Shake Sphere Collaborators

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Lois Potter 6

We usually think of collaboration as confined to the theatre, a world inwhich there was obvious motivation for dividing up a task in order to get it

done more quickly. Poetry and fiction, on the other hand, are generallythought of as the work of a single mind, though the author might benefitfrom feedback in the course of writing, as Sidney apparently did when heread chapters of the Arcadia to his sister and her ladies during the courseof composition. Even in the theatre world, it is possible, as Heather Hirschfield suggests, that single authorship was more prestigious thanteamwork, until the success of Beaumont and Fletcher changed the

perception of joint authorship (Hirschfield 1999: 179-181). In theapologetical dialogue at the end of Poetaster , Jonson depicts himself withdrawing from the theatrical world of petty rivals and unintelligentaudiences to the lofty solitudes of poetry. Yet the end of the sixteenthcentury brought the recognition that the solitary author had only a

precarious hold on immortality. With the publication in 1598 of theconflated version of Sidneys unfinished Arcadia , and with Spensersdeath in 1599, it had become obvious that the centurys two mostambitious and prestigious works of single authorship were going to remainunfinished.

Hence the attraction, even for professional writers, of what Arthur Marotti calls Social Textuality (Marotti 1995: 135-208). Much amateur

poetry is collaborative; it likes word games acrostics and posies anduses them as a means of courtship. One such interchange is described byMaster Stephen, in Jonsons Every Man in His Humour (1598). He tellsEdward Knowell that he received a jet ring from a woman with a posy,or short verse inside it saying Though fancy sleep, my love is deep.Meaning that though I did not fancy her, yet she loved me dearly. Andthen I sent her another, and my posy was: The deeper, the sweeter, Ill be

judged by St Peter. Edward comments: How, by St. Peter? I do notconceive that! and Stephen triumphantly explains: Marry, St. Peter, tomake up the meter (2.4.32-40; this passage is the same in both the Q andF versions of the play.). The level expected in these verse games wasobviously not very high. Jonson ridiculed them more extensively inCynthias Revels and Poetaster .

In another social form, which E.F. Hart christened the answer poem,the poet chooses an earlier poem usually one that is easily recognizablethrough its opening line or unusual verse form in order to parody, or agree, or disagree with it, as with Raleghs answer to Marlowes Comelive with me and be my love. Sometimes one poet amplifies the theme of

the first; more often, his verses are a point-by-point refutation of everything said in the earlier poem. This poetry is not so much


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Involuntary and Voluntary Poetic Collaboration:The Passionate Pilgrim and Loves Martyr

7

collaborative as contra-laborative. As You Like It (1599) contains twoexamples of the answer poem. In 2.5, Jaques takes up Amiens Who doth

ambition shun with If it should come to pass | That any man turn ass(2.5.47-48), imitating the metre though not the rhyme, in a direct, evenhostile, confrontation with the author. Then, in 3.2, Touchstone parodiesthe rhythm and rhyme scheme of Orlandos verses on Rosalind (If a hartdo lack a hind, | Let him seek out Rosalind, 3.2.99-100, etc.), partly as acriticism of their badness and partly to show off his virtuosity: Ill rhymeyou so eight years together, dinners, and suppers, and sleeping hoursexcepted (3.2.94-95). Hamlet of course demonstrates a completecommand of parody when he writes some dozen or sixteen lines to insert

into a play that has already passed the censor, and later when he rewritesClaudiuss letter to the English king in the same style as the original.Parody, in this case, is a form of revenge: a couplet for a couplet.

