The Passionate Pilgrim

For other uses of the title, see Passionate Pilgrim (disambiguation).

The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is an anthology of 20 poems collected and published by William Jaggard that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are considered authentically Shakespearean. These are two sonnets, later to be published in the 1609 collection of Shakespeare's sonnets, and three poems extracted from the play Love's Labour's Lost. Internal and external evidence contradicts the title-page attribution to Shakespeare. Five were attributed to other poets during his lifetime, two were published in other collections anonymously, and critics agree that the remaining eight cannot be attributed to Shakespeare on stylistic grounds. Jaggard later published an augmented edition with poems he knew to be by Thomas Heywood.

Editions

The Passionate Pilgrim was published by William Jaggard, later the publisher of Shakespeare's First Folio. The first edition survives only in a single fragmentary copy; its date cannot be fixed with certainty since its title page is missing, though many scholars judge it likely to be from 1599, the year the second edition appeared with the attribution to Shakespeare. The title page of this second edition states that the book is to be sold by stationer William Leake; Leake had obtained the rights to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in 1596 and published five octavo editions of that poem (the third edition through the eighth) in the 1599–1602 period.

Jaggard issued an expanded edition of The Passionate Pilgrim in 1612, containing additional poems on the theme of Helen of Troy, announced on the title page ("Whereunto is newly added two Love Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellen's answere back again to Paris"). These were in fact by Thomas Heywood, from his Troia Britannica, which Jaggard had published in 1609. Heywood protested the piracy in his Apology for Actors (1612), writing that Shakespeare was "much offended" with Jaggard for making "so bold with his name." Jaggard withdrew the attribution to Shakespeare from unsold copies of the 1612 edition.

All the early editions of The Passionate Pilgrim are in octavo format. They were carelessly printed with many errors, in contrast to the carefully printed early editions of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

The poems in The Passionate Pilgrim were reprinted in John Benson's 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems, along with the Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, The Phoenix and the Turtle, and other pieces. Thereafter the anthology was included in collections of Shakespeare's poems, in Bernard Lintott's 1709 edition and subsequent editions.

Title pages variants

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  Title page of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599)

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  Title page of The Passionate Pilgrim (1612)

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  Revised title page of The Passionate Pilgrim (1612)

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  Secondary title page included within The Passionate Pilgrim (1612)

The poems (Arden Edition)

Number	Author	First line	Information
1	William Shakespeare	"When my love swears that she is made of truth"	First publication, later appears as Sonnet 138 in Shakespeare's sonnets.
2	William Shakespeare	"Two loves I have, of comfort and despair"	First publication, later appears as Sonnet 144 in Shakespeare's sonnets.
3	William Shakespeare	"Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye"	A Version of Longaville's sonnet to Maria in Love's Labour's Lost 4.3.58—71.
4	Anonymous	"Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook"	On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem.
5	William Shakespeare	"If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?"	A version of Berowne's sonnet to Rosalind in Love's Labour's Lost 4.2.105—18. .
6	Anonymous	"Scarce had the sun dried up the dewy morn"	On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem.
7	Anonmymous	"Fair is my love, but not so fair as fickle"	In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis.
8	Richard Barnfield	"If music and sweet poetry agree"	First published in Poems in Diverse Humours (1598).
9	Anonymous	"Fair was the morn when the fair queen of love"	On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem.
10	Anonymous	"Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely pluck'd, soon vaded"	In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis.
11	Bartholomew Griffin	"Venus, with Adonis sitting by her"	Printed in Fidessa (1596). On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem.
12	Thomas Deloney (?)	"Crabbed age and youth cannot live together"	Was reprinted with additional stanzas in Thomas Deloney's The Garden of Good Will entered into the Stationer's Register in March 1593. Deloney died in 1600; he might be the author of 12, though collections of his verse issued after his death contain poems by other authors. Critic Hallett Smith has identified poem 12 as the one most often favoured by readers as possibly Shakespearean – "but there is nothing to support the attribution."
13	Anonymous	"Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good"	In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis.
14	Anonymous	"Good night, good rest. Ah, neither be my share"	In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. Originally published as two poems; some scholars, therefore, consider them as 14 and 15, adding 1 to all subsequent poem numbers.
15	Anonymous	"It was a lording's daughter, the fairest one of three"	.
16	William Shakespeare	"On a day, alack the day!"	Dumaine's poem to Catherine in Love's Labour's Lost 4.3.99—118. Reprinted in England's Helicon (1600).
17	Anonymous	"My flockes feed not, my ewes breed not"	First printed in Thomas Weelkes' Madrigals to 3, 4, 5 and 6 Voices (1597).
18	Anonymous	"When as thine eye hath chose the dame"	Three versions of the poem exist in manuscript miscellanies.
19	Christopher Marlowe & Sir Walter Raleigh	"Come live with me and be my love"; "If all the world and love were young"	An inferior text of Marlowe's poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" followed by the first stanza of Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
20	Richard Barnfield	"As it fell upon a day"	First published in Poems in Divers Humors (1598).

Musical settings

Several of the poems have been set to music. In the nineteenth century, the English composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop produced musical settings for number 7, "Fair is my love", and number 20, "As it fell". Number 20 was also set by Aaron Copland for voice, flute and oboe. Number 12, "Crabbed age", has also been set by several composers, including Hubert Parry and Madeleine Dring.

See also

• Shakespeare Apocrypha

References

• Duncan-Jones, Katherine; Woudhuysen, H. R., eds. (2007). Shakespeare's Poems. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. ISBN 978-1-90343-686-8. 
• Halliday, F[rank] E[rnest] (1964). A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964. Penguin Books. 
• Shapiro, James (2005). A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-21480-8. 
• Smith, Hallett (1974). "The Passionate Pilgrim". In Evans, G. Blakemore. The Riverside Shakespeare. Houghton Mifflin. pp. 1787–94. ISBN 0-395-04402-2. 

External links

• The Passionate Pilgrim at Project Gutenberg (omits poems identifiably by others)
• The Passionate Pilgrim(1599) Full text.