New Approaches to the Work of Robert Herrick

Abstract The new edition of Robert Herrick’s works Hesperides and His Noble Numbers will enable readers to study the poems he circulated in manuscript alongside printed versions of the same poems. As scholarly work continues on the intersection of print and scribal culture in the 17th century in general and in relation to Stuart lyric poetry in particular, there is increasing interest in examining how the technologies of manuscript and print affect the composition of poetry. Herrick is one of first poets personally to gather and rework his verses for print but does so having spent three decades circulating his poems exclusively in manuscript. An analysis both of individual poems and of his entire printed collection reveal that Herrick’s revisions and the order and structure of his book are heavily influenced by the scribal method of serial composition and by 17th‐century readers’ habits of compiling poetry into verse miscellanies. Both discoveries challenge the tendency to consider Herrick’s printed versions as invariably representing his final intention for his poetry and suggest that Hesperides as a whole work should be read as participating in the trend for compiling verse miscellanies in both manuscript and print between the 1620s and 1650s.