Part 2 (2/2)

[28] _Sonn._ 99.

[29] [Warton originally wrote ”1609,” but immediately scored it out and replaced it with ”1599.”]

[30] In 16mo. With vignettes. Never entered in the Register of the Stationers. [Possibly Warton saw a volume registered by Eleazer Edgar on 3 January 1599/1600 as ”A booke called _Amours_ by J. D. with certen oy'r sonnetes by W. S. vj'd” (Arber's _Stationers Register_, III, 153).

This entry may indicate that Edgar held ma.n.u.scripts of some of Shakespeare's sonnets, and some copies of the book so registered may have been published. However, if Warton had seen this hypothetical volume he should have correctly identified it: he had already (III, 402, n.) printed the Edgar entry from the Stationers Register.

If this volume which Warton mentions ever actually existed, it cannot now be located. Concerning Warton's statement Mr. G. B. Oldham, Princ.i.p.al Keeper of Printed Books, British Museum, wrote as follows: ”I have examined the sale catalogue which contains books from the library of the Reverend William Thomson of Queens College, Oxford, but have failed to find anything at all corresponding with the volume which Warton describes. There are not, in fact, many really scarce books in this catalogue and it rather looks as though the rarer items in Thomson's collection were otherwise disposed of. In any case I think there is a strong presumption that Warton's memory betrayed him.”

Thus, in the absence of any evidence concerning a 1599 edition of the _Sonnets_ and in the light of Thorpe's claim in 1609 that they were ”Never before Imprinted,” it seems probable that what Warton was vaguely recalling was actually a copy of Shakespeare's _Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_.

This book, printed for Jaggard in 1599, my have misled Warton by its separate t.i.tle page, _Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke_. Such a volume as Warton describes was, it seems evident from surviving copies, frequently bound up to contain _The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_, _Venus and Adonis_, and other small collections of poetry. The fact that Warton recollected the book as a l6mo. does not argue much against this identification. Though _The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_ is actually an octavo, surviving copies measure about 4-1/2 by 3-1/4 inches, and as late as 1911 William Jaggard, in his _Shakespeare Bibliography_ (p. 429), described it as a 16mo.

In explanation of Warton's probable error two extenuating facts should be remembered. First, since Thomson died about 1766, Warton's recollection was at least fifteen years old; and second, only in 1780 did Edmond Malone edit the _Sonnets_ and _The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_ as discriminate texts comprising Shakespeare's lyrics. Even then Malone omitted without comment the separate t.i.tle page _Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke_. Previously, except in George Steevens's edition of the _Sonnets_, Shakespeare's poems were lumped together, with lyrics of several other Elizabethan poets, and printed as Shakespeare's _Poems on Several Occasions_. Moreover, Warton was not the first to write of a 1599 edition of the _Sonnets_. His friend Bishop Percy may have helped to create this false impression in Warton's memory. In his interleaved copy of Langbaine's _Account of the English Dramatick Poets_, immediately after Oldys's statement that Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ were not printed until 1609, Percy commented, ”But this is a mistake. Lintot republished Shakespeare's Sonnets from an edition in 1599.” Malone, in his transcript of Steevens's transcript of Percy, corrected Percy's mistake: ”This is a mistake of Dr. Percy's. Lintot republished from old ed's but not from any ed. of 1599, except a very _few_ sonnets called the _Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_ printed in that year.” (Photostat of Bergen Evans's transcript of Bodleian Malone 129-132.) Warton, however, may well have been misled by Percy's comment, for in the winter of 1769 he had borrowed and used Percy's annotated copy of Langbaine. (_The Percy Letters, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton_, ed. M.

G. Robinson and Leah Dennis [Baton Rouge, 1951], pp. 135, 137.) It is unfortunate that the matter was not cleared up in discussion with Malone, whom at some time during the 1780's Warton furnished with a copy of the 1596 _Venus and Adonis_ and with whom he corresponded around 1785 concerning sonnets in general and Shakespeare in particular. (William Shakespeare, _Plays and Poems_, ed. Edmond Malone [London, 1790] X, 13, n. 1; and James Prior, _The Life of Edmond Malone_ [London, 1860], pp.

122-123.)]

[31] _Wits Tr._ fol. 281. b. [The brackets in the text are Warton's.]

[32] [Warton was of course much mistaken. Following the 1640 edition of Benson, Gildon had reprinted them under Shakespeare's name in 1709 (dated 1710) and again in 1714. The two Sewell editions appeared in 1725 and 1728. Invariably the poems seem to have been printed under Shakespeare's name, though perhaps not always in a collected edition of his complete poems. See Hyder Rollins's New Variorum edition of the _Sonnets_ (Philadelphia, 1944).]

[33] [See Malone's _Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare's Plays_ (London, 1780), I, 581.]

[34] See supr. vol. iii. [p. 405].

[35] _Wits Tr._ fol. 284. a. He is again mentioned by Meres for his distich on king James's _Furies_ & _Lepanto_. fol. 284. b. [The distich, printed by Meres, is the final couplet of Barnfield's Sonnet II.]

[36] _Sonn._ xii.

[37] It begins thus.

Nights were short, and daies were long, Blossoms on the hauthorns hong; Philomel, night-musickes kinge, Tolde the comming of the springe, &c.

He does not scruple to insert these lines,

Loue I did the fairest boy, That these fields did ere enioy.

Loue I did faire Ganymed, Venus darling, beauties bed, &c.

This piece was afterwards inserted in _Englands Helicon_.

[38] See supr. vol. iii. p. [292, n.] I [am] now most inclined to think, that these initials mean Henry Constable, and not Henry Chettle. The Sonnets do not justify the applauses paid to Constable, by his contemporaries, Edmond Bolton, Meres, the author of the _Return_ from _Parna.s.sus_, and many others. Some of his sonnets are prefixed to Sydney's _Apology for Poetry_. The initials H. C. often occur in _Englands Helicon_. I take this opportunity of saying that some pieces of Chettle were among Mr. Beauclerc's books. (See supr. iii. [291-292, n.?]) [Indeed the annotations in the Harvard Library copy of the _Bibliotheca Beauclerkiana_ (p. 102) suggest that either Thomas Warton or, more probably, his brother may have purchased the copy of Chettle's _Englands Mourning Garment_ owned by Thomas Warton's former student. It was sold to ”Dr. W.”]

[39] See supr. iii. [480.] [R. L. was Richard Lynch.]

[40] In 16'mo. With vignettes. They are sixty two in number. The best is that which begins,

Venus, and yong Adonis sitting by her, Vnder a myrtle shade began to woe him She told the yongling, &c. Sonn. iii.

He calls Sleep, ”Balme of the brused heart.” Sonn. xv.

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