A Year In The Life Of William Shakespeare.1599 by James Shapiro

Author:James Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-11-25T23:00:00+00:00

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The Passionate Pilgrim

We don’t know who first mentioned to Shakespeare, no later than April or May, that a new book of his poems, The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare, was for sale at William Leake’s bookshop at the sign of the Greyhound in Paul’s Churchyard (and perhaps elsewhere as well). At long last some of his prized sonnets, which until now had circulated only among those Francis Meres called Shakespeare’s “private friends,” were available in print. The news would have come as a surprise. While Shakespeare couldn’t deny that some of the sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim were his, he had nothing to do with their publication. And though the book advertised his authorship-testimony to his growing popularity-he didn’t profit from its sale.

How and under what auspices his poetry was published mattered a great deal to Shakespeare, especially early on in his career. He had carefully seen Venus and Adonis into print in 1593; a year later he showed similar care in publishing Lucrece, this, too, handsomely produced by his friend Richard Field. But in the ensuing five years he hadn’t published a single poem, including any of his sonnets. He had begun writing sonnets around 1590, well before he turned his hand to the two long narrative poems, and he would continue writing and revising them for many years. Other than sharing his sonnets with a select few, Shakespeare guarded them closely-so closely that not a single commonplace book or manuscript collection from the 1590s records even one of them. We can only assume that he made clear to his friends that the poems shouldn’t circulate, and, except for those that appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, they would remain under wraps until a sequence of 154 of them were published in 1609.

As disconcerting as it must have been to see his poetry surreptitiously published-along with poems that weren’t even his-there was little Shakespeare could do about it. In Elizabethan England publishers, not authors, held copyright. The publisher of The Passionate Pilgrim was William Jaggard, famous to posterity for helping to produce the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. But that was a quarter century later. In 1599, Jaggard was at the beginning of his career, already keen on, though apparently unknown to, Shakespeare. He had somehow got hold of two of Shakespeare’s sonnets that were in circulation: “When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth” and “Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair.” With this provocative pair of sonnets in hand, Jaggard then filched three other irregular sonnets (spoken by young gallants, all three of them second-rate poets) from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, which had just appeared in print.

Five of Shakespeare’s poems did not stretch far enough to warrant a whole book-nor enough to generate a decent profit, since there were rules about how much he could charge for a book (no more than a penny for every two sheets of text). So Jaggard padded things out by beginning each brief poem on a fresh

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