Welcome to the Banquet

Studies of early modern English manuscripts have been integral for the retrieval of new information about the lives and literary habits of sixteenth and seventeenth-century people. Our knowledge of literary history has benefited greatly from the new texts and authors uncovered by scholars, yet there remains, as Arthur Marotti notes, a wealth of poetry in surviving manuscripts that has been ‘largely ignored’.¹ This blog post concerns the time I have spent at the Folger Shakespeare Library with one such overlooked manuscript: Thomas Grocer’s 1657 Banquet of Sweetmeats.

Grocer’s manuscript comprises around 186 leaves of poetry and prose gathered from a range of classical and contemporaneous sources. So why have its contents not been documented in detail? Let’s dig into this question.

Many early modern manuscripts remain untapped sources of information, but it’s hard to know exactly what is left to be examined and, moreover, what should be examined. Every researcher has different priorities, there is also no easy way to see who has performed work with a particular item (beyond individual publication records), and more research is performed with such materials than is documented in notes, blogs, articles, chapters, and books! Few people have the time to share every piece of new evidence they come across. Further to the point, of the many physical and digital catalogues of manuscript materials from this period, there is none which offers a complete overview of every extant item known to and housed in rare book libraries: such a resource does not currently exist. Those working with early modern literary manuscripts need to draw upon a range of repositories to determine what has been recorded and where potential gaps in our collective knowledge may lurk.

One incredibly useful resource is the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM). This catalogue details where one might find the writing of now canonical authors in a huge range of manuscripts housed in private collections and libraries across the US and Europe.² This digital catalogue does not record the presence of anonymous work or work by less famous authors, but this lack of data is informative in itself: how better to know what has not been examined in detail than by looking for the gaps in such records? Our knowledge of what manuscript items are held by rare book libraries is also greatly enriched by the Union First Line Index of English Verse (UFLI). This database records the first lines of verse from the early modern print and manuscript sources from a range of libraries and catalogues. Like CELM, UFLI (apologies for the double acronym!) are pivotal to the production of new research on early modern history and culture.

What must be borne in mind is that these resources are not utterly comprehensive: they do not account for or record all the relevant texts housed in the libraries that they use to build their respective catalogues, nor do such resources record all of the extant poetry in the texts that they do address. Indeed, despite containing copies of 363 individual poems by both canonical and lesser-known authors, A Banquet of Sweetmeats is not included in CELM and only two of the poems that feature in Grocer’s Banquet have been recorded in the UFLI. This means that the contents of this unique manuscript are relatively unknown and not available to the research community or public at large. Having spent my time at the Folger creating a semi-diplomatic transcription of all the poems in this manuscript, I’m in an opportune position to share some of my findings.³ So, let’s look at this fascinating manuscript.

Grocer’s Banquet of Sweetmeats is made to be a gathering of ‘dishes’ that should benefit the reader’s ‘Heart & head, for knowledg, and practice’.

The Banquet comprises ‘many choyce, stories, sayings, scentences, and witty speches’ in prose from both Christian and pagan writers, without mentioning the medium of poetry at all. You’d be forgiven then for thinking that this commonplace book (this gathering of sententious material arranged for the edification of its owner and any subsequent reader) contains no verse. It turns out that Grocer, who describes himself with the adjective of ‘Florilegus’ or flower-gathering, has gathered quite a rich bouquet (or, perhaps, a banquet) of poesies in this text.⁴ Another interesting aspect of this manuscript is that its first page has been made to look like the title page of a printed book. Grocer has arranged the two main blocks of text so that they taper off to create the shape of an inverted triangle, as so often seen in the era’s printed texts.

This title page’s hand-ruled frame has also been filled with decorative swirls and a  symmetrical(ish) tile-like design, indicating the care with which the writer has taken to present their work. This is, in sum, a book thoughtfully produced by gathering and stitching together excerpts from historical, philosophical, poetical, and theological sources to best serve its intended reader.⁵

It is interesting, then, that two poems that preface the main content of the Banquet seem designed to defend the text from any unwelcome criticism, rather than to inspire delight or admiration. As the title of ‘To the Captious Reader’, suggests, Grocer does not ‘invite my foe’ (line 3) to this literary feast, yet still imagines that some ‘grim’ (line 5) figure of mockery would ‘read’ and ‘deride it’ (line 6).

Although the Banquet has been ‘made … for my friend’ (line 4), no mention of any specific ‘friend’ is given. There is frustratingly little evidence to show that this book was used for personal or communal purposes, or if it simply remained as a testament to Grocer’s (or an unknown writer’s) skill in composition. It bears no marginal glosses or notes in another hand, the fore-edges of each page are in relatively good condition, and the binding is still quite tight, yet someone has tried to erase the identifying date of ‘1657’ in the bottom margin of this manuscript’s title-page frame without offering any alternative.

Despite the seeming lack of physical interaction with the text in the years following its completion, there is plenty of material within it that should catch the eye. A total of 361 poems by a wide range writers — like Christopher Harvey, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Thomas Jordan, Francis Quarles, Thomas Urquhart, Henry Vaughan, and many more — are embedded into discussions on a variety of topics, from ‘Atheists and Apostates’, ‘Death’, to general ‘Passages of Witt’.⁶

Of the 29 different topics addressed in this manuscript, the most expansive is the one on ‘Death’ (though ‘Christ’s Love’ and ‘Contentment’ are robust sections in their own right)! Grocer consistently integrates whole poems, sections of verse, or aphoristic couplets into each section, as seen in the next image taken from ‘Of Backbitting, Slander, &’.

Here, Grocer draws on a couplet from Robert Herrick’s renowned collection of poetry Hesperides (1648) to emphasize a point about human hypocrisy. The reader is asked to ‘bare in minde’ the blind spots of our own reasoning when considering the ‘sins’ that we may identify in other people (line 1). Since it is ‘the easiest thing in the world … to find fault with another’ (as suggested in the prose directly above this poem), Herrick’s couplet reminds us that ‘None sees the Fardle of his faults behind’ (line 2). It would be wise, in other words, to give some pause to reflect on what ‘faults’ we carry with us through life before we chastise other people for their own misdemeanors.

The contents of this manuscript are not always sweet in nature, but they do provide insight into what poetry was accessible to, and relevant for, someone making an instructive commonplace book during the final years of the Cromwellian Protectorate. I am currently working with the team at the Folger to update the Union First Line Index of English Verse with all of the poems contained in V.a.178, so that interested parties may browse this banquet of poetic goods for what might delight their own sensibilities.