That part of Professor Smith's paper which deals with edition B1 of Byrd's Psalmes was duly published here in Notes as "A Newly Discovered Edition of Byrd's Psalmes,
Sonets & Songs: Provenance and Significance," (vol.
However, a minimum of research ascertains how much of Brown's material was in fact presented by Cathcart, who focused on what he saw as casuistical habits of mind in the Songs and
Sonets, and Slights, who discussed exactly the same three prose texts, Biathanatos, Pseudo-Martyr and the sermon on Esther.
Klawitter correctly argues that modern scholarship has suppressed the erotic diversity of early modern literature, and his insights will provoke critics into questioning their assumptions about gender and sexuality in Donne's secular poetry, especially the verse letters and the Songs and
Sonets. It can be entertaining and enlightening to watch Klawitter working at the level of puns, pronouns, syntax, and textual history, as he reshuffles and regroups the various lyrics according to audience and tone, detects in the image of love's "centrique happiness" an anus where others have found a vagina (188), or observes that the famous "stiffe twin compasses" of "A Valediction forbidding mourning" are "more properly descriptive of male anatomy than female" (134).
