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University of Texas at Austin

Thomas Killigrew:

An Inventory of His Miscellany at the Harry Ransom Center

Creator: Killigrew, Thomas, 1612-1683
Title: Thomas Killigrew Miscellany
Dates: compiled late 17th to early 18th century
Extent: 1 box (.21 linear feet)
Abstract: A volume containing copies of 406 songs and poems originally written between the late 1500s and the early 1700s by authors such as William Congreve, John Donne, John Dryden, and William Shakespeare among many others, some of whom are not yet identified. The texts were copied in the hand of various unidentified persons, possibly including Thomas Killigrew, and compiled from the late 1600s through the early 1700s.
Call Number: Manuscript Collection MS-2287
Language: English (405 items) and French (1 item)
Access: Open for research


Administrative Information


Processed by: Paul Sullivan, 2015 Note: This finding aid replicates and replaces information previously available only in a card catalog. Please see the explanatory note at the end of this finding aid for information regarding the arrangement of the manuscripts as well as the abbreviations commonly used in descriptions.
Repository:

Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Scope and Contents


The manuscript formerly known as the Thomas Killigrew Commonplace Book is actually a Miscellany containing copies of 406 songs and poems originally written between the late 1500s and the early 1700s by authors such as William Congreve, John Donne, John Dryden, and William Shakespeare among many others, some of whom are not yet identified. The texts were copied in the hand of various unidentified persons, possibly including Thomas Killigrew, and compiled from the late 1600s through the early 1700s. All songs and poems are written in English with the exception of one in French.
Most of the copies lack author attribution in the manuscript, although sixty authors have been identified from print copies. The manuscript copies often differ from the printed versions. At least 80 of the 192 anonymous poems were printed in collections of drollery or wit from 1655 to 1682. The dominant types of poetry are pastoral lyric and bawdry, with some dramatic verse both tragic and comic, political satire, and elegy. The political sentiment is mainly royalist, but at least one example (folio 103) expresses leveling sentiment, though satirically.
The following container list provides a summary of the volume contents arranged alphabetically by author with anonymous works listed at the end by title/first line. Author names, titles, and first lines are chiefly as given in a 1974 dissertation by Nancy Cutbirth. Citations to page or folio numbers and to Cutbirth identification numbers are given, as well as citations to identification numbers appearing in the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM). Author attributions follow Cutbirth unless otherwise noted. Notes also indicate attributions listed as questionable by Cutbirth as well as attributions from a 2001 list provided by Adam Smyth that identifies works published in printed miscellanies. The author attributions have been compiled from Cutbirth, CELM, or Smyth without confirming their accuracy. (Current authorized forms of author names from the Library of Congress Authorities or the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography have been used as available.) Titles and first lines are taken directly from the manuscript and preserve the spelling there. The Cutbirth, CELM, and Smyth lists also provide variant versions of first lines. (See the sources listed below for fuller citations to the works by Cutbirth, CELM, and Smyth.)
The manuscript pages are not continuously paginated or foliated. The first 26 pages are unnumbered, but designated in the container list as pages i-xxvi; the next nine pages are numbered in the upper outside corner and appear here as pages 1-9; the next and largest group are numbered only on the recto of each folio, upper right, and are referenced here as 9v-151v; and the final 12 folios (all blank but the penultimate one) are numbered on the recto lower left, and listed here as 152r-165v.
The Killigrew manuscript came to the Ransom Center in 1961 via the Stark Library, which was acquired by The University of Texas at Austin starting in 1925. It was formerly owned by Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) and was designated Phillipps 9070. Phillipps is thought to have acquired the manuscript from Thomas Thorpe (1791-1851) in 1836 (his number T 1811). The volume itself bears the signature of a Sir Robert Killigrew, who presumably owned the manuscript in 1702.

Sources:


Beal, Peter. Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM). accessed January 5, 2015, http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/.
Cutbirth, Nancy. A Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book: Indexes to the Manuscript and an Edition of the First Hundred Poems. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1974.
Cutbirth, Nancy. Thomas Killigrew’s Commonplace Book? The Library Chronicle of The University of Texas at Austin, new series, 13 (1980): 31-38.
Smyth, Adam. Killigrew’s ‘Commonplace Book” and printed miscellanies, April 2001.

Container List