FIRST LINE INDEXES:
Manuscript Poetry in the Folger Shakespeare Library and Huntington Library

Introduction by Laetitia Yeandle - Folger Shakespeare Library

This is an index to the First Lines of Poems written in English before about 1700 as they appear in manuscripts or in manuscript additions to printed books at the Folger Shakespeare Library1.  Occasionally, a later copy of the poem will be included.  For the purposes of this Index a poem is a text whose lines rhyme; therefore a great assortment of verse is included, among them songs, prologues and epilogues.  Many poems appear in multiple copies, several of the popular ones in as many as a dozen copies.  The first line seen here may not necessarily be the first line of the complete poem, but only of the extract that has appealed to some compiler.  At the beginning of the Index is a group of first lines that are not even complete.  Two kinds of poems are not generally included: works wholly or mostly in verse, such as plays, and the couplets that often occur at the end of scenes or speeches in blank verse.  Poems and songs that are an integral part of a larger work, such as those in Sir Philip Sidney's "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia", and in Walter Montagu's plays, are included.

The card file has been compiled over several decades by a number of people, and this has lead to inconsistencies.  The intention always has been to transcribe the spelling of the original, but this has not necessarily included capitalization and punctuation, nor, in earlier days, the distinction between "i" and "j", or "u" and "v".

The cards have been filed as if the spelling had been modernised.  As is usual with First Line Indexes, the initial articles have not been silently suppressed.  A few features, however, may seem to depart from standard practice for First Line Indexes of Poems:

• "Ye" is interpreted as "you" or "the" depending on the context.

• "I'll" and "We'll" are treated as though there were no apostrophe.

• "Mr" and "Mrs" are read as "Master" and "Mistress".

• "An" is occasionally treated as a "a". For example, "an one-eyed boy" has been alphabetised as though it read "a one-eyed boy".  When the "e" of the definite article is dropped before a word beginning with a vowel and "th" seemingly added as a prefix to that word, as in "thambitious", the card is filed as though no elision had occurred; in the example cited it would be interpreted as reading "the ambitious".

If the name "Crum" and a number should be visible on the card, they refer to the number assigned to that poem in Margaret Crum's First Line Index of English Poetry 1500-1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library Oxford (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1969).

Most of the manuscripts and several of the printed volumes from which these poems come can be seen in their entirety in the microfilm edition of British Literary Manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, published by Primary Resource Media.

Laetitia Yeandle

Curator of Manuscripts

Folger Shakespeare Library

1)  The printed books have not been systematically examined for poems that may have been added in manuscript.  This has started to be remedied as the books published in England or in English before 1700 (the so-called STCs and Wings) are recatalogued on line.

Call numbers of the Manuscripts and Printed books from which the First Line Index of Poems in Manuscript has been compiled.

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