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- Two volumes of the utmost literary interest, which were also issued in 1591, illustrate how readily poetic manuscripts fell, without the knowledge of the author or his friends, into a publisher’s clutches. Firstly, in that year, Thomas Newman, a stationer of small account, discovering that Sidney’s sonnets were ‘spread abroad in written copies’, put them into print on his own initiative, together with an appendix of ‘sundry other rare Sonnets’, which he ascribed to divers anonymous ‘noblemen and gentry’. Samuel Daniel, the poet, soon discovered to his dismay that Newman, without giving him any hint of his intention, had made free in the
¹ Of each of these miscellanies assigned to Breton only single copies are now known to be extant; they are even rarer than *The Passionate Pilgrim*. A unique copy of the *Bower* is at Britwell, and a unique copy of the *Arbor* (defective and without title-page) is in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge. Another example of the assignment by an adventurous publisher of a collection of miscellaneous poems to a single author, whereas the contents of the volume were from many pens, is offered by the second edition of Constable’s *Diana*, issued by James Roberts in 1594. The printer, Richard Smith, distributed twenty-one genuine sonnets by Constable, which he had brought out in a separate and authentic volume in 1592, through a collection of seventy-five sonnets, of which fifty-four were by ‘other honourable and learned personages’. Eight of the supplementary poems, which the publisher Smith connected with Constable’s name, were justly claimed for Sir Philip Sidney in the authorized collection of his works in 1598.
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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
appendix with written copies of twenty-three sonnets by himself which had not been in print before; they appeared anonymously in Newman's volume.
Secondly, in 1591, William Ponsonby published a little collection of Spenser's verse, in a volume on which he and not the author bestowed the title of Complaints. In an address ‘To the gentle Reader’ Ponsonby announced that he had ‘endevoured by all good means . . . to get into his handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors as he heard were dispers about abroad in sundrie hands and not easie to bee come by by himselfe, some of them having been diverslie imbeziled and purloyned from him since his departure Oversea’. The printer expressed the hope that Complaints might be the forerunner of a second collection of ‘some other Pamphlets looselie scattered abroad’, for which he was still searching.
Further illustration of various points in Jaggard's procedure may be derived from yet two other poetic anthologies, which came out a year later than The Passionate Pilgrim, viz. England's Helicon, an admirable collection of Elizabethan lyrics, four of which also find a place in Jaggard's volume; and Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses, an ample miscellany of elegant extracts. In the address to the reader prefixed to England's Helicon reference is made to the grievance that another man's name was often put in such works to an author's poems, but the wrong done was treated by the publisher of England's Helicon as negligible.
The Belvedere anthology indicates the superior
1. To the complaint of stationers, that their copies ‘were robbed’ and their copyright ignored by these collections, the compiler of England's Helicon makes answer that no harm can be done by quotation when the name of the author is appended to the extract, and the most eminent poets are represented in the miscellany. As the author's name was usually either omitted or given wrongly, the apologist for Jaggardian methods offers very cold comfort.
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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 19
Publishers' thirst for private poems'.
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