The Passionate Pilgrim
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- For other uses of the title, see Passionate Pilgrim (disambiguation).
The Passionate Pilgrim is an anthology of poems, published in 1599, which according to the title-page were "By W. Shakespeare".
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[edit] Editions
The Passionate Pilgrim was published by William Jaggard, later the publisher of Shakespeare's First Folio. The first edition survives only in a single fragmentary copy; its date cannot be fixed with certainty since its title page is missing, though many scholars judge it likely to be from 1599, the year the second edition appeared with the attribution to Shakespeare.[1] The title page of this second edition states that the book is to be sold by stationer William Leake; Leake had obtained the rights to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in 1596 and published five octavo editions of that poem (the third edition through the eighth) in the 1599–1602 period.
Jaggard issued an expanded edition of The Passionate Pilgrim in 1612, contaning an additional nine poems — though all nine were by Thomas Heywood, from his Troia Britannica, which Jaggard had published in 1609. Heywood protested the piracy in his Apology for Actors (1612), where he wrote that Shakespeare was "much offended" with Jaggard for making "so bold with his name." Jaggard withdrew the attribution to Shakespeare from unsold copies of the 1612 edition.[2]
All the early editions of The Passionate Pilgrim are in octavo format. They were carelessly printed, with many errors — in contrast to the carefully-printed early editions of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
The poems in The Passionate Pilgrim were reprinted in John Benson's 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems, along with the Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, and The Phoenix and the Turtle and other pieces. Thereafter the anthology was included in collections of Shakespeare's poems, in Bernard Lintott's 1709 edition and subsequent editions.
[edit] The poems
Only five of the twenty poems can be identified with certainty as Shakespeare's; these are poems 1 and 2, which are numbers 138 and 144 of Shakespeare's sonnets, and poems 3, 5, and 16, which are from Love's Labour's Lost, Act IV, scenes ii and iii. Four of the other poems can be identified as the work of other writers. Poem 19 is an inferior text of Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love followed by one stanza of Sir Walter Raleigh's "Reply." Poem 11 is a sonnet by Bartholomew Griffin, printed in his Fidessa (1596). Poems 8 and 20 are by Richard Barnfield, published in his Poems in Divers Humors (1598).
The remaining eleven poems are of uncertain authorship.
- Numbers 4, 6, and 9 are on the theme of Venus and Adonis, like Shakespeare's long narrative poem and like Griffin's number 11.
- Numbers 7, 10, 13, 14, and 18 are in the six-line stanza that Shakespeare used for his Venus and Adonis. Number 14 was originally published as two poems; some sources therefore give the total number of poems in the collection as twenty-one, with the numbering of the later poems displaced by one.
- Number 12 was reprinted with additional stanzas in 1631 in Thomas Deloney's Garden of Goodwill. Deloney died in 1600; he might be the author of 12, though collections of his verse issued after his death contain poems by other authors.
- Number 17 was printed in an anthology titled England's Helicon in 1600; it is there assigned to "Ignoto." The same collection gives Barnfield's number 20 to "Ignoto" as well, leading to the supposition that 17 might also be Barnfield's. Number 17 had been publshed previously, with a musical setting, in the Madrigals of Thomas Weelkes (1597).
- In the judgement of some critics,[3] number 18 resembles canto 44 of Willobie His Avisa (1594) by Henry Willobie, a poem with a complex connection to Shakespearean biography.
Critic Hallett Smith has identified poem 12 as the one most often favored by readers as possibly Shakespearean — "but there is nothing to support the attribution."[4]
In the nineteenth century, the English composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop produced musical settings for number 7 and number 20.
[edit] See also
- Shakespeare Apocrypha
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Evans, G Blakemore, textual editor. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1974; pp. 1787-94.
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
[edit] External links
- The Passionate Pilgrim at Project Gutenberg (omits poems identifiably by others)
- The Passionate Pilgrim(1599) Full text.