Verse competitions were probably more widespread on the Europeancontinent than in England. A manuscript belonging to Charles dOrlans(the Orleans of Shakespeares Henry V ) contains ten poems, including one

by Franois Villon, with the same first line: Je meurs de soif auprs de lafontaine. Orlans, a distinguished poet himself, apparently provided thefirst line and had his guests compete in writing the rest (Champion 1933:94). It is not clear whether all the participants in the concours de Bloiswere actually present at the same time some of the poems may have beenwritten for a visitors book but full-scale poetic competitions took placein France and Spain and the societies of rhetoric, where they existed,evidently provided an organization for what the French called joutes

potiques (poetic jousts). 1 Jonsons early comedies, especially Cynthias Revels and Poetaster , show courtly competitions that may have a basis inreality. Steven May has suggested that such competitions might be thesource of some of the Elizabethan sonnets that appear to share the samesubject matter, and even the same line (for instance, both Samuel Danieland Bartholomew Griffin address Care-charmer sleep). 2

1 This information derives from group discussion after this paper was presented inBrno. I am particularly grateful to Teresa Ba uk-Ulewiczowa for information aboutPolish societies, and to Paul Franssen for suggesting that the same activities

probably took place in the Dutch Chambers of Rhetoric. Pavel Drbek has sinceinformed me that such gatherings were also characteristic of Czech culture in that

period, with poetic jousts taking place in the early sixteenth century at thePardubice Castle, owned by the house of Pernstein (Perntejn).2 In their edition of Shakespeares Sonnets, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine citea suggestion by Steven May in private communication that two other, verysimilar sonnets number 99 by Shakespeare and number 16 from Constables


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The closest equivalent to the joute potique in Britain is the flyting.More formal and hostile than the answer poem, this was an exchange of

verses, often bawdy, where each poet insulted the other at length, usuallyadhering to formal conventions. The poems were composed in private butread or recited in public. The ultimate origin was probably the classicalsong contest, or perhaps something more primitive, where two bardscursed each other. It was particularly common in countries that stillretained a strong oral tradition, like Scotland and Wales. One flyting inWales lasted from 1581 to 1588 and produced a total of 54 poems(Williams 2004). The Scottish examples were still better known. In 1579,Alexander Montgomerie, at the court of the thirteen-year-old James VI,issued a poetic challenge and, with the king as judge, succeeded inunseating his rival. James quoted from Montgomeries work in 1584,when he published his first collection of poems, Essayes of a Prentise ,along with a short essay on writing poetry. Through this book, English

poets who took this seventeen year old poet seriously as a probable heir tothe throne of England could have learned what flyting was and what other kinds of poetry the king liked. Jamess court in the 1580s was a centre for

poets, producing exchanges of comic verse, verses written under assumednames, and verses written by royal command. Naturally, Jamess book was prefaced by a number of poems in which his courtiers praise thevolume that is to follow. As Wayne Chandler has shown, commendatory

poems go back to the beginning of printing in England, but wereincreasingly used from the 1570s on and had become commonplace by theend of the century. Though the first published play to appear withcommendatory verses was Samuel Brandons The Virtuous Octavia (1598), probably a closet drama, most published plays had already beenseen in the theatre (Chandler 2005: 3). The readers of a volume of poems,on the other hand, would have no previous knowledge of the contents. Itlooks as if the author generally showed at least some of his work to

prospective verse-writers, much as publishers nowadays send complimentarycopies to academics, hoping for a quotable blurb (Chandler 2003: 163). Inone or two cases, the commendatory verses inspired answer poems. InRobert Toftes Alba (1598) the author replied to each writer, in the samelength and metre as the commendatory poem, modestly expressing histhanks and disclaiming any value attributed to his work.

Diana might have been written in response to a poetic competition or challengesuch as the one that produced Sir Thomas Heneages response to RaleghsFarewell False Love or Spencers Amoretti 8, variants of which appear in poems

by Dyer and Sidney (Mowat and Werstine 2004: 329-30).


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Thomas Coryates experience in 1611 shows how interactive thecommendatory poem could become. A member of the famous Mermaid

Club, and also of Prince Henrys household, Coryate apparently sent hisfriends the frontispiece of his travel book, Coryates Crudities HastilyGobbled Up , hoping for a few commendatory verses. Turning the wholething into a joke, his friends responded with verses ridiculing first thefrontispiece and then the entire project, in Latin, Greek, Italian, evenWelsh. Other writers jumped on the bandwagon, until Coryate was

positively drowning in commendatory verses. Rather helplessly, heexplained in the preface, I sollicited not halfe those worthy Wights for these verses that I now divulge, a great part of them being sent vnto me

voluntarily from diuers of my friends, from whom I expected no suchcourtesie. Despite himself, he had to print them all: Henry, the seventeenyear old Prince of Wales, insisted on it (Coryate 1776: I: d3v). Clearly the

prince knew something about the flytings at his fathers Scottish court andenjoyed being part of this one.

