Geoffrey Whitney
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Geoffrey Whitney (1548?-1601?), poet, born at Coole Pilate, in the parish of Acton, four miles from Nantwich in Cheshire, in or about 1548. His family had been settled on a small estate at Coole Pilate since 1388. His ancestors were the Whitneys of Whitney-on-Wye in Herefordshire.
He was educated at the neighbouring school of Audlem. He then attended Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, leaving the university without a degree.
On 1 March 1586 he began to attend the newly founded university of Leyden, in the Netherlands, and later in the year he published at Plantin's press his emblem book 'Choice of Emblems'.
The book was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester from London, the 28 November 1585, with an epistle to the reader dated Leyden 4 May 1586. This appears to be a second edition, if so, the first was hand-written, and not printed.
His 248 emblems, one or more stanzas of six lines (a quatrain followed by a couplet), have a device or woodcut with a motto.
Addressed to his kinsmen or friends, or to a notable contemporary, they give information of persons, places, and things not often to be found elsewhere.
Twenty-three of the devices are original, and 23 are suggested by, and 202 identical with, those of Alciati, Paradin, Sambucus, Junius, and Faerni.
The work was the first of its kind to give to Englishmen an adequate example of the emblem books from the great continental presses. It was mainly from this book, representing the greater part of emblem literature preceding it, that Shakespeare gained the knowledge of the great foreign emblematists of the sixteenth century. Whitney's verses are often of great merit, and always show extensive learning.
Isabella Whitney, sister of the poet, was likewise a writer of verses. Her principal work, 'A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posye, contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers,' appeared in 1573.
1. Sidney Lee, ed., Dictionary of National Biography (New York: The MacMillan Company; London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1900), vol. LXI, pages 142-143.
