JANE CAVENDISH AND Elizabeth Brackley's works are preserved in two manuscript collections: one held at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford (Rawlinson MS Poet. 16) and the other at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (Osborn MS b.233). The two manuscripts share much in common, including over eighty poems and Cavendish and Brackley's masque, A Pastorall. The manuscripts are both in the same hand, probably that of John Rolleston, the secretary employed by Cavendish and Brackley's father, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. Both manuscripts are also handsomely bound presentation volumes, and there are few substantial variants among the many works they share. The small number of corrections and strikeouts found in the Beinecke manuscript appear in their corrected form in the Bodleian manuscript, which suggests that the Beinecke manuscript may have served as the Bodleian manuscript's copy text. In addition to including nearly all of the contents of the Beinecke manuscript, the Bodleian manuscript contains eight additional poems and the unique copy of Cavendish and Brackley's most well-known work, a play called The concealed Fansyes.

The manuscripts share so many similarities that when I edited Cavendish and Brackley's dramatic works for Women's Household Drama: "Loves Victorie," "A Pastorall," and "The concealed Fansyes" (2018) with Marta Straznicky, we considered doing a side-by-side transcription of A Pastorall but determined that this was unnecessary given the few significant variants between the two manuscripts.