The Passionate Pilgrim

"The Passionate Pilgrim" is an anthology of poems, published in 1599, which according to the title-page were "By W. Shakespeare".

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. [Halliday, p. 355; Evans, p. 1787.] 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, contaning an additional nine poems — though all nine were by Thomas Heywood, from his "Troia Britannica," which Jaggard had published in 1609. Heywood protested the piracy in his "Apology for Actors" (1612), where he wrote 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. [Halliday, pp. 34-5.]

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," and "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.

The poems

In the nineteenth century, the English composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop produced musical settings for number 7 and number 20.

ee also

* Shakespeare Apocrypha

Notes

References

* Evans, G Blakemore, textual editor. "The Riverside Shakespeare." Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1974; pp. 1787-94.
* Halliday, F. E. "A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964". Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.

External links

*" [http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/1545 The Passionate Pilgrim] " at Project Gutenberg (omits poems identifiably by others)
* [http://www.shakespeare-w.com/english/shakespeare/w_passionate.html The Passionate Pilgrim(1599)] Full text.