Properties
- end_line
- 7555
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T06:24:48.288Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7499
- text
- In the following line the MS. is probably right in reading ‘through Arcadia grounds’ for ‘through hartles’ or ‘harcklesse’ of the printed copies. In Stanza 3, l. 4, ‘nymphs looke peeping’ is better than any of the printed readings (i.e. ‘back creeping’, ‘blacke peeping’, or ‘backe peeping’). Finally, in l. 7,
Alle our evening sportes from greenes are fled
is more pictorial than:—
All our euening sport from vs is fled.
Shakespeare’s tutor in tragedy, Marlowe, may be safely No. XIX. Marlowe’s lyric. credited with the authorship of the familiar lyric ‘Come live with me and be my love’, which is the nineteenth piece in the miscellany, and stands fifth in the appendix of ‘Sonnets To sundry notes of Musicke’. It is in four alternately riming stanzas. To it is appended a single stanza of like metre, entitled ‘Loues answere’; this stanza has been assigned on good grounds to Sir Walter Raleigh.
The four stanzas of the substantive poem reappear in
The last four lines are omitted from the Harleian MS.
<!-- [Page 325](arke:01KG6QFYFSDQ10D4WP5JJGS8ZV) -->
36
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
England's Helicon, with the addition of two stanzas in the fourth and sixth places, and the whole is signed ‘Chr. Marlow’. The presence of these two new stanzas, and the slight variations between the two texts at other points’, indicate that different manuscripts were employed by the two compilers, and that the editor of England’s Helicon did not borrow direct from The Passionate Pilgrim.’
As in the case of the poem ‘My flocks feed not’, the air to
Survival of the tune.
‘For example, the two lines 1 and 20 in England’s Helicon both open with the words ‘Come liue with me’, instead of with ‘Liue with me’ (line 1) or ‘Then liue with me’ (line 16), as in The Passionate Pilgrim.
The lyric enjoyed great popularity in Shakespeare’s day. Marlowe somewhat derisively quotes two lines in his *Jew of Malta*, where Ithamore addresses Bellamine:—
Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love.
Shakespeare also introduces a stanza into the Merry Wives of Windsor, iii. 1. 17–19, where Sir Hugh Evans hums over the last two lines of the second stanza and the first two of the third. Sir Hugh sings:—
To shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There will we make our beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies.
There were numerous imitations of the song. One, entitled ‘Another of the nature’, in England’s Helicon begins:—
Come live with me and be my deare
And we will revill all the yeare,
In plaines and groves, on hills and dales
Where fragrant ayre breeds sweetest gales.
Another by Dr. Donne was called ‘The Bait’, and opens thus:—
Come liue with me and be my love
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands and crystal brooks
With silken lines and silver hooks.
Cf. Donne’s Poems, 1635, p. 39.
In his *Poste with a packet of Mad Letters*, 1637, 4to, Nicholas Breton attests the continuance of the piece’s popularity:—‘You shall heare the old song that you were wont to like well of, sung by the black browses with the cherrie-cheeke, under the side of the pide-cowe: ‘Come, live with me, and be my love’: you know the rest, and so I rest.’
<!-- [Page 326](arke:01KG6QFYFJDN5R6BGEDF7B1B9S) -->
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 37
- title
- Chunk 20