Signature verses | TLS
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Signature verses
SAMUEL FALLON AND DAVID SCOTT KASTAN
Two previously unknown fragments of
early modern miscellanies
Published: 3 February 2016
Photograph: Reproduced courtesy of the James
Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
In 2011, the Beinecke Library at Yale University
separately acquired two fragments of printed poetry.
Each comprises a single quarto gathering, and their
respective signatures – “B” and “H” – mark them as
fragments of books that are otherwise not known to
have survived. They are from different volumes,
although either in whole or in part may well have been
bound together, as there is a near alignment of stabstitch holes and paper damage. Both gatherings contain
previously unknown material. The first (Osborn pb173)
contains eleven poems, seven of which are unrecorded,
including poems attributed to Sir Philip Sidney and the
Earl of Essex. The second (Osborn pa67), with the
running head “Poems and devises”, contains poems
from The Partheniades, a text previously known only
from the manuscript copy now in the British Library,
which was perhaps intended as a gift from its author to
Queen Elizabeth, and in over a dozen quotations
included in The Arte of English Poesie (1589).
It is easy to identify the book from which the first fragment comes. A running title identifies it as The Muses
Garland. On February 7, 1603, Thomas Archer entered “A booke called The Muses garlond” in the
Stationers’ Register. There are no known copies of the book, but the fragment proves it was indeed
published. The only previous evidence of that fact is that it was listed in the 1611 catalogue of the library of
William Drummond of Hawthornden, though his copy has seemingly not survived. The fragment’s contents
and the book title itself indicate that it was a miscellany of lyric poems not unlike The Paradyse of Dainty
Devices (1576), The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), and Englands Helicon (1600) – all of which were also
owned by Drummond.
The surviving gathering contains eleven poems, the last incomplete, cut off at the end of the final remaining
page. Three of the poems can be readily identified. One of these, attributed to “EDM. SPENCER” and
described in a header as “Concerning his suit and attendance at the Court”, is a variant of Prosopopoia: or
Mother Hubberds Tale, ll 892–908. Two others, with the first lines “The purest Golde of all will soonest
weare” and “IT was a time, when sillie Bees could speake”, are attributed to “Ess.”; both are associated with
Essex in the manuscript tradition. A fourth poem is a variation on several extant sonnets, among them
Spenser’s Amoretti 8, beginning, “MOre then most faire, full of the lovely fire”; it is attributed to “H. W. S.”,
most likely Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton, a close friend and political ally of Essex.
Of the seven unrecorded poems in the gathering, five are attributed to Essex (Ess.) and two, both sonnets,
to “S. P. S.”, apparently Sir Philip Sidney, as the initials are a common form of identification. The first
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Signature verses | TLS
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sonnet, “Of the favour of the Gods unto men”, warns against the presumptuousness of resisting the power
of love. (Lettering has been modernized throughout.)
OFt have I heard of Stories long agoe,
That Gods for favour they to men did beare:
Did raise them up, even from the earth belowe,
To fit above (as Gods) in heavens Spheare.
They were but men, whom favour raisde so hye,
And they were Gods that favour did rewarde:
In humble sorte contented yet am I,
Though in dispaire I dye without regarde,
For, if that Gods, as Gods, will served be,
Then honour, dutie, feare to them belongs:
And let all earthly men be warnde by me,
How they presume to challenge CUPIDs wrongs.
For madnes comes by over-ruled Love:
And madnes doth the Gods to vengeance move.
The poet’s submission to Love’s authority is a theme explored by Sidney in Certain Sonnets 1 and 2. In the
second sonnet, “As desirous to be his Mystresses Painter”, this abstract Love becomes a very human
mistress, a mistress whose image the poet desires to “set foorth in collours”:
ALL Things on earth, her fairenes farre excelles,
All thoughts of men, my Love as farre doth passe:
My troubled hart exceedes all other helles,
Yet is it to her face a perfect glasse:
Wherein, if she would but vouchsafe to see,
The Painter of her faire and lovely hue:
Then should my Love to her intreate for me,
For such reward as unto him were due.