The Passionate Pilgrim

This rich variety of collaborative and combative verse may not seem to

have much connection with Shakespeare. We know that he is unlikely tohave been part of the elite Mermaid Club. None of his works before the1623 Folio include commendatory poems by other people. Yet thecollaborative tradition supplies a context for two of the most puzzlingworks with which his name is connected: The Passionate Pilgrim (1599)and Loves Martyr (1601). The Passionate Pilgrim , notoriously, isascribed on the title page to W. Shakespeare. It contains four sonnetsand a song that are undoubtedly his, along with a number of other poems,some already published by other writers and some of unknown authorship.

Loves Martyr , mainly by Robert Chester, contains the work of at leastfive other writers, along with the untitled Shakespeare poem usually calledThe Phoenix and Turtle. Both volumes have titles that use religiouslanguage to describe secular love. Passionate had been a fashionableword since Thomas Watsons early sonnet cycle, Hekatompathia (1584),which means, as its subtitle says, Passionate Centurie of Loue . Another W.S., William Smith, published in 1596 a sonnet sequence called Chloris,or the Complaint of the passionate despised Shepheard . Christopher Marlowes Come live with me and be my love was published for thefirst time in The Passionate Pilgrim . When it was reprinted the followingyear in Englands Helicon (1600), it became The Passionate Shepherd toHis Love, probably because of the volume in which it first appeared. The


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word was everywhere in the 1590s. So, perhaps more surprisingly, waspilgrim. A passionate palmer appears in Robert Greenes Never Too

Late (1590) (Dowden 1883: iv; note 2). There would later be a Passionate Hermit (the subtitle of Dolarnys Primerose , by John Reynolds, 1606).The passionate pilgrim, figuratively speaking, is also loves martyr.

The speaker in Robert Toftes Alba declares that he had vowed:

As painfull Pilgrim in deuoutfull wise,A voyage in that Holy land to make,At my sweete Saint her Shrine to sacrifice.

(Robert Tofte, Alba , B6 v)

He also calls himself a Martyr for religious Loue (C6). Although this isan obscure volume, it is relevant because Tofte is a poet who went to thetheatre: the one poem from Alba that is known to most scholars tells of going to see Loves Labours Lost and losing his mistress there. Thus, hisimagery of pilgrims and saints probably derives from Romeo and Juliet ,where Romeos first encounter with Juliet is based on his conceit of himself as a pilgrim. Both plays incorporate sonnets as part of their dialogue, and Tofte is returning the compliment.

The Passionate Pilgrim has inspired a good deal of suspicion, not least

because it was printed only on one side of the paper, to make a meretwenty poems look like more. On the other hand, it sold well, so peopleapparently did not feel that they were being cheated. They might havewelcomed the publishing gimmick as a way of leaving space for them towrite their favourite poems, or allowing them to tear favourite pages out of the book. Moreover, as is often pointed out, anyone looking into thevolume might easily have thought it genuinely Shakespearean. It openswith two sonnets that were published in 1609, in different versions, assonnets 138 and 144, followed by one of the sonnets from Loves Labours

Lost . It includes two more poems from the play, as well as a number of sonnets and other poems on the subject of Venus and Adonis and perjuredor frustrated love. A few of the other authors can be identified: the sonnet

beginning If music and sweet poetry agree (8) is by Richard Barnfield,and one of the Venus and Adonis poems (11) was published inBartholomew Griffins Fidessa in 1596. Poems 15 to 20 in the collectionhave a separate title page calling them Sonnets to divers notes of musicke; number 16 is Dumaines song from Loves Labours Lost .

