ABSTRACT
A tradition of deferential interpretation has encumbered Donne’s religious writing since the seventeenth century. It is a tradition which Donne himself helped to foster. By creating a highly coloured version of his life centred on the image of the sinner-turned-preacher, he was able to give pattern and order to his otherwise unshapely career. The version’s ingenious amalgam of fact and fiction can be seen under construction in a letter Donne wrote to his friend Sir Robert Ker in 1619. On the point of setting out for Germany, Donne wishes to entrust Ker with the delicate task of looking after the potentially inflammatory treatise on suicide he had written ten years previously. He provides Ker with a formula to be used when showing others the manuscript: ‘let any that your discretion admits to the sight of it know the date of it, and that it is a book written by Jack Donne, and not Dr Donne’ (Gosse 1899, ii, p. 124) 1 . In effect Donne forbids Ker to allow the text to circulate separately from its author’s account of its composition. 2
