When Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609 a poem called A Lover’s Complaint was included by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, who was notorious for several irregular publications. Many scholars have doubted its authenticity, but recent editions of the Sonnets have accepted it as Shakespeare’s work. Now Brian Vickers, in the first full study of the poem, shows it to be un-Shakespearian both in its language and in its attitude to women. It is awkwardly constructed and uses archaic Spenserian diction, including many unusual words that never occur in Shakespeare. It frequently repeats stock phrases and rhymes, distorts normal word order far more often and more clumsily than Shakespeare did, while its attitude to female frailty is moralizing and misogynistic. By close analysis and comparison, Professor Vickers attributes the poem to John Davies of Hereford (1565–1618), a famous calligrapher and writing master who was also a prolific poet. This book will redefine the Shakespeare canon.
BRIAN VICKERS is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, London University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications on Shakespeare include ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ (Cambridge, 2002); Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (2002); Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (1993); and William Shakespeare: the Critical Heritage, 1623–1801 (1974–1981), a six-volume collection of early Shakespeare criticism. Professor Vickers is also a specialist in rhetoric and stylistics, his publications including Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, 1968), Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (1970, 1989), and In Defence of Rhetoric (1988).
BRIAN VICKERS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Brian Vickers 2007
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| List of illustrations | page viii | ||
| Acknowledgements | ix | ||
| List of abbreviations | x | ||
| Introduction | 1 | ||
| 1 | Thomas Thorpe and the 1609 Sonnets | 7 | |
| PART I | BACKGROUND | ||
| 2 | John Davies of Hereford: a life of writing | 15 | |
| 3 | A Lover’s Complaint and Spenserian pastoral | 47 | |
| 4 | ‘Poore women’s faults’: narration and judgement in the ‘Female Complaint’ | 76 | |
| PART II | FOREGROUND | ||
| 5 | A poem anatomized: the rival claims | 121 | |
| 6 | A Lover’s Complaint in Davies’s canon | 204 | |
| Appendix 1 The text of A Lover’s Complaint | 267 | ||
| Appendix 2 John Davies, Uncollected Poems | 278 | ||
| Notes | 282 | ||
| Bibliography | 307 | ||
| Index | 325 |
| Plate 1 | Engraved frontispiece to John Davies of Hereford, The Writing Schoolmaster (1636). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics, Cambridge University Library |
14 | |
| Plate 2 | Final page of the Penshurst manuscript of the Sidney Psalms, with the autograph subscription by John Davies of Hereford. Reproduced by permission of the Viscount De L’Isle |
18 | |
| Plate 3 | John Davies of Hereford, autograph poem ‘A dedicatorie and consolatorie Epistle To the right honorable Henry Earle of Northumberland’, in the British Library copy (G. 11190) of Davies, Humours Heav’n on Earth (1612). Reproduced by permission of the British Library |
21 |
In writing this book I have incurred many debts. I should like to thank Alan Jenkins and Mick Imlah of the Times Literary Supplement, who encouraged me to submit a brief summary of my argument for their pages (5 December 2003). At ProQuest Matthew Kibble helped solve several problems. MacDonald Jackson has been, as ever, generous in sharing his knowledge. Margrit Soland made several thoughtful contributions. Richard McCabe and Hugh Craig kindly read earlier versions of chapters 3 and 5, respectively. Jonathan Hope read the whole typescript and once again (as with ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare) gave acute advice on re-organizing its structure and argument, while an anonymous reader for the publisher also made helpful suggestions. None of these is responsible for any blemishes that remain. At Cambridge University Press my editor, Sarah Stanton, has been patient and supportive; Rebecca Jones helped see the book into print, while Caroline Drake has been a keen-eyed copy-editor. I thank Dr Marcus Dahl for generating the index, and Henry Woudhuysen for last minute suggestions. The earlier versions were typed by Kathy Hahn, my indefatigable assistant while I was teaching at the ETH, Zürich. The final versions have been prepared by my wife, and have also benefited from her sometimes acerbic comments. The book is dedicated to our daughter.
WORKS BY JOHN DAVIES
For a detailed list of poem titles within the main collections see the Bibliography on pp. 307–24.
| BV | Bien Venu (1606) |
| CP | ‘Commendatory Poems’, in Grosart 1878, vol. II (separately paginated) |
| EC | ‘An Eclogue between yong Willy the singer of his native Pastorals, and old Wernocke his friend’ (1614) |
| HE | Humours Heav’n on Earth (1609) |
| HR | The Holy Roode (1609) |
| MI | Microcosmos (1603) |
| MM | Mirum in Modum (1602) |
| MS | The Muse’s Sacrifice (1612) |
| MT | The Muses Teares (1613) |
| SF | The Scourge of Folly (1611) |
| SH | A Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas Overburie’s Wife, now a Matchlesse Widow (1616) |
| ST | Summa Totalis (1607) |
| UP | Uncollected poems (see Appendix 2) |
| WB | Wits Bedlam (1617) |
| WP | Wittes Pilgrimage (1605?) |
| LC | A Lover’s Complaint |
| LION | Literature Online, a web resource: ProQuest UK http:/ /lion.chadwyck.co.uk |
| RL | Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece |
| VA | Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis |
| Barber 1976 | Charles Barber, Early Modern English (London, 1976) |
| Barber 1997 | Charles Barber, Early Modern English, revised edn (Edinburgh, 1997) |
| Burrow 2002 | The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford, 2002) |
| Duncan-Jones 1997 | The Arden Shakespeare, third series. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London, 1997) |
| Grosart 1878 | The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. The Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1878; facs. edn, Hildesheim, 1968) |
| Jackson 1965 | MacDonald P. Jackson, Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: Its Date and Authenticity (Auckland, New Zealand, 1965) |
| Jackson 2004 | MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘“A Lover’s Complaint” Revisited’, Shakespeare Studies, 32 (2004): 267–94 |
| Kerrigan 1986 | New Penguin Shakespeare. ‘The Sonnets’ and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth, 1986) |
| Mackail 1912 | J. W. Mackail, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, Essays and Studies, 3 (1912): 51–70. |
| Muir 1973 | Kenneth Muir, ‘“A Lover’s Complaint”: A Reconsideration’, in Muir, Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies (London, 1973), pp. 204–19 |
| Murphy 1940 | Charles Driscoll Murphy, ‘John Davies of Hereford’, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1940 |
| Nevalainen 1999 | Terttu Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics’, in Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III, pp. 332–458 (Cambridge, 1999) |
| Partridge 1976 | A. C. Partridge, A Substantive Grammar of Shakespeare’s Nondramatic texts (Charlottesville, VA, 1976) |
| Roe 1992 | The New Cambridge Shakespeare. The Poems, ed. John Roe (Cambridge, 1992) |
| Rollins 1938 | A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Philadelphia, 1938) |
| STC | A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, second edition, ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London, 1976–91) |
| Vickers 1999 | Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1999) |