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 accepted by present-day scholars as 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.
Other poems in the collection may be by Shakespeare, but it also contains poems definitely identifiable as the work of other authors, and Jaggard later published an augmented edition with poems he knew to be by Thomas Heywood. For this reason the remaining poems cannot be definitively confirmed or rejected as Shakespeare's.
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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.[1] 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.[2]
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.
| 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" | Spoken by Nathaniel in Act 4, Scene II of Love's Labour's Lost. The inclusion of this poem (and 5 and 16) says much about Jaggard's taste: in the play, they are intended to be examples of bad poetry.[3] |
| 4 | William Shakespeare? | "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?" | Spoken by Nathaniel in Act 4, Scene II of Love's Labour's Lost.
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| 6 | William Shakespeare? | "Scarce had the sun dried up the dewy morn" | On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem. |
| 7 | William Shakespeare? | "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 Divers Humors (1598). |
| 9 | William Shakespeare? | "Fair was the morn when the fair queen of love" | On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem. |
| 10 | William Shakespeare? | "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 young 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 1631 in Thomas Deloney's Garden of Goodwill. 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."[4] |
| 13 | William Shakespeare? | "Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good" | In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. |
| 14 | William Shakespeare? | "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 | William Shakespeare? | "Lord, how mine eyes throw gazes to the east!" | In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. |
| 16 | William Shakespeare | "It was a lording's daughter, the fairest one of three" | Read by Dumain in Act 4, Scene III of Love's Labour's Lost
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| 17 | "Ignoto" (Richard Barnfield?) | "On a day, alack the day!" | Printed in an anthology titled England's Helicon in 1600; it is there assigned to "Ignoto" (Latin for "unknown"). The same collection gives Barnfield's number 20 to "Ignoto" as well, leading to the supposition that 17 might also be Barnfield's. Number 17 had been published previously, with a musical setting, in the Madrigals of Thomas Weelkes (1597). |
| 18 | [unknown] | "When as thine eye hath chose the dame" | F. E. Halliday an others have found a resemblance between number 18 and Canto 44 of Willobie His Avisa (1594) by Henry Willobie, a poem in which Willobie listens to advice from his friend "W.S.", often conjectured to be Shakespeare. The content of the advice and the stanza format are identical to Willobie's lines, supposed to be W.S.'s words.[5] In addition, poem 18 is in the same six-line stanza format as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. A textually variant version of the poem exists in a manuscript collection of verse made c.1595 for Anne Cornwallis, daughter of Sir William Cornwallis. Though most of the poems in the manuscript are attributed, this one is not.[6] |
| 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). |
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.