The Donne Variorum is among the most ambitious and exacting editorial projects ever undertaken for an English Renaissance author. Plans were hatched in 1980, and the edition is projected to run to eight volumes in eleven parts, with the first volumes issued in 1995. It is welcome, then, finally to see published the first part dedicated to the most voluminous and critically appreciated gathering of Donne's poetry, the Songs and Sonets. Volume 4.1 contains a digest of all criticism from the seventeenth century until 1999 (Ben Jonson, writing in 1616, takes the honor of Donne's first critic). By my rough count of the forty-seven-page bibliography, this amounts to well over one thousand books, articles, and chapters. This daunting achievement required the efforts of the original volume editor, the late Professor Albert Labriola, and was completed by Johnson, Parrish, and general editor Gary A. Stringer, and with the untold labors undertaken by “Al's army” (lxvi) of sixteen contributing editors.

The resulting volume contains a “General Commentary” and twenty other chapters organized around themes—e.g., autobiography and persona, Donne's originality, imagery, medievalism, paradox, Petrarchism, wit and metaphorical conceit, women, and a single chapter dedicated to a named scholar and his legacy, T. S. Eliot. Each chapter reviews the critical canon chronologically, which allows for the long view of changing ideas about Donne's poetry. For instance, on the “dramatic elements” of the Songs and Sonets, Schelling (1910) found “a completer absence of dramatic instinct in Donne than in any poet of his age,” where later scholars felt that Donne “thought like a dramatist” or that his poems were “conceived as a little piece of theatre” (179, 187–88). Whereas some areas of Donne's poetry have occupied readers for centuries (e.g., his language and rhetoric, his wit and conceit), the majority of Donne scholarship dates from the early twentieth century, or emerged later, for instance work on “Mannerism and the Baroque” (from 1931).

How best to use this book? As a kind of annotated bibliography, no one would read this cover to cover. The chapters are enumerative with most bibliographical entries digested to a short paragraph, and many reduced to a single sentence. However, as a top-level view of nearly four centuries of commentary, this volume makes for an indispensable guide to literary historiography and therefore also an outstanding starting point for new research. An “Index of Writers and Historical Figures” allows for cross-referencing to key individuals who did not produce a bibliographical item but who nevertheless impacted on Donne's poems. Led by Labriola, the editors determined the “number of recurring topics that transcended particular periods and enabled organization of the entire body of general commentary” (lxvi). The inevitable upshot is that some readers would wish for chapters on subjects that did not sufficiently recur to merit a chapter. I would find the most urgent need for a chapter on religion. If the Songs and Sonets are Donne's most secular works, nevertheless the language of devotion and theology suffuses the poems (often parodically), be it by way of sanctification (“The Canonization”), angelology (“Air and Angels”), or relic worship (“The Relique”), to give only the most obvious examples. Critics have keenly responded to Donne's religious language but given that there is no subject index that further deconstructs the broad chapter headings, nor a chapter on religion, coverage of this topic is hard to find (it is dealt with, for instance, under “Imagery” or “Platonism”; a more general trend from the 1950s to consider, for instance, the “coupling of sacred and secular” or the “theological and philosophical underpinnings” of the Songs and Sonets [9] emerges from the chapter on “General Commentary”). In this way, other readers might conceive of other thematic chapters (and, especially, smaller subject headings) that have occupied Donne's critics, but to do so takes little away from the monumental achievement of Labriola and his team, and the unenviable job of finding order among the quarrelsome critics.

This commentary volume will more properly come into its own once the remaining two parts containing the poem's texts, glosses, bibliographical apparatus, and especially the poem-specific line-by-line commentaries become available. The three volumes jointly are destined as the most comprehensive editorial treatment of the Songs and Sonets.