James Shapiro thinks that the experience of seeing his poems reprinted,

out of context, in The Passionate Pilgrim would have been annoying for Shakespeare, especially since it might seem to make claims for poemswhich, in their theatrical context, are presented as amateur efforts (Shapiro


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2005). Yet, as Patrick Cheney points out, there is no record of anycomplaint from Barnfield or Griffin, who had still more reason to be

annoyed than Shakespeare, since they received no credit for their poems(Cheney 2004: 164); it was only when Jaggard republished the volume in1612, adding substantial chunks from Thomas Heywoods Troia

Britannica , that someone protested not surprisingly, Heywood himself,who added that Shakespeare (unnamed but clearly identifiable) wasequally annoyed. Certainly, the printer must have known that some of the

poems in his book were not written by Shakespeare: for one thing,Barnfields Lady Pecunia , from which his sonnet comes, had been

published by William Jaggards brother John in 1598. Still, by

Shakespeare might mean not only written by Shakespeare but also in the persona of Shakespeare. 3 The entire 1599 volume could be seen as atribute to Shakespeares most popular early writings. The most obvious isof course Venus and Adonis . The sonnets on this subject are clearlyinspired not merely by the theme but also by Shakespeares poem, sincethey all feature an amorous Venus courting a boy Adonis who either rejects or ignores her. In fact, almost any sonnet about unrequited sexual

passion could easily be imagined as spoken by Venus. Even the version of 138 that appears here could be taken to be by Adonis. Though the speaker refers to himself as past the best and even old, he also asksrhetorically, wherefore says my Loue that she is young? somethingthat Venus certainly does say (Thou canst not see one wrinckle in my

brow, line 139), whereas the 1609 version links the womans falsehood toher promiscuity, asking But wherefore says she not she is unjust? The

poem emphasizes the fact that Venus is a personification of Love, just asShakespeare had done in calling her loue-sicke Loue (328) and punningthat Shees loue, she loues, and yet she is not loud (610). When Jaggardreprinted the collection in 1612, he actually called it The PassionatePilgrim, or, Certaine Amorous Sonnets, betweene Venus and Adonis,newly corrected and augmented.

Thus, Patrick Cheney argues, the volume coheres in presenting the printed voice of a single authorial persona, singing a complaint againstlove, beauty, and the female sex (Cheney 2004: 159). Read by anenthusiastic admirer of Venus and Adonis , the volume might indeed seemto be a sort of appendix to the longer poem, using the voices of the

3 An interesting parallel occurs in John Soowtherns Pandora (London, 1584), acollection dedicated to the Earl of Oxford, in which there are several sonnetssupposedly by his wife on the death of her son. These might conceivably be byher, but it seems to me more likely that they are simply put into her mouth.


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narrator, Adonis, and even (quoted in the sonnets) Venus herself. On theother hand, a reader who knew the plays as well might have supplied other

narrative voices. The theme of forswearing, which dominates thecollection, is more obviously relevant to the plot of Loves Labours Lost than to Venus and Adonis , though in the poems, unlike the play, it iswomen who are forsworn. Many of the poems could be put into themouths of Navarre and his courtiers, who speak for much of the time in amixture of quatrains and couplets that could easily be mistaken for sonnets. 4 They seem to belong to the same cynical world as some of thesonnets in the so-called Dark Lady group, now generally thought to have

been written around the same time as the play. Finally, the poem that endsthe first section of the book, which opens, Good night, good rest, andrhymes sorrow with come again tomorrow, might have recalled, for those who had seen it, Romeo and Juliet with its repeated goodnights andJuliets

Good night, good night; parting is such sweet sorrowThat I shall say goodnight till it be morrow. ( RJ 2.1.229-230)

The link between the two Rosaline plays and the dark lady sonnets isgenerally recognized. Shakespeares sonnets give no names to the

characters who appear in them, nor do they have a title, like Astrophil and Stella , identifying the mistress and/or her lover. Venus and Adonis mighthave been an alternative title for The Passionate Pilgrim (as Jaggardrecognized when he added the names to the subtitle of his 1612 edition),

but another might have been Berowne and Rosaline .It is possible to construct a good many scenarios to explain the way in

which The Passionate Pilgrim became a tribute to Shakespeares earlyerotic poems and plays. Jaggard may simply have printed a collection thatwas already grouped together in a commonplace book, but even so it is

worth asking how so many sonnets on the Venus and Adonis theme cameto be written. Did writers compete or collaborate on them? Given thatFrancis Meres, a year earlier, had referred to Shakespeares sugaredsonnets circulating among his private friends, it has naturally beenassumed that one of those private friends was careless with the two poemsthat Jaggard printed at the beginning of his volume. But it is equally

possible that Shakespeare himself was the source, using this opportunity totest the waters before deciding whether to publish the mainly misogynistic

4 The sonnet was by no means limited to fourteen lines in this period: Watsons Hekatompathia consists of 16-line poems, while Robert Tofte uses a 12-line form,made up of two Venus and Adonis stanzas.


