When was The Passionate Pilgrim first printed by William Jaggard?
William Jaggard printed the first edition of The Passionate Pilgrim in 1598 or possibly 1599. No record exists in the Stationers Register to fix the exact date.
Questions about The Passionate Pilgrim
Short answers, pulled from the story.
How many poems in The Passionate Pilgrim are considered authentically Shakespearean?
Only five of the twenty one poems in The Passionate Pilgrim are considered authentically Shakespearean by modern scholars. Two sonnets appeared here before their official publication in the 1609 collection known simply as Sonnets and three additional poems were extracted directly from Love's Labour's Lost.
What did Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza discover about authorship in The Passionate Pilgrim?
Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza applied computerized methods to analyze authorship patterns across the anthology and identified two specific blocks of poems falling within Shakespeare's stylistic boundaries. Their computational study found that poems numbered four six seven and nine alongside ten twelve thirteen and fifteen share identical linguistic DNA with confirmed Shakespeare works.
Why did Thomas Heywood protest against The Passionate Pilgrim in 1612?
Thomas Heywood issued a public protest titled Apology for Actors in 1612 regarding unauthorized use of his work because William Jaggard had added poems taken directly from Heywood's Troia Britannica published three years earlier in 1609. These new additions included love epistles between Paris and Helen announced on the title page which caused Heywood to claim manifest injury done to him.
Where can surviving copies of The Passionate Pilgrim be found today?
Only two sheets remain from the first edition forming eleven leaves total preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library while two complete copies of the 1599 second edition exist intact. One copy resides in Trinity College Cambridge another sits in the Huntington Library and a third imperfect copy remains at the Folger.