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- THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 21
Falstaff came into being, and in the previous autumn he had been hailed by the critic Meres as the greatest poet of his era. It was a natural ambition in a speculative publisher to parade Shakespeare’s name on the title-page of a conventional anthology. The customs of the trade and the unreadiness or inability of authors to make effective protest rendered the plan easy of accomplishment. Enough of Shakespeare’s undoubted work fell, moreover, into Jaggard’s hands to give a specious justification to the false assignment.¹
A year before *The Passionate Pilgrim* appeared, it was announced that poems by Shakespeare were circulating ‘in private’. Shakespeare’s appreciative critic, Francis Meres, did more than write admiringly in 1598 of Shakespeare’s narrative poems, *Venus and Adonis* and *Lucrece*, which were accessible in print, and of a dozen plays, which were familiar on the stage to the theatre-goer. He made specific reference to writings by the great poet which were ‘held back from publishing’ and ‘kept in private’. These were vaguely described by Meres as Shakespeare’s ‘sugred Sonnets among his private friends, etc.’ The productions which Meres cloaked under his ‘etc.’ are not with certainty identified, but two of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ strayed into Jaggard’s net.
There can be no doubt that Jaggard, like his colleagues in trade when designing a miscellany, made it his chief aim to secure ‘private poems, sonnets, ditties, and other witty
¹ It was not the first time that Shakespeare suffered such an experience, and the action of other publishers was even less justifiable than Jaggard’s. Already in 1595 *The Tragedie of Locriue* was attributed by the publisher, Thomas Creede, on the title-page to ‘W.S.’, with fraudulent intent. His surname figured on the title-pages of *The Life of Sir John Oldcastle*, 1600, *The London Prodigall*, 1605, *A Yorkshire Tragedie*, 1608, and ‘W.S.’ again in *Thomas Lord Cromwell*, 1602, and in *The Puritaine*, 1607. With none of these six plays had Shakespeare any concern. The worthless old play about King John was assigned to Shakespeare in revisions of 1611 and 1622.
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