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- THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 19
Publishers' thirst for private poems'.
importance which the publishers attached to ‘private’, or unpublished pieces, above ‘extant’, or pieces which were already in print. The compiler of Belvedere claims credit for having derived his material not merely from printed books, but from ‘private poems, sonnets, ditties and other witty conceits . . . according as they could be obtained by sight or favour of copying’. In the case of Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Barnfield, and many other living authors whom he named, he had drawn not merely ‘from many of their extant (i.e. published) works’, but from ‘some kept in private’. Of five recently dead authors he stated he had ‘perused’ not only their ‘divers extant labours’ but ‘many more held back from publishing’.
In christening his volume, Jaggard illustrated the habit which George Wither had in mind when he wrote of the stationer that ‘he oftentymes giues bookes such names as in his opinion will make them saleable, when there is little or nothing in the whole volume suitable to such a tytle’.¹ The title which Jaggard devised has no precise parallel, but it does not travel very far from the beaten track. The ordinary names which were bestowed on poetic miscellanies of the day were variants of a somewhat different formula, as may be deduced from the examples ‘Bower of Delights’, ‘Handful of Pleasant Delights’, and ‘Arbor of Amorous Devices’. The Affectionate Shepheard, a collection of poems by Richard Barnfield, which appeared in 1594, approaches Jaggard’s designation more nearly than that of any preceding extant volume of verse.²
¹ Scholast Purgatory (c. 1625), p. 122.
² The similitude is not quite complete. Although Barnfield’s book includes many detached pieces, the title of the whole applies particularly to the opening and longest poem of the volume. Jaggard’s general title does not apply to any individual item of the book’s contents.
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