ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: MANUSCRIPT CONTEXT AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION: JOHN DONNE’S POETRY IN

This project promotes investigation of poems within early modern manuscripts as an effective means to illuminate contemporary perspectives on writers and their works. With few methods available for accessing Renaissance readers ’ explications of multivalent and frequently encoded texts, I emphasize analysis of certain literary manuscripts as a method for considering how readers encountered, grouped, and interpreted verse. Interpretive evidence often appears in elements such as the sequence of items chosen for inclusion, paratexts, titles, ascriptions, even watermarks. Extant manuscripts containing copies of poems by Donne, who (like many contemporary poets) composed verse almost exclusively for a manuscript medium, prove fruitful for exploring this thesis because more of his verse circulated in manuscript than any other Renaissance poet’s. The first chapter provides a methodology for such study, while the remaining chapters demonstrate how this research perspective alters our understanding of Donne’s satiric, religious, and dubious verse. In the second chapter, study of components such as the title-page and scripts in a composite Folger collection suggests that at least one seventeenth-century reader interpreted Metempsychosis as a satire on court favorites