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John Stow's Editions of Skelton's
Workes and of
Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems
by
William Ringler
John Stow, best known as an Elizabethan historian, author of The Annales of England, A Survay of London, and principal editor of the second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, admitted himself that his earlier interests had been poetry and divinity rather than history.[1] He remained throughout his life a diligent collector of early poetical texts, and many of the manuscripts containing texts of Chaucer, Lydgate, and others passed through his hands;[2] but so far his only known published works dealing with poetry are his edition of Chaucer in 1561 and the notes he contributed to Speght's edition of Chaucer in 1598. In view of his avowed interest in, and extensive manuscript collections of, early poetry, I believe it highly probable that he edited at least two other volumes of verse.
The first of these is Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate. Nowe collected and newly published. ANNO 1568. Imprinted at London . . . by Thomas Marshe (STC 22608). The table of contents (* 4v) is
The Workes contains thirty-two items assigned to Skelton. The editor had gathered all the material (nineteen poems and a fragment) from seven earlier printed volumes of Skelton's poetry, printed twelve other poems for the first time, and made one wrong attribution.[4] The volume was reprinted in 1746 and 1810, and remained the standard edition of Skelton until Alexander Dyce published his Poetical Works in 1843. Dyce reprinted the entire contents of the 1568 volume, and added seven poems from three early prints that I. S. had overlooked; but beyond that he could find only three short items in manuscript that are certainly Skelton's.[5] I. S. was even more reliable in establishing the canon of Skelton's writing than was Dyce; for only one of his thirty-two items was wrongly attributed, while Dyce admitted six poems which are either doubtfully or wrongly attributed.[6] Since Dyce's time A Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge has been reprinted; and four fragments, all wrongly or doubtfully attributed, have been proposed
The second volume probably edited by John Stow is Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems of great Antiquitie Reserued long in the Studie of a Northfolke Gentleman. And now first published By I. S. . . . Imprinted at London [by Robert Robinson] for R[obert]. D[exter]. 1597 (STC 21499). This has a one-line dedication, "To the worthiest Poet Maister Ed. Spenser," and prints for the first time three fifteenth-century poems. The first, "The Statelie Tragedie of Guistard and Sismond in two Bookes," a versification of Boccaccio's Decameron, IV, i, probably made about 1485, is also preserved in an early sixteenth-century manuscript; the second, "The Northren Mothers Blessing, Written nine yeares before the death of G. Chaucer" (probably too early a date), a version of "How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter," is also preserved in five manuscripts; and the third, "The Way to Thrift," a moralizing poem in nine stanzas, is also preserved in three manuscripts.[8] Certaine Worthye Manuscript Poems contains just the kind of early verse that especially interested Stow, and the dedication to Spenser