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and bawdy poems that constitute 126-152 of the 1609 edition. In that case,Shakespeare himself would have been a collaborator on what however it

happened can surely be called a collaborative volume.

Loves Martyr

There is, of course, no doubt that Loves Martyr (1601) was the work of several hands and that a plan perhaps several plans lay behind it. It wasissued by Edward Blount, a well regarded and respectable literary

publisher, and dedicated to John Salusbury, an esquire of the body toQueen Elizabeth, who received a knighthood at her hands in 1601. Its title

page claims that the main poem, Loves Martyr , is a translation of anItalian poem by Torquato Caeliano. It also draws attention to the truelegend of famous King Arthur, the last of the nine Worthies, which isthe first Essay of a new Brytish Poet, collected out of diuerse AuthenticallRecords. In other words, the book is presented as a combination of translation and original work, with the translation ascribed to RobertChester and the story of King Arthur to a modern British that is, Welsh

poet. Alexander Grosart, the first editor of this volume, established thatthere is no such person as Torquato Caeliano, although poems by both

Torquato Tasso and Livio Celiano appeared, consecutively, in an Italiancollection of 1587. None of them remotely resemble the English poem. Itseems clear that both the story of King Arthur and the story of lovesmartyrdom are by Robert Chester, pretending to be two people. In themain story, a Phoenix who is about to die without an heir is taken toPaphos to meet a forsaken Turtledove; they agree to burn together, and a

pelican, observing, sees a new phoenix rise from their ashes. TheArthurian story is told to the Phoenix by Nature, who accompanies her toPaphos. Just as Shakespeares Venus and Adonis is the absent centre of

The Passionate Pilgrim , Chesters poem is the centre of Loves Martyr , towhich the other poems refer, if sometimes obliquely. Chester presentshimself as a member of a circle with literary interests, mentioning in hisdedication (A3) the advice he has received from the directions of some of my best-minded friends and later explaining that he inserted the historyof King Arthur after being intreated by some of my honourable-mindedFriends (34).

The only part of Chesters book in which most readers are interestednow is its final section, which has its own title page:

Hereafter follow Diverse Poeticall Essaies on the former Subiect; viz: theTurtle and Phoenix. Done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers,


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with their names subscribed to their particular workes: neuer before extant.And (now first) consecrated by them all generally, to the loue and merite of the true-noble Knight, Sir John Salisburie. 5

The title page to the entire volume, having listed the contents of Chesters poem, adds,

To these are added some new compositions, of seuerall moderne Writerswhose names are subscribed to their seuerall workes, vpon the first subiect:viz. the Phoenix and Turtle .

The vagueness of this title may mean that the contributions arrived after

the main part of the volume had been set in type. The stress on the fact thatthese poems are new, and that the names of the authors will follow their poems, may be Edward Blounts way of showing that he was a respectable publisher. Maybe, following the episode of The Passionate Pilgrim , hewas determined not to be accused of misleading readers about the contentsof his volume. Or maybe, for the same reason, the best and chiefestwriters had insisted on separate billing.

These writers are, in order, someone who calls himself Ignoto, WilliamShakespeare, John Marston, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson. The first

poem in this section is, however, ascribed to a Vatum Chorus , a Chorus of Bards. After invoking Apollo and the muses, the anonymous author, pretending to be multiple, declares that the writers want to gratulate | Anhonorable friend , presumably Salusbury, not out of Mercenarie hope,

But a true Zeale, borne in our spirites,Responsible to your high Merites

Like commendatory poems, their offerings are focused on the subjectmatter of the poem, or, at least, on its basic idea about the immolation of a

phoenix and turtle dove (the dramatists mostly ignore the lengthydigressions). On the other hand, they appear at the end rather than the frontof the volume, and praise the books dedicatee, Salusbury, rather than itsauthor, Chester.

