After exploring “The Anniversaries” and the Epicedes and Obsequies (1995), The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneous Poems (1995), The Elegies (2000), and The Holy Sonnets (2005), the editors of the Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne now address his “satiric thorns.” With the ambitious objective of providing the most authoritative version of this corpus, and understanding its critical reception throughout history, the one-thousand-page volume comprises editions for the eight following poems: Donne's “Satyre 1” to “Satyre 5,” “Metempsychosis,” “Upon Mr Coryat's Crudities,” and its accompanying piece “In eundem Macaronicon.” To Donne's productions, the editors have also added other reading texts that contribute to understanding the historical response to Donne as a satirist: the dubium “Incipit Ioannes Dones.,” two noncanonical “Satyres” from the seventeenth century, as well as eighteenth-century imitations of Donne's satirical writings by William Mason, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Parnell.

In their introduction, the editors explain how the obstacles traditionally faced when confronted with Donne's works—the scarcity of holographs, the multitude of copied manuscripts, Donne's own “knotty” syntax (lvi)—are supplemented by other challenges characteristic of his satires. In a context in which controversy was at once privately craved and publicly frowned upon, Donne often took some distance from his texts, limiting their circulation and regularly revising them. Despite these challenges, the sound methodology behind the variorum, as well as the exhaustive stemmas and lists of variants accompanying the texts in the first section of the volume, has allowed the editors to provide us with the most complete, carefully crafted, and authoritative edition and textual history of Donne's satires to this day. Some editorial choices might however come as confusing to the less informed reader. For example, both an original and a revised version are provided for three of the five “Satyres,” despite the fact that only one of them, “Satyre 3,” would require both versions to be printed for “readers to fully appreciate” the differences (ci). Some will be surprised by this apparent inconsistency, especially since the distinction between original and revised versions does not appear in the table of contents. Others, more curious as to which version they want to use, will need to engage in some back-and-forth throughout the massive book to find, in the introduction to the volume, the editors’ perfectly straightforward and convincing explanation.

In the second section of the book, the compilation of existing criticism—coming from sources in English and other languages—is vast, soundly formatted, and each annotation is at once concise and precise. For each poem, summaries of sources dating from the texts’ publication to 2001 have been arranged as follows: first, a general commentary divided into major themes of critical inquiry (dating, style, sources, and influences, etc.), followed by an overview of every word or passage addressed at some point by scholars. The result is inspiring, to say the least. Given the particularly topical nature of Donne's satires, as well as the multiple responses they elicited, this ought to become an invaluable resource to any literary scholar or cultural historian interested in the world Donne lived in and his rendering of it. My only regret in this regard has to do with the thematic division of the commentary. By relying too much on traditional fields of inquiry, we sometimes risk losing sight of some of the main concerns raised by the poems themselves. As the editors acknowledge, issues of “social standing and place in the world” (ciii) are central to most of his satires. Yet, with the exception of “Religion,” or at best “Religion and Politics,” no other sections point us toward cultural contexts that were regularly addressed by Donne and his critics, such as the urban or, more generally, the public sphere.

But these minor suggestions for improvement are easier said than Donne, and should by no means undermine the merits of this groundbreaking edition. The efforts sometimes required to navigate the volume pale in comparison to the collaborative endeavor demonstrated here, and are definitely worth undertaking. Recent studies relying on this edition, such as Lara Crowley's Manuscript Matter: Reading John Donne's Poetry and Prose in Early Modern England (2018), are already demonstrating how the Variorum’s function is not only to record but also, and more importantly, to spark the most significant critical responses to the poet. In that, the volume resembles Donne and his writings: prolific, ambitious, daring, at first a little obscure or daunting, perhaps, but undeniably generous in the erudition it spreads, and the legacy it promises to leave behind.