(formerly the property of Malone) has the two title-pages, the original one being left by some inadvertence. In 1640 a new edition, with much additional matter, altogether un-Shakespearean, was issued as Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. THE CONTENTS OF THE VOLUME The Passionate Pilgrim has aptly been described as a "rag-picker's bag of stolen goods." Like many another pirate-publisher, Jaggard must needs issue a book purporting to be by the author of the hour: by some underhand means he obtained transcripts more or less correct of "the sugar'd sonnets," referred to by Francis Meres; he conveyed three pieces from the printed text of Love's Labor's Lost; to these genuine Shakespearean articles he added sundry songs and sonnets, some by well-known authors of the day, some by obscure poetasters, some perhaps manufactured to order, so as to give a Shakespearean coloring to the volume; possibly one or two fragments of true metal may have been preserved in the miscellaneous collection. 1 THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE POEMS I-II. Shakespeare's Sonnets, 138 and 144 (with various readings). as I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage under whom he hath published them, so the author, I know was much offended with Mr. Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name. 1 The many variant readings in the Shakespearean portions of the collection were probably due in some cases to Jaggard's editor, in others to incorrect transcripts. An instance of the former is perhaps to be found in the last line of V, where the play reads, "That sings heaven's praise," etc. It will be remembered that Holofernes chides Nathaniel for not finding the apostrophas, and so missing the accent: "let me supervise the canzonet." Had Jaggard properly supervised it, he would, I think, have read "That singës" instead of "To sing." Some of the changes in the Sonnets may have been intentional for the purpose of obscuring references to the person alluded to. III. Longaville's Sonnet to Maria in Love's Labor's Lost. IV. (?) Shakespeare's (on Venus and Adonis). V. From Love's Labor's Lost. VI. (?) Shakespeare's (on Venus and Adonis). VIII. Probably by Richard Barnfield, in whose Poems in Divers Humors, 1598, it had first appeared. IX. (?) Shakespeare's (on Venus and Adonis). X. Probably not Shakespeare's. XI. Probably by Bartholomew Griffin: it had already appeared, with variations, in 1596, in his Fidessa more Chaste than Kind. XII. Probably not Shakespeare's. XIII. Perhaps by the author of X. XVII. Dumain's Poem to Kate, Love's Labor's Lost (IV, iii). XVIII. Found in Weekes's Madrigals, 1597; also in England's Helicon, 1600, with the title The Unknown Shepherd's Complaint, and subscribed Ignoto (probably printed from the 1599 volume).2 XIX. Doubtfully Shakespeare's. The poem strongly resembles one section of Willobie's Avisa, published 1594. XX. By Christopher Marlowe. The Lover's Answer, probably by Sir Walter Raleigh. In England's Helicon the poem is given in full.3 1 Wrongly printed as two poems, though evidently not intended as such in the First Edition. 2 Cp. Bullen's edition of England's Helicon, p. xxi., where he gives his opinion in favor of Barnfield's authorship. 3 Isaac Walton's well-known reference did much to maintain the fame of the lyric:-"As I left this place, and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me; 'twas a handsome milkmaid: she cast away all care and sang like a nightingale. Her voice was good and the ditty fitted for it: it was the smooth song which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago. And the milkmaid's mother sang an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his young days." XXI. By Richard Barnfield, from Poems in Divers Humours, 1598 (ll. 1-28 found also in "England's Helicon," signed "Ignoto”). "The Passionate Pilgrim" belonged in reality to the poetical miscellanies so popular at the time; it deserved utter failure for the undue liberty it had taken with Shakespeare's great name, and it perhaps deserved the almost too severe though eloquent censure which a modern poet, Mr. Swinburne, has passed upon it. When the genuine Shakespearean pieces have been taken into account, "the rest of the ragman's gatherings, with three most notable exceptions, is little better for the most part than dry rubbish or disgusting refuse. I need not say that those three exceptions are the stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barnfield, our elder Shelley and our firstborn Keats; the singer of Cynthia in verse well worthy of Endymion, who would seem to have died as a poet in the same fatal year of his that Keats died as a man; the first adequate English laureate of the nightingale, to be supplanted or equalled by none until the advent of his mightier brother." age "... Our Poet, him And only one amid the strife INTRODUCTION By HENRY NORMAN HUDSON, A.M. "THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM, by W. SHAKESPEARE. At London: Printed for W. Jaggard, and are to be sold by W. Leake, at the Greyhound in Paul's Church-yard, 1599." Such is the title-page of a 16mo volume of thirty leaves, the contents of which are the same, and given in the same order, as in the pages following this Introduction. The collection was reprinted in 1612, with additions, and with a new title-page reading thus: "The Passionate Pilgrim; Or certain amorous Sonnets, between Venus and Adonis, newly corrected and augmented. By W. Shakespeare. The third Edition: Whereunto is newly added two Love-epistles, the first from Paris to Helen, and Helen's answer back again to Paris. Printed by W. Jaggard. 1612." In some copies of this edition, the words, "By W. Shakespeare," are omitted from the title-page. It is here called "the third edition"; but of the second, if there were any, as there may have been, nothing has been seen in modern times. The circumstances, which were somewhat peculiar, attending the issue of these two impressions, are thus stated by Mr. Collier: "In 1598 Richard Barnfield put his name to a small collection of productions in verse, entitled The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, which contained more than one poem attributed to Shakespeare in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1699. The first was printed by John, and the last by William Jaggard. Boswell suggests, that John Jaggard in 1598 might have stolen Shakespeare's verses, and attributed them to Barnfield; but the answer to this supposition is two fold: First, that Barnfield formally, and in his own name, printed them as his in 1598; and next, that he reprinted them under the same circumstances in 1605, notwithstanding they had been in the meantime assigned to Shakespeare. The truth seems to be, that W. Jaggard took them in 1599 from Barnfield's publication, printed by John Jaggard in 1598. In 1612 W. Jaggard went even more boldly to work; for in the impression of The Passionate Pilgrim of that year he not only repeated Barnfield's poems of 1598, but included two of Ovid's Epistles, which had been translated by Thomas Heywood, and printed by him with his name in his Troja Britannica, 1609. The Epistles were made, with some little ambiguity, to appear, in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1612, to have been also the work of Shakespeare. When, therefore, Heywood published his next work in 1612, he exposed the wrong that had been thus done to him, and claimed the performances as his own. He seems also to have taken steps against W. Jaggard; for the latter cancelled the titlepage of The Passionate Pilgrim, 1612, which contained the name of Shakespeare, and substituted another without any name; so far discrediting Shakespeare's right to any of the poems the work contained, although some were his beyond any dispute. Malone's copy in the Bodleian Libray has both title-pages. "To what extent, therefore, we may accept W. Jaggard's assertion of the authorship of Shakespeare of the poems in The Passionate Pilgrim, is a question of some difficulty. Two Sonnets, with which the little volume opens, are contained, with variations, in Thorpe's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1609: three other pieces, also with changes, are found in Love's Labor's Lost, which had been printed the year before The Passionate Pilgrim originally came out: another, and its 'answer' notoriously belong to Marlowe and Raleigh: a Sonnet, with some slight differences, had been printed as his in 1596, by a person of the name of Griffin; while one production ap |