The Viscount Dungarvan's “Epitaph on Shakespeare” Cookbook.

Folger Shakespeare Library
V.a.125. II. f. 7v-8r.

Doing research can be misery. At first it seems no worse than boring: poring over long indexes, perhaps, or jotting notes on who knew who, etc. Even now that search engines make the task much less onerous, however, compiling stylistical traits, habitual vocabulary words and grammatical usages, etc., rapidly goes from boring to stultifying. The list of tasks goes on and on as do the hours of minutiae.

It all takes a special kind of training that even most scholars cannot bear. It is excruciating to be that boring (for soon you resemble what you do). In what was supposed to be my personal time, for just one recent example, I decided I would finally read from Vernon Lee (the pen name of Violet Paget). A fascinating young woman, that Violet, and those of her letters that have been made public, it turns out, are filled with accounts of moving among the London literary set of the late 19^th century. What a pleasure to learn small details about the writers and artists that have accompanied me through life. Minor names whose works hinted at fascinating personalities, like Edmund Gosse, William Morris, William Rossetti and Paget herself. Leslie Stephens before his daughters Virginia Stephens (Woolf) and Venessa (Bell). Also bigger names like John Singer Sargent and Robert Browning. Paget's descriptions are never psychological but rather capable nutshell portraits.

But, of course, having researched so many figures so constantly for so many years matters could not be left there. I next delved into Paget's Studies of the Eighteenth Century In Italy, a particularly minor period in European arts, with scads more obscure minor figures. Suddenly I was in the world of Goldini and Alfieri both of whose works I had promised myself to dip into one day. I searched Internet recordings from Cimarosa's comic operas, Pergolesi's, from Metastasio. The reconstructions of the voice of the great castrato Farinelli.

Even more obscure and minor were the travel letters of William Beckford, “the author of the novel 'Vathek,'” who she found so engaging . Through him I learned how completely the Antwerp of my Tudor travels had changed, by the mid-18^th century, into a sleepy harbor town. I was treated to Beckford's delightful eye for the telling scene:

Almost every cottage door being open to catch the air, I had an opportunity of looking into their neat apartments. Tables, shelves, earthenware, all glisten with cleanliness; the country people were drinking tea, after the fatigues of the day, and talking over its bargains and contrivances.

At the Hague I was treated to the names of the delightfully obscure painters Nicholaes Pieterszoon Bercham, Philips Wouwerman and Carlo Cignani. An hour or so on Google Image Search and I saw them over Beckford's shoulder.

I've been ruined. Even in my reading for pleasure I go backward instead of forward. A few decades ago I could know a Violet Paget well enough after some few hundred vaguely entertaining pages. Now it is impossible to know her at all. The more pages, the less I know.

And when I am at work I'm even worse. I've already written a bit about William Basse's “Epitaph on Shakespeare”. I made myself break off at a normal amount of research or it would not have been written. Now it comes up again, amongst those who know everything there is to know, including claims that the history of the text will not support.

I have returned to obsessively researching Ben Jonson's Discoveries and Shakespeare's The Tempest with smashingly good results for some weeks now. No time, I tell myself, for yet another mind-bending agon the end of which will be that I succeed, by an Herculean effort, at knowing less and less than I did when I started.

Perhaps the reader will have no problem imagining me come, somehow after this fashion, upon the '“Epitaph on Shakespeare” Cookbook'. Of course, it begins with neither a poem or a recipe.

To Make Ink

take 6 ounces of gaules & 2 ounces

of coporus & 3 ounces of gum araback

& a quart of whit wine bruse the gaules

before you put them in the wine & let them

steep 24 houers & then straine the

wine cleare from the gaules & put it

into a botell with the coporus & the gum

& stop the botell & shake it 3 or 4

times a day till it be all disouled if

you set it warm it once by the fier

it will be the beter & disoule in 3 or 4

dayes & then you may use it

What else would a college student's day-book properly begin with? The young student being Richard Boyle, Viscount Dungarvan. The college being Christ Church, Oxford.

From ink recipe to folio 54 is filled with poems, most unknown, about half unattributed. Like most “Manuscript Miscellanies” those that are unattributed were likely not the owner's own. Like most, the poems copied were some from books the young owner could not or chose not to buy. The others from handwritten copies presented to him.

On the next folio / page we find, “To Bake a Rump of Beefe”:

Take out all the bones & season it with

peper & sellt as you doe venison then shred

a pound of befe suiet uery smalle: &c.

Some 100 pages of recipes follow: recipes for mead, sack posset, and the much beloved syllabub of the time; recipes “To make shred Pyes,” “To Pickell Pidgeyeons,” “To neat Bake neates Toungus,” and much more.

In this instance, the day-book is divided into two parts. One reading from front to back. The other written upside down reading from what originally was the back to the front. Toward the beginning of the second part the “Epitaph”:

Vpon Poet Shakespeare

Renowned Spencer lye a thought more nigh

To learned Chaucer , and rare Beaumont lye

A little neerer Spencer to make roome

For Shakespeare in your threefold fourefold Tombe.

To lodge all foure in one bed make a shift

Vntill Doomesday, for hardly will a fift

Betwixt this day and that by Fate bee slaine,

For whom the Curtaine may bee drawne againe

If your precedency in death doe barr,

A fourth place in your sacred Sepuchre

Vnder this carued Marble of thine owne

Sleepe braue Tragædian Shakespeare sleepe alone

Thy vnmolested peace vnshared caue

Possesse as Lord not Tenaunt of thy graue.

That vnto others, or vs it may bee,

Honour hereafter to bee laid by thee.

Boyle has broken off about a third way through the first part and dedicated the rest to recipes. Presumably, the second part was then begun upside-down he intending to write until the two sections met and then to buy another manuscript book.

As for the “Epitaph,” it's variations are in line with the other 34 handwritten copies yet discovered in daybooks or loose papers. It is the daybook in which it is found that teaches us most about the poem. It was not a carefully assembled text. The poetry was no closer to the owner's heart than the recipes. The handwriting throughout reflects a wide range of execution and attention. Every available bit of space is used, one poem running into another. A second handwriting appears later in the second part.

In short, young Boyle's daybook makes clear that the scholar who does not know the nature of such daybooks, through having studied a good many, does not know any subject that includes one or more of them. And any scholar who has studied them closely knows that he knows even less than when he first began.

Now, if you will excuse me, I'm off to search for other recipes for Pickell Pidgeyeons. With Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona for background music.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

Medieval Mirrors and Practical Jokes. March 6, 2023. "Among any number of medieval and early modern personal inventories we find the items that composed the owners’ daily lives.

 June 27, 1711: The Ladies' Manual of Arms. December 31, 2022. "Women are armed with fans as men with swords, and sometimes do more execution with them."

The Tudor Version of International First-Class Mail. June 11, 2022. “…they had established a system that was centuries old and the fastest available however much letters often took weeks or even months to reach their destinations.”

Livin’ Real at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth. June 4, 2022. “Being fans of the Queen and the times, we watch television miniseries and movies draped with intrigue, lust and tapestries.”

Sidney Lanier on the Fate of the Seminoles. May 26, 2022. “I met one resident of Florida who knew their old chief Tiger-tail, and had received an invitation to their Green-Corn Dance,…”

What Color Were Shakespeare’s Potatoes? July 27, 2019. “By the year 1599-1600, when Shakespeare’s play would seem to have been written, the potato was available in London.  It was considered a delectable treat and an aphrodisiac.”

Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.