I do not propose here to offer a reading of Shakespeares notoriouslydifficult poem, which has been variously interpreted as alluding to the

5 Curiously, this is virtually a translation of the title of the Italian collection inwhich the Tasso and Celiano poems appeared: Rime di Diversi Celebri Poeti dell et nostra (rhymes of several [divers] celebrated poets of our age). See Grosartsedition of Chester (1878).


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personal history of Sir John Salusbury, to the relationship of Elizabeth andEssex, and to various permutations of these two theories. Instead, I should

like to look at it in the contexts both of collaboration and of commendatory poem. It has sometimes been suggested that Shakespearehad very little interest either in Salusbury or in Loves Martyr, since his

poem says that the dead birds left no posterity and makes no mentionof their rebirth in a new phoenix. This, however, is to assumeShakespeares ignorance not only of the contents of Chesters poem, but of the phoenix myth, which is omnipresent in the period. Chester himself hadalready treated the myth even more radically by making the new phoenixthe offspring of two parents rather than exploiting the paradox that unique

perfection can be succeeded by another, equally unique, perfection. It isalso surprising that the Turtle Dove should be male and the Phoenixfemale something on which one of the other writers will comment.Another odd feature of the poem is that its full title is Loves Martyr, or,

Rosalins Complaint , but the poem never uses the name Rosalin.As William Matchett has noted, in the only full-length study of the

poem, several features of the appendix suggest careful planning, either because the authors agreed on the shape their contribution should take or because one of the poets, probably Jonson or Marston, played the role of aplotter (Matchett 1965: 77). 6 The different sections have learned-sounding titles Invocatio, Threnos, Epicidium, Perfectioni Hymnus

Peristeros, Praeludium, Epos and Ode that suggest acommon origin. Shakespeares poem, calling a group of mourners together for a ceremony, follows one called The Burning and the opening line of Marstons poem, O, twas a moving epicidium! seems to comment onthe way that ceremony was expressed in Shakespeares immediately

preceding one. When Marston goes on to deny that so much beauty andvirtue could perish, he is not trying to rescue Shakespeare from anembarrassing mistake; rather, he is dramatizing the moment when, after death and mourning, the phoenix is reborn. Both dramatists, notsurprisingly, wrote poems that live in an imagined present. The movement

6 Matchett has made some valuable contributions to the study of this poem, for instance in noting that Ignotos line One Phoenix borne, another Phoenix burnerecurs in a poem by H.G. [possibly Henry Goodyere] published in 1618 in TheMirrour of Maiestie , a poem in honor of Queen Anne (181). H.G. actually did aPhoenix emblem (pictured in the book) for the queen (182). Maurice Evans,however, in his edition of The Narrative Poems (Penguin, 1989), describesIgnotos poem as based on a popular Elizabethan emblem (58). Evans suggestedthat Ignoto might be John Donne, who at this period was involved in his courtshipand marriage of Ann More.


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from tragedy to joy also explains the surprisingly jocular tone and rhythmof Jonsons The Phoenix Analysde:

Splendor! O more than mortall,For other formes come short allOf her illustrate brightnesse. (Chester 1878: 186)

At one time, scholars wondered why Shakespeare and his fellowdramatists should have felt it worth their while to write poems for anobscure Welsh squire and his still more obscure poet. More recently, it has

become clear that Salusbury was in fact rather important (see, in particular, Honigmann (1998), chapter 9 (99-113), and Bland (2000)).Through his mother, he was descended from Henry VII; his wife was anillegitimate but acknowledged daughter of the Earl of Derby. A familycommonplace book shows that Salusbury and a number of his relativeswrote poetry themselves, much of it in the form of acrostics or posies.Much of the poetry written in the book is in Welsh, and one of the Welsh

poets was William Cynwal, the traditional bard who took part in theflyting of the 1580s; he also produced an elaborate illustrated genealogy of Salusburys mother. It had taken Salusbury considerable time to rebuildhis familys reputation after the Babington plot of 1586, for which his

brother was executed, but in 1595 he had invited a number of Welsh bardsto celebrate his restoration of his familys honour and fortunes. Theexistence of this cooperative poetic circle and Salusburys reputation for generosity as a patron no doubt had something to do with the willingnessof Shakespeare and other dramatists to add their own poems to the Chester volume. 7

