Every REED edition is a collaboration and I want to begin by thanking my number one collaborator, my co-editor and great friend, Jane Cowling. We worked together on and off on this project for a quarter century, and I very much regret that she did not live to participate in its final completion and publication on REED Online. Jane and I did not know each other at the beginning of the project, but Jane welcomed me into her home in Titchfield, helped me find my own place to live, and introduced me to Hampshire and to the local scholarly community. We divided up the editorial work by locality: Jane worked on the city of Winchester, Winchester College, Portsmouth, and the Isle of Wight; I took Southampton and the rest of the county. Jane did all the searching for records, transcribing and much of the editing for the locations she chose. She wrote the introductory material for the Winchester College records, and the rest of the introductions and apparatus incorporate much that she wrote, especially for Winchester and the Isle of Wight. Although we worked independently much of the time, we met often when I was in England to share our findings and work out knotty problems — usually in the evening, over ‘a glass of something’ (as Jane would put it, pulling out a bottle acquired on her most recent trip to France). I miss her greatly and want to dedicate this finished Hampshire edition to her memory.
This edition would not have been possible without financial support from a number of sources. I received several travel grants from the University of Puget Sound, as well as from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both Jane and I received fellowships from the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton, and Jane also received support from the British Academy. The work of REED’s central editorial office has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science and Research Council of Canada, and Father Edward Jackman and the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. We are both extremely grateful to these funders for their generosity.
The records in this collection come from a number of archives: the Hampshire Record Office, the Winchester College Archives, the Southampton City Archives, the Isle of Wight Record Office, The National Archives, the British Library, the Surrey History Centre, the Portsmouth City Museum and Records Office, the Winchester Cathedral Library, the Salisbury Cathedral Archives, the Bodleian Library, and the archives of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. We wish to thank all these repositories for the permission to publish excerpts from their holdings. We also wish to thank Mr John Jervoise for permission to study and publish records from the wonderfully rich Jervoise of Herriard Collection deposited at the Hampshire Record Office, and Ms Fanny Oglander for permission to publish excerpts from the writing of her ancestor, Sir John Oglander, on deposit at the Isle of Wight Record Office.
We wish to thank all the staff of these archives for their patient assistance over the thirty years it has taken to produce this edition. REED editors are literary archaeologists, and we have had to scrape away a good deal of dirt to find the occasional shard that can add to our history of early drama. We owe much to the people who, day after day, have brought us bucketloads of documents, taken them away again, cared for the documents in the meantime, and sometimes helped us to tell shard from dirt. In particular we wish to thank, at the Hampshire Record Office, Gill Rushton, Caroline Humphries, David Rymill, and especially Sarah Lewin, who helped us launch our research at the beginning and many years later helped us pull it together in our Hampshire Paper. Roger Custance and Suzanne Foster aided our researches at Winchester College, as did Sue Woolgar and Andrew George at the Southampton City Archives, John Hardacre at Winchester Cathedral Library, and Julian Reid at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Chris Woolgar of the University of Southampton advised us on research, administered our Hartley Fellowships, and generously shared the early kingale record of Andover he discovered buried in coroners’ reports at The National Archives.
We also want to express our gratitude to a number of other scholars who have helped us along the way. Tom James of the University of Winchester shared preliminary research he had done on dramatic records of Southampton and provided helpful suggestions for our Hampshire Paper. Ernest Blake of the University of Southampton checked translations of some difficult Latin records included in Jane’s doctoral thesis. Martin Wiggins of the Shakespeare Institute made a number of helpful suggestions about records of Sir Richard Paulet and also directed our attention to an unpublished play connected to Winchester College. Robert Tittler provided historical perspective throughout the project and read an early draft of the historical introduction. James Gibson checked on some Hampshire records in the Kent archives, and allowed us to reprint in this Hampshire collection his editing (for REED Kent, Diocese of Canterbury) of the Visitatio Sepulchri from the Regularis Concordia and the Winchester Troper. Others who have contributed useful suggestions and references include Ed Cueva, David Lupher, Bill Cooke, Richard Rastall, Cheryl Butler, David Freemantle, Lynn Forest-Hill, and the anonymous reviewers of the proofs of this project. Our especial thanks go to John McGavin of the University of Southampton, who was a great mentor to Jane as supervisor of her doctoral thesis and who has encouraged and supported both of us through the long life of this project.
The staff of the REED Office at the University of Toronto has contributed immeasurably to this project. Patrick Gregory did paleographical checking of the transcriptions and provided most of the Latin translation. Kathy Chung did the indexing, tagging the entities to make the records searchable. Tanya Hagen checked the bibliographic references in the apparatus and provided leads to new records. The meticulous work of those three not only ensured the accuracy of the records and apparatus, but also, by turning fresh and perceptive eyes on material that had become over-familiar to me, they pushed me to add fuller explanations of the records to the apparatus and to see connections in the evidence I had not previously noticed. Early in the research process we had bibliographical support from Theodore de Welles and Miriam Skey, and Abigail Ann Young helped Jane with the Latin of some of the Winchester College documents.
Paleographical checking of documents at archives in the UK was done by Stephanie Hovland, aided by Merel Veldhuizen, Alan Nelson, and Sally-Beth MacLean. In Toronto, a number of research assistants contributed to the project: Alexandra Atiya worked on bibliographic support, Janine Harper on the English glossary, Cai Henderson on Latin paleography and translation, Jané Jacobs on mapping, and Morgan Moore on patrons research. Carolyn Black provided overall management for the project, coordinating the work of this whole REED team, as well as doing proofreading and coding. Jamie Norrish is the programmer and developer for the REED Online platform.
Jane and I want to thank Alexandra Johnston, founder of Records of Early English Drama, and Sally-Beth MacLean, Director of Research and General Editor, for their trust and support throughout the life of this project. They took both of us on when we were only graduate students, and through the following decades Sandy and Sally-Beth have been mentors, valued research colleagues, and dear friends.
Finally, I want to thank my children, Dinah and Toby, who endured (and perhaps even enjoyed) having significant portions of their childhoods dislocated to Hampshire. My wife, Sandra Dahlberg, accompanied me on research trips, put aside her own research at times to help me by combing through catalogues and photographing manuscripts, and listened patiently to my soliloquies on matters often of interest only to REED editors. Her companionship and enthusiasm have been crucial to keeping me going over the many years it has taken to bring the Hampshire records to publication.
Peter Greenfield
April 2020