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- Jaggard used the word ‘passionate’ in the affected sense of ‘amorous’. ‘Passionate’ in that signification was a conventional epithet of ‘shepherd’ and ‘poet’ in pastoral poetry. Two poems in *The Passionate Pilgrim*, which also appear in *England’s Helicon*, were ascribed in the later anthology to ‘The Passionate Shepherd’. Biron’s verses from *Love’s Labour’s Lost* were headed ‘The Passionate Shepherd’s Song’, while Marlowe’s poem ‘Come, live with me’ was headed ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. A poetaster, Thomas Powell, entitled a volume of verse in 1601, *The Passionate Poet*, and described himself in the preface as the creature of ‘passion’. In 1604 Nicholas Breton christened a miscellany of love-poems ‘The Passionate Shepheard’; and named the concluding section ‘Sundry Sweet Sonnets and Passionated Poems.’ It was Jaggard’s manifest intention to attract through the title those interested in amorous verse.
## III
Shakespeare’s position in 1599.
IN 1599 Shakespeare was nearing the height of his fame. He had just produced the two parts of *Henry IV* in which
1. A detached love poem was often called ‘a passion’. Thomas Watson gave his ‘Eearouxallia (1582), a well-known collection of love-poetry, the alternative title of ‘Passionate Centurie of Love’, and the work was described in the preliminary pages as ‘this Booke of Passionate Sonnetes’, while each poem was called a ‘passion’. Cf. the title of the appendix to the love poem *Alcilia (1595)*: ‘The Sonnets following were written by the Author, after he began to decline from his Passionate Affection.’
2. Sir Walter Raleigh’s familiar verses beginning, ‘Give me my scalop shell of quiet’, which circulated freely in MS., bore, perhaps with allusion to Jaggard’s volume, the title of ‘The Passionate Mans Pilgrimage’ when they were first published at the end of Scoloker’s *Dalphamus, 1604*. In this connexion ‘passionate’ signifies ‘sorrowful’, as in Shakespeare’s *King John*, ii. 1. 544, ‘She [i. e. Constance] is sad and passionate at your highness’ tent.’ Raleigh was author of ‘Loucs answere’, which Jaggard included in *The Passionate Pilgrim*, in No. xix.
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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
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