The Passionate Pilgrim, second edition

William Jaggard published The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599 in two separate octavo editions. While the first edition exists only as a fragment without a title page, the second edition, shown here, carries the attribution “By W. Shakespeare.” on its title page. Therefore, although Shakespeare probably wrote just five of its poems, he is credited as the author of the whole work. This collection of twenty poems also includes a second title page between the fourteenth and fifteenth poem announcing “SONNETS To sundry notes of Musicke,” although none of the poems that follows is a sonnet.

Like the first edition, the volume shown here includes Shakespeare’s Sonnets 138 and 144 and  three versions of poems from Love’s Labour’s Lost. Additionally, there are four poems that explicitly evoke Venus and Adonis, the story at the time most famous in Shakespeare’s poem first printed 1593. The collection also includes lyrics by Richard Barnfield, Thomas Deloney and Christopher Marlowe, as well as several for which no persuasive attribution has been found.

The frontloading of genuine Shakespeare poems and poems concerning Venus and Adonis at the start of the volume suggests that Jaggard was trying to sell something that would look authentically Shakespearean to the casual browser, but was padded out towards the end with more incongruous poems. Nonetheless, the book has value both as an example of the kinds of poetic miscellany (manuscript and print) in which early readers may have encountered Shakespeare’s poems, and as containing unique variants on Shakespeare poems found elsewhere.

The second edition is extremely rare and only survives in only two complete copies. The one shown here is part of the Huntington Library collection. Most of the poems are printed on recto only, though the last two poems in the second edition run onto verso as well, presumably in order to save paper (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen 2007, 489-94).