The Passionate Pilgrim

• 1. Introduction

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  The Passionate Pilgrim carried William Shakespeare's name on its title page in 1598 or 1599. Shakespeare had written fewer than five of its twenty-one poems. The publisher, William Jaggard, understood that a famous name moved copies.

  What makes the anthology strange is precisely the gap between what it claimed and what it contained. Some poems inside belonged to named rivals and contemporaries. Others had no identified author at all. A few remain among the most debated short poems in the English language.

  Who wrote the rest of these twenty-one poems? And what happened in 1612, when Jaggard returned to the anthology and the full extent of his liberties became impossible to ignore?

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• 2. The Publisher's Gambit

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  William Jaggard brought The Passionate Pilgrim to press without entering it in the Stationers' Register, leaving no dated legal record of publication. The printer, probably Thomas Judson, had only set up his shop after September 1598. Because the title page of the first edition has not survived, the precise date remains uncertain.

  William Leake, named on the second edition's title page as the seller, had obtained the rights to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in 1596. Between 1599 and 1602 he published five octavo editions of that poem. Jaggard's invocation of "W. Shakespeare" on The Passionate Pilgrim's title page drew on readers already buying Shakespeare's verse in this compact format.

  Eleven leaves are all that survive of the first edition, preserved in two sheets. These are held in a fragmentary composite copy at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Sheets from the second edition were apparently added to replace damaged leaves.

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• 3. What Shakespeare Contributed

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  Five poems in the collection are considered genuinely Shakespearean. Two of them are sonnets: "When my love swears that she is made of truth" and "Two loves I have, of comfort and despair." Both received their first publication here, and both later appeared in the 1609 Sonnets collection as Sonnets 138 and 144.

  Three other authentic pieces were extracted from Love's Labour's Lost. They are the sonnets spoken by Longaville to Maria, Berowne to Rosaline, and Dumaine to Catherine in the play. Dumaine's poem, numbered seventeen in the anthology, was reprinted the following year in England's Helicon (1600).

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• 4. Borrowed and Unclaimed

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  Richard Barnfield contributed at least two poems: "If music and sweet poetry agree" and "As it fell upon a day." Both had first appeared in his Poems in Divers Humours in 1598. Bartholomew Griffin's "Venus, with young Adonis sitting by her" had already appeared in his collection Fidessa in 1596.

  Poem twenty combines two pieces without crediting either author. It opens with an inferior text of Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." That is followed by the first stanza of Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd." Another poem, "My flocks feed not, my ewes breed not," had already been set to music by 1597. It appeared first in Thomas Weelkes' Madrigals to 3, 4, 5 and 6 Voices that year.

  Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza's stylometric analysis found two groupings of the anthology's unsigned poems that fall within Shakespeare's stylistic range. Critic Hallett Smith identified poem twelve, "Crabbed age and youth cannot live together," as the one readers have most often found plausible as Shakespearean. Elliott and Valenza's modal analysis described it as "strikingly Shakespearean."

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• 5. Heywood's Protest

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  In 1612, Jaggard issued a third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, expanded with additional poems on the theme of Helen of Troy. The new title page announced "two Love Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellen's answere back again to Paris." These had been taken from Thomas Heywood's Troia Britannica, which Jaggard himself had published three years earlier.

  wood's Apology for Actors, also published in 1612, protested the "manifest injury done to me." Heywood reported that Shakespeare was "much offended" with Jaggard for making "so bold with his name." Those objections apparently carried enough weight that Jaggard revised the title page and removed Shakespeare's name.

  Two copies of the third edition survive. One is at the Folger Library, retaining the original title page with Shakespeare's name. The other is at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, bearing the cancel title page from which his name has been removed.

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• 6. Circulation and Survival

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  John Benson reprinted the anthology's poems in his 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems. They were placed alongside the Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, and The Phoenix and the Turtle. Bernard Lintott's 1709 edition continued the practice of including The Passionate Pilgrim in collections of Shakespeare's verse.

  Two complete copies of the second edition, dated 1599, have survived the intervening centuries. One is held in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge; the other is at the Huntington Library. The last six poems in that edition were preceded by a second title page, reading "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke." Why Jaggard divided the collection at that point has never been explained.

  One poem, "When as thine eye hath chose the dame," survives in three separate manuscript miscellanies. That trail of handwritten copies suggests some of the anthology's unsigned verse found readers who valued it enough to copy it out for themselves.

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