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Here follows an edition of Mr. John Donne’s poem “The Bayte.” I designed this edition with the modern reader who has a strong interest in the English Renaissance and the poetry of Donne in mind; my goal has been to imitate the greatest degree possible the original version of this poem so that readers can come close to the experience of reading a rare print version of “The Bayte” by merely typing in the web address for this blog.

The following poem is transcribed from the 1633 publication of John Donne’s poems, printed by M.F. [Miles Flesher] for John Marriot. A facsimile of this text, which the Harvard University Library holds, is available through Early English Books Online. In this edition, the font used in the title of the poem, a font called “Ludovicos,” imitates handwriting; in the source material I used, the title “The Bayte” was not printed but rather penned in, presumably by one of the owners of the text. In the body of the poem I used the font “Perpetua,” the font that best matched the type in the 1633 edition. To hold to the goal of verisimilitude, I maintained the original punctuation and kept the spellings unmodernized. The one change I did make, however, was to eliminate the elongated “s,” or “S,” which looks confusingly like an “f” to the modern reader. While I have aimed to make readers feel that they’re coming into close contact with a Renaissance text, I feared that using the “S” might make the text seem impenetrable. I hope that maintaining unmodernized spellings, however, will help readers get closer to the text as it was written, to the words that swirled around in John Donne’s mind as he composed it, to know how the poem sounded and felt to someone in the Renaissance.

Looking at the poem and thinking of those who read it in the past, one thinks readers of the original 1633 text would probably have been upper class, erudite men, able to read both handwriting and printed text. We know that readers would have been wealthy and well educated because they had the ability to buy and to read the compilation of Donne’s poems. Since the poems were published posthumously, one assumes that readers of the 1633 edition would not have known Donne personally but simply had an interest in his poetry. Because of the marginalia left behind, we know for certain that at least one reader had the ability to write and engaged with the text thoroughly enough to want to write in the margins. I hope that readers of this edition will also choose to have an active relationship with the poem and make use of the comment function as a way of writing marginalia.

I imagine that readers of this edition, an edition that makes available a Renaissance text, represented as authentically as possible, on the internet, will be those who use all the tools that the modern world puts at their disposal, tools such as the internet, to read and to learn. Readers of this version of “The Bayte” will most likely be people who look for knowledge not only in the musty pages of a library book, but also in the ever-expanding reaches of cyberspace. They may be of any gender, age, or occupation, but I am sure that many readers will be well-educated, for they are familiar with and interested in the poetry of Donne, and quite a few will be students. Whatever the difference between them, they will all have in common their apt use of the internet to approach Renaissance texts like Donne’s “The Bayte.”

While the internet mainly connects living individuals to one another, one aim of this edition has been to show modern readers that they can use the internet to reach into the past and come into contact with the dead. I hope that when scrolling through this version of “The Bayte,” readers can feel as though they are leafing through the original 1633 edition, as though they are readers in the Renaissance rather than in the modern world. While Donne negatively figures the experience of becoming caught in the thrall of his beloved, one who needs not even bait to apprehend him like a foolish fish, I hope that readers of this edition come under the spell of the Renaissance literature and find it both a pleasurable and a rewarding experience.