And, if she thought (of all men) I did best
Set foorth in collours, and come neere to life:
Then, that she would but trust me with the rest,
And thereby end a long continued strife.
Then my true faith might overcome her will:
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And I might wish to be her Painter still.
The gathering’s attribution of these two sonnets cannot be independently substantiated. The “English” form
of the quatrains distinguishes these from the sonnets of Astrophil and Stella, which favour the Petrarchan
form, though this rhyme scheme does appear both in the Old Arcadia and in Certain Sonnets. The
marriages of Frances Walsingham to Sidney and later Essex may suggest that the poems’ path to print lay
through someone with a connection to her, but Thomas Archer, who registered the volume, has no obvious
link. Archer received his freedom from the Stationers’ Company just a month before registering The Muses
Garland and later specialized in playbooks and news pamphlets. He seems to have lacked literary
connections of the kind, for example, which William Ringler and other scholars have noted in accepting the
authenticity of the poems attributed to Sidney in Francis Davison’s A Poeticall Rhapsody.
There is no such uncertainty about the contents of the second fragment, though the book from which they
come cannot be identified. The poems are versions of several of The Partheniades, the collection of
(sometimes double-edged) panegyrics dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, which survives only in the British
Library manuscript (Cotton Vesp. MS E.8, fols. 169–78). There is no compelling evidence that the
manuscript was ever presented to the Queen, and until now there was no evidence that any of the poems
were ever published. The manuscript is anonymous, declaring that “the Author intended not to have his
name knowne”, but The Partheniades has generally been attributed to George Puttenham. That attribution
itself rests on the attribution of another anonymous work to Puttenham: The Arte of English Poesie, a
poetic treatise whose author on several occasions draws examples from what he calls “our Partheniades”.
Scholars now generally agree that The Arte of English Poesie was written by Puttenham, and, thus, that The
Partheniades is also his.
Osborn pa67 does not settle the issue of authorship but shows clearly that at least some of the poems did
make it into print. Its contents are, in order, Partheniades 8, 5, and 11 (though in versions whose occasional
differences from the manuscript suggest that they may well be revisions of the poems as they appear there).
The first of these is incomplete, continuing from a page that does not survive, a fact that allows for the
possibility that the text from which Osborn pa67 survives contained more poems from Puttenham’s work
than merely those in this fragment. Yet the running head, and the ordering of the poems, suggests that the
volume from which the fragment survives was not a complete edition of The Partheniades. It seems likely
that “Poems and devises” is the title of a section rather than the book as a whole, and the specification of
verse content here may suggest that the larger book included prose as well. The complete book might well
have been a tribute to Elizabeth, compiled soon after her death, in which case both fragments come from
books published nearly at the same time, and could have been purchased and soon bound together.
Even in their incomplete condition and with uncertainties about some attributions and the fragments’
relationship to one another, these two quartos furnish significant new material for readers of Elizabethan
and Jacobean poetry. If The Muses Garland was, as seems likely, published early in 1603 before Elizabeth’s
death, then it is striking that it includes poems by Essex, executed for treason in 1601, indeed poems that
seemingly address his tumultuous relationship with Elizabeth. Evidence of previously unrecorded poems by
Sidney, meanwhile, offers the possibility of adding to the canon of one of Elizabethan England’s greatest
poets. Finally, the discovery of “Poems and devises” clearly demands a reconsideration of the long-held
belief that Puttenham’s Partheniades was never printed and may indicate its revision sometime after the
manuscript version. But the fragments are also significant as evidence of the varied forms in which
Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry was published. Osborn pb173, in particular, seemingly offers a hitherto
lost example of the early modern genre of the verse miscellany. Like other miscellanies, the volume from
which this fragment survived reminds us of the importance of anthology collections in the transmission and
reception of Renaissance lyric poetry. The newly recognized fragments themselves remind us more
generally that much still remains to be discovered and that our literary histories will be always subject to
revision.
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2016/03/06