It may already have been a collaborative volume. Chesters poem isfollowed by Cantoes Alphabet-wise to faire Phoenix made by the PaphianDoue. These are an ingenious tour de force : a stanza in which each lines

first word begins with a, followed by one where each begins with b,and so on (in the latter part of the alphabet, the author ran out of rhymewords beginning with the right letter and had to compromise). Followingthese acrostic Cantos comes a sequence of Cantos Verbally Written like acrostics, but with words instead of letters: the first word of each lineof a longer poem becomes a short posy, like My Phoenix rare, is al mycare and I haue no loue, but you my Doue. 8 Chester placed his name at

7 Burrow suggests that, in the aftermath of Essexs execution, poets may have beenin search of another patron (Burrow 2002: 88-9).8 Carleton Brown notes that these cantoes borrow from existing collections of

posies, such as those in Harleian MS 6910. See Brown (1914: lv).


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the end of this section, but, since the poem identifies Salusbury with theTurtle Dove, it is likely that the Cantos would have been understood by

contemporaries as the voice of Salusbury himself. The familycommonplace book, preserved in the Library of Christ Church College,Oxford, shows that his household in Wales went in for such verbal gamesas posies and acrostics spelling out the names of female relatives (ChristChurch MS 184; Brown 1914: xxxiii). The fact that the same posy is the

basis of several different poems among the cantos alphabet-wiseattributed to the dove in Loves Martyr suggests that these may be theresult of a poetic competition or game, 9 probably confined to Salusburysimmediate circle of family and friends, and one in which mutual

admiration rather than antagonism was the dominant mode. Thecollaborative mode of the appendix might well have seemed appropriate tothe knighthood of an amateur poet who enjoyed social poetry.Unfortunately, the spirit of collaboration does not seem to have lasted.Only a year later, Dekker and Marston collaborated on Satiromastix ,incorporating a fierce response to Jonsons attacks on them in Poetaster .Among many other things, they ridiculed Jonson, as he had ridiculedothers, for being paid to write acrostics and poesies for rings, or hand-kerchers, or kniues ( Satiromastix 5.2.272). Since the play was performed

by the Lord Chamberlains men, Shakespeare, whose dirge had lamentedthe loss of so true a twain and single natures double name, now

presided over a collaborative attack both on Jonsons egotism and on hiscareer as a social poet. He and Marston probably learned about the side of Jonsons career that he was now attacking through their mutual connectionwith Salusbury and their brief experience of collaboration on LovesMartyr .

Bibliography

Bland, Mark (2000). As far from all reuolt: Sir John Salusbury, ChristChurch MS 184 and Ben Jonsons First Ode. English Manuscript Studies 8 (2000): 43-78.

Brown, Carleton, ed. (1914). Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester . Early English Text Society. London: Kegan Paul and OxfordUniversity Press, 1914.

9 For instance, I had rather loue though in vaine that face, | Then haue of any other grace, which is used in nos. 7, 9, and 11 of the sequence.


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Burrow, Colin, ed. (2002). William Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnetsand Poems . The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2002.Champion, Pierre (1933). Franois Villon, sa vie et son temps . 2 vols.Paris: Honor Champion, 1933.

Chandler, Wayne A. (2003). Commendatory Verse and Authorship in the English Renaissance . Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The EdwinMellen Press, 2003.

Chandler, Wayne A., ed. (2005). An Anthology of Commendatory Verse from the English Renaissance . Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: TheEdwin Mellen Press, 2005.

Chester, Robert (1878 [1601]). Robert Chesters Loves Martyr, or, Rosalins Complaint (1601). Ed. Alexander B. Grosart. NewShakspere Society 19. N. Trbner & Co., 57, 59, Ludgate Hill,London, 1878.

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