CHAPTER XVII

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM AND LOVE'S MARTYR LOVE

SHAKESPEARE, as we have seen, had definitely abandoned the composition of non-dramatic literature; yet just at the turn of the century appeared two volumes of lyrical verse with which his name was associated, though in different ways.

The first bore the title: "The Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare. At London. Printed for W. Jaggard, and are to be sold by W. Leake, at the Greyhound in Paules Churchyard. 1599." It is mainly significant as showing the eagerness of publishers to secure something from the pen of the dramatist, and the confidence they had in the potency of his name on the title-page to "vent" a work. In all probability Jaggard had come into possession of a small commonplace-book, such as Elizabethan gentlemen were fond of making. From various sources its owner had copied into its blank leaves songs and sonnets for the most part amorous pleased him, including two sonnets from Shakespeare's unpublished cycle, and two sonnets from Love's Labour's Lost, all four, no doubt, with Shakespeare's name appended; and in addition, verses by Griffin, Barnfield, Marlowe, and others, some with, some perhaps without, the author's name attached. Collections of this character frequently fell into the hands of publishers and

that

1 The publisher of the first quarto of Othello says: "The author's name is sufficient to vent his work."

2 Not transcribed from the printed play (unless from the pirated and corrupt first quarto of which no copy is extant), but, apparently, from some manuscript then circulating among gallants.

They were very common; the present writer has two such commonplace-books, with poems by Jonson, Donne, and other well-known writers, and many verses with no names attached.

AT LONDON

Printed for W. Jaggard, and are

to be fold by W. Leake, at the Grey-
hound in Paules Churchyard.

1599.

were made the basis of piratical issues, a noteworthy instance being Tottel's Miscellany.

When Jaggard realized that he had two sonnets from Shakespeare's famous cycle, he decided to make capital of the fact. For his volume he devised the title The Passionate Pilgrime (using “Pilgrime" in the well-known sense of "Lover" 1), added the statement "by W. Shakespeare," and carefully put in the display-window his two prize poems. Apparently he hoped to deceive the unwary into supposing that here at last they were able to purchase the "sugared sonnets" which the master had so long allowed to circulate among his "private friends." With the two authentic sonnets from that cycle Jaggard associated the two sonnets from Love's Labour's Lost, and certain other poems which he thought might with some show of plausibility be attributed to Shakespeare, namely: four sonnets on the theme of Venus and Adonis, almost certainly by Griffin, who had already printed one of them in his Fidessa; four short love-poems (the author of which has not been identified), written in the six-line stanza familiar in Venus and Adonis; the sonnet "If music and sweet poetry agree," printed by Barnfield in his Poems in Diverse Humours; and a song, "Crabbed age and youth," often found in early anthologies. These fourteen poems made up what Jaggard was pleased to call "The Passionate Pilgrime, by W. Shakespeare." Then he slyly inserted a second title-page, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, without any author's name, following which he printed verses by Barnfield, Marlowe, and other writers. Obviously he intended the book

1 As used, for example, by Romeo in addressing Juliet. The lady beloved was commonly called “saint." In this connection it is interesting to observe that Thomas Nashe, in Jack Wilton, describes sonneteers as "passionate lovers."

2 It is curious that this second section contained, doubtless unsuspected by Jaggard, a genuine poem by Shakespeare, Biron's address to Rosaline, extracted from Love's Labour's Lost.

buying public to suppose that the whole volume was by Shakespeare; only on closer inspection would the purchasers discover that merely the first section actually was attributed to the master.

Jaggard had but twenty short poems. In order to make this slender collection into a sizable volume he used a diminutive type-page with wide margins of paper, he inserted at the top and bottom large ornamental devices, and, finally, he resorted to the unusual scheme of printing on only one side of each leaf. By these clumsy expedients he managed to stretch his material into a book of sixty pages.

Because of the presence, no doubt, of Shakespeare's name on the title-page, the volume met with a ready sale. A second edition was called for, of which no copy has come down to us, and a third edition appeared in 1612. In this third edition, Jaggard, still embarrassed by his scanty material, added two long amorous poems, the epistles of Paris to Helen, and of Helen to Paris, impudently extracting them from Thomas Heywood's Troia Britanica, a work he had himself published in 1609. Since this enlarged edition bore on the title-page the assertion "newly corrected and augmented, by W. Shakespeare," Heywood felt called upon to defend himself against the possible charge of having plagiarized from that more distinguished author a portion of his Troia Britanica. Accordingly, in the same year, 1612, he added to his Apology for Actors an explanation to the reading public:

Here, likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in that work [Troia Britanica] by taking the two epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a less volume [The Passionate Pilgrime] under the name of another [William Shakespeare], which may put the world in opinion I might steal them from him, and he, to do himself right, hath since published them in his own name: but, as I must