The publisher Jones was indifferent to the complaint, and in 1594 he exposed the poet Breton to the like indignity for a second time. Very early in that year Jones published, with the licence of his Company, a new miscellany which he called 'The Arbor of Amorous Deuices by N. B. Gent.' In a preliminary epistle To the Gentlemen Readers, he boldly called attention to the fact that this pleasant Arbor for Gentlemen' was 'many mens workes, excellent Poets, and most, not the meanest in estate and degree'. Jones' new miscellany consisted of thirty short poems. Breton was only responsible for six or seven of them, yet the title-page ascribed all of them to him.' Sonnets, Two volumes of the utmost literary interest, which were also issued in 1591, illustrate how readily poetic manuscripts fell, without the knowledge of the author or his friends, into a publisher's clutches. Firstly, in that year, Thomas Newman, a stationer of small account, discovering that Sidney's Sidney's sonnets were 'spread abroad in written copies', put them into print on his own initiative, together with an appendix of 'sundry other rare Sonnets', which he ascribed to divers anonymous noblemen and gentry'. Samuel Daniel, the poet, soon discovered to his dismay that Newman, without giving him any hint of his intention, had made free in the 1 of each of these miscellanies assigned to Breton only single copies are now known to be extant; they are even rarer than The Passionate Pilgrim. A unique copy of the Bower is at Britwell, and a unique copy of the Arbor (defective and without title-page) is in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge. Another example of the assignment by an adventurous publisher of a collection of miscellaneous poems to a single author, whereas the contents of the volume were from many pens, is offered by the second edition of Constable's Diana, issued by James Roberts in 1594. The printer, Richard Smith, distributed twenty-one genuine sonnets by Constable, which he had brought out in a separate and authentic volume in 1592, through a collection of seventy-five sonnets, of which fifty-four were by other honourable and learned personages'. Eight of the supplementary poems, which the publisher Smith connected with Constable's name, were justly claimed for Sir Philip Sidney in the authorized collection of his works in 1598. C 1591. 1591. appendix with written copies of twenty-three sonnets by himself which had not been in print before; they appeared anonymously in Newman's volume. Secondly, in 1591, William Ponsonby published a little collection of Spenser's verse, in a volume on which he and Spenser's not the author bestowed the title of Complaints. In an Complaints, address To the gentle Reader' Ponsonby announced that he had 'endevoured by all good means. . . to get into his handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors as he heard were disperst abroad in sundrie hands and not easie to bee come by by himselfe, some of them having been diverslie imbeziled and purloyned from him since his departure Oversea '. The printer expressed the hope that Complaints might be the forerunner of a second collection of some other Pamphlets looselie scattered abroad', for which he was still searching. Publishers' habit of wrongly giv names. Further illustration of various points in Jaggard's procedure may be derived from yet two other poetic ing authors' anthologies, which came out a year later than The Passionate Pilgrim, viz. England's Helicon, an admirable collection of Elizabethan lyrics, four of which also find a place in Jaggard's volume; and Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses, an ample miscellany of elegant extracts. In the address to the reader prefixed to England's Helicon reference is made to the grievance that another man's name was often put in such works to an author's poems, but the wrong done was treated by the publisher of England's Helicon as negligible.' The Belvedere anthology To the complaint of stationers, that their copies were robbed' and their copyright ignored by these collections, the compiler of England's Helicon makes answer that no harm can be done by quotation when the name of the author is appended to the extract, and the most eminent poets are represented in the miscellany. As the author's name was usually either omitted or given wrongly, the apologist for Jaggardian methods offers very cold comfort. thirst for importance which the publishers attached to 'private', or Publishers' unpublished pieces, above extant', or pieces which were 'private already in print. The compiler of Belvedere claims credit poems '. for having derived his material not merely from printed books, but from 'private poems, sonnets, ditties and other witty conceits... according according as they could be obtained by sight or favour of copying'. In the case of Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Barnfield, and many other living authors whom he named, he had drawn not merely from many of their extant (i. e. published) workes', but from some kept in private'. Of five recently dead authors he stated he had 'perused' not only their divers extant labours' but many more held back from publishing'. In christening his volume, Jaggard illustrated the habit The name which George Wither had in mind when he wrote of the of Jaggard's miscellany. stationer that he oftentymes giues bookes such names as in his opinion will make them saleable, when there is little or nothing in the whole volume sutable to such a tytle'.' The title which Jaggard devised has no precise parallel, but it does not travel very far from the beaten track. The ordinary names which were bestowed on poetic miscellanies of the day were variants of a somewhat different formula, as may be deduced from the examples Bower of Delights', 'Handful of Pleasant Delights', and Arbor of Amorous Devices'. The Affectionate Shepheard, a collection of poems by Richard Barnfield, which appeared in 1594, approaches Jaggard's designation more nearly than that of any preceding extant volume of verse.2 I 1 Scholars Purgatory (c. 1625), P. 122. 