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- Opportunities for gathering material for such anthologies abounded. Printed books, for example, novels and plays, which were interspersed with songs, could always be raided with impunity. But it was from manuscript sources that the anthological publishers sought their most attractive wares. Short poems circulated very freely in manuscript copies through Elizabethan England. An author would offer a friend or patron a poetic effusion in his own handwriting. Fashion led the recipient to multiply transcripts at will as gifts for other worshippers of the Muses. There were amateurs who collected these flying leaves in albums or commonplace books.¹ The author exerted no definable right over his work after the MS. left his hand. His name was frequently omitted from the transcript. A publisher, in search of ‘copy’, recognized no obligation to consult the writer of unprinted verse before he sent it to press. It might be to his interest to enlist the aid of an amateur collector in extending his collections, and to him he might be ready to make some acknowledgement. But the author’s claim to mention was usually disregarded altogether. As often as not, both collector and publisher were in ignorance of the name of the author of unsigned poems which
¹ Numerous manuscript collections of verse, which were formed by amateurs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are extant in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and in private hands. Mr. Henry Huth printed for private circulation in 1870 interesting specimens of such collections in private hands, in the volume entitled *Inedited Poetical Miscellanies*, 1584–1700. Some Elizabethans seem to have collected with an eye to business, and to have deliberately handed their collections over to publishers for some unknown consideration. Such an one was John Bodenham, to whom the publishers of *England’s Helicon* (1600), *Belvedere* (1600), and other miscellanies of the time, acknowledged indebtedness. Bodenham was hailed in a preliminary sonnet before *Belvedere* as ‘First causer and collector of these flowers’.
Manuscript verse.
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16
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
fell into their hands. In that contingency, the publisher deemed it within his right to append in print what signature he chose.¹
Judged’s fraudulent methods of work as an anthologist are capable of almost endless illustration. A venture of the year in which Judged became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company precisely anticipates Judged’s conduct in printing in a single volume ‘small poems’ by various pens, which were ‘dispersed abroad in sundrie hands’, and in attributing them all on the title-page to one author who was only responsible for a few of them. A well-known stationer, Richard Jones, issued in 1591 an anthology which he called *Brittons Bowre of Delights*. Jones represented this volume to be a collection of lyrics by Nicholas Breton, a poet who was just coming into fame. The poet had no hand in the publication, and was piqued to discover on perusing it that it was a miscellany of poems by many hands, in which the publisher had included two or three of his own composition from scattered manuscript copies. Next year, in the prefatory note of his *Pilgrimage to Paradise*, Breton stated the facts thus:—‘Gentlemen, there hath been of late printed by one Richardo Ioanes, a printer, a booke of english verses, entituled Bretons bower of delights: I protest it was donne altogether without my consent or knowledge, and many thinges of other mens mingled with a few of mine, for except Amoris Lachrimae: an epitaphe vpon Sir Phillip Sydney, and one or two other toies, which I know not how he vnhappily came by. I have no part of any of thē: and so I beseech yee assuredly beleeue.’ But the author wasted his protest on the desert air. He had no means of redress.
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