The Phoenix and Turtle, second edition

This is the only surviving copy of The Anuals of great Brittaine, a 1611 reissue of Robert Chester’s 1601 Loves Martyr, which included the Shakespeare poem now known as “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” The Anuals is made up of sheets from the 1601 edition but lacks the dedicatory epistle “To the Honorable, and (of me before all other) honored Knight, Sir Iohn Salisburie”; “The Authors request to the Phoenix”; and the verses “To the kind Reader.” Furthermore, the original title page has been removed and replaced with one that identifies a new publisher, Mathew Lownes, who seems to have taken over Edward Blount’s rights to the book.

That there were unsold copies of the 1601 edition available to be altered and reissued suggests that it had not been very popular. However, it is not clear why Lownes would have thought the book would fare better ten years later. The removal of the preliminaries might have made it seem less obviously directed to Salisbury, and the new title page highlights the antiquarian and chorographical themes of Chester’s poem rather than its legendary and allegorical dimensions, which may have seemed less timely eight years after Elizabeth’s death. Curiously, it does not mention the “new compositions, of seuerall modern Writers,” although the second title page, which introduces the “Diverse Poeticall Essaies” (including Shakespeare’s) on sig. Z1r, remains unchanged. Again, Shakespeare’s name appears after his poem, which remains un-titled.

It may seem surprising that a publisher seeking to drum up new interest in an old book would not try emphasize Shakespeare’s contribution. However, as Helen Wilcox has pointed out, even the third edition of Titus Andronicus (printed the same year) lacks an attribution on the title page. Even as Shakespeare’s career neared its end, early modern English attitudes toward authorship and attribution did not yet require an author’s name on a book’s title page.