2 The similitude is not quite complete. Although Barnfield's book includes many detached pieces, the title of the whole applies particularly to the opening and longest poem of the volume. Jaggard's general title does not apply to any individual item of the book's contents. Jaggard used the word 'passionate' in the affected sense of 'amorous'.' 'Passionate' in that signification was a conventional epithet of 'shepherd' and 'poet' in pastoral poetry. Two poems in The Passionate Pilgrim, which also appear in England's Helicon, were ascribed in the later anthology to "The Passionate Shepherd'. Biron's verses from Love's Labour's Lost were headed The Passionate Shepherd's Song', while Marlowe's poem 'Come, live with me' was headed The Passionate Shepherd to his Love'. A poetaster, Thomas Powell, entitled a volume of verse in 1601, The Passionate Poet, and described himself in the preface as the creature of 'passion'. In 1604 Nicholas Breton christened a miscellany of lovepoems 'The Passionate Shepheard'; and named the concluding section 'Sundry Sweet Sonnets and Passionated Poems.' It was Jaggard's manifest intention to attract through the title those interested in amorous verse.2 Shake III IN 1599 Shakespeare was nearing the height of his fame. speare's posi- He had just produced the two parts of Henry IV in which tion in 1599. 1 A detached love poem was often called 'a passion'. Thomas Watson gave his 'Exaтoμmalía (1582), a well-known collection of love-poetry, the alternative title of Passionate Centurie of Love', and the work was described in the preliminary pages as this Booke of Passionate Sonnetes', while each poem was called a passion'. Cf. the title of the appendix to the love poem Alcilia (1595): The Sonnets following were written by the Author, after he began to decline from his Passionate Affection.' 2 Sir Walter Raleigh's familiar verses beginning, Give me my scalop shell of quiet', which circulated freely in MS., bore, perhaps with allusion to Jaggard's volume, the title of "The Passionate Mans Pilgrimage' when they were first published at the end of Scoloker's Daiphantus, 1604. In this connexion 'passionate' signifies sorrowful', as in Shakespeare's King John, ii. 1. 544, She [i. e. Constance] is sad and passionate at your highness' tent.' Raleigh was author of 'Loues answere', which Jaggard included in The Passionate Pilgrim, in No. xix. Falstaff came into being, and in the previous autumn he had been hailed by the critic Meres as the greatest poet of his era. It was a natural ambition in a speculative publisher to parade Shakespeare's name on the title-page of a conventional anthology. The customs of the trade and the unreadiness or inability of authors to make effective protest rendered the plan easy of accomplishment. Enough of Shakespeare's undoubted work fell, moreover, into Jaggard's hands to give a specious justification to the false assignment.' 1598. A year before The Passionate Pilgrim appeared, it was Meres' announced that poems by Shakespeare were circulating in statement of private'. Shakespeare's appreciative critic, Francis Meres, did more than write admiringly in 1598 of Shakespeare's narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, which were accessible in print, and of a dozen plays, which were familiar on the stage to the theatre-goer. He made specific reference to writings by the great poet which were held back from publishing' and kept in private'. These were vaguely described by Meres as Shakespeare's sugred Sonnets among his private friends, etc.' The productions which Meres cloaked under his etc.' are not with certainty identified, but two of Shakespeare's Sonnets' strayed into Jaggard's net. hunt for There can be no doubt that Jaggard, like his colleagues Jaggard's in trade when designing a miscellany, made it his chief aim to secure 'private poems, sonnets, ditties, and other witty poems. It was not the first time that Shakespeare suffered such an experience, and the action of other publishers was even less justifiable than Jaggard's. Already in 1595 The Tragedie of Locrine was attributed by the publisher, Thomas Creede, on the title-page to 'W.S.', with fraudulent intent. His surname figured on the title-pages of The Life of Sir John Oldcastle, 1600, The London Prodigall, 1605, A Yorkshire Tragedie, 1608, and 'W. S.' again in Thomas Lord Cromwell, 1602, and in The Puritaine, 1607. With none of these six plays had Shakespeare any concern. The worthless old play about King John was assigned to Shakespeare in revisions of 1611 and 1622. 'private' |