Book Description

Excerpt from Englands Parnassus Watson is alleged to have written three of the poems, but they do not strike me as being his. In the same year, 1593, we find that the sequence of sonnets entitled The Teares of F ancie is credited to Watson, who was then dead, but research seems to show that they belong rather to Nicholas Breton. Other contributors named or recognized are Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Oxford, George Peele, Sir William Harbert, Matthew Roydon, and a 'w. S who is thought to have been the William Smith who wrote Chloris. The eighth and last anthology to which I need refer is England's Helicon, first printed in 1600, and again in 1614 with additions. This work was edited by the person who signs the prefatory sonnet, A. But who he was is not known. His sonnet, however, is a valuable document, for he says in plain words that England's Helicon is Boden ham's work, that the latter also collected the material used in Wits Commonwealth, Wits Theater, and Belvedere, and that his own pains in preparing it for the press were not great The same A. B.' signs a commendatory sonnet to Belvedere, which was edited for Bodenham by A[nthony] M[unday], who likewise addresses Bodenham in a sonnet in which he declares in language which, it seems to me, cannot be misunderstood, that the material in the work was gathered by Bodenham - who spent many years in collecting it. The epistle fronting Wits Commonwealth, n. D., from Nicholas Ling, the editor, to John Bodenham, also tells us that the latter had seriously begun the work long since and that he had spent much earnest travaile therein Bodenham, otherwise unknown to us, seems to have been a wealthy man, who made a hobby of collecting sentences from the writings of all sorts and conditions of men, and of ranging them, after alteration, under appro priate headings. The results of his many years of collecting are to be found in the four books credited to him by the editor of England 's Helicon, the part played by the respectiveeditors being mainly that of supervision and preparation for the printing, and, most likely, of additions suggested by their own reading or of a desire to do honour to friends of their own whom Bodenham had not recognized in an open way. In the case of England's Helicon it is difficult to explain the presence in that volume of the twenty five poems from Bartholomew Young's translation of the Diana of Montemayor on any other ground than that of personal friendship between the editor and Young, for the merits of the latter, as a poet, are much below the level of many of his contemporaries, whose verse is ignored. Besides, not a single quotation from Young's book is to be found in any other work with which Bodenham was concerned nor does the latter mention his name in any of his tables of authors' names whose works he professed to have laid under contribution. E ngland's Helicon is incomparably the choicest collection of miscellaneous poetry in our language printed up to 1600, and Young's indifferent verse is quite out of place in it. Indeed, so much is this the case that Mr. Bullen had serious thoughts at one time of ousting Young's poems from his masterly edition of England's Helicon, and was only deterred from doing so because their omission would have been unscholarly. Bodenham, with all his faults, seems to have had real gifts of taste and discernment in judging what was good in others, and there fore I cannot help thinking that he was not responsible for the quotations from Young, but that the latter was favoured by A. B.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com