I - The Poetic Corpus

Summary

Since Lauder's poems are little known, since they consist of many separate publications, since not all his works are mentioned in the biographical accounts in DNB and ODNB, and since not all are itemised in the standard bibliographical reference works (STC, ESTC, Wing, NCBEL), a list of his publications is offered here, as a preliminary to the edition itself. For the sake of convenience, some of the titles of the principal works are simplified and/or abbreviated, and where the printed publications contain more than one poem, only the title of the respective main work is mentioned. Three poems, only known by their titles, remain untraced; how many further poems may be lost cannot be known with certainty. The present inventory brings together evidence from early prints, manuscript transcriptions, listings of Lauder's works, and reprints. Finally, a collective and chronologically numbered list of his poetry is given.

An important aspect of Lauder's poetic corpus is that most of the early textual witnesses are printed rather than manuscript: for Lauder there was clearly no question of any ‘stigma of print’.1 The only known manuscript containing his work is Edinburgh, NLS MS 1806 (the Newhailes MS), in which most of the material included has clearly been transcribed from various printed sources. In the present volume, the only texts edited from the Newhailes MS are those for which no earlier witness is known. All the Lauder material in the manuscript, however, has been collated with the prints, and in a very small number of places an emendation to the text found in the printed source has been imported from the manuscript (e.g. 7.2/64): all such cases are noted in the commentary. Where an early printed text is available electronically via EEBO, this is noted, and the actual copy used for EEBO is specified. The copy-text for the edited texts of the poems has been, as far as practical, a surviving early print, rather than the EEBO reproduction; however, where such a reproduction has been used for a copy-text, this is indicated as ‘via EEBO’. In the case of the few works by Lauder for which multiple surviving copies exist, comparison has revealed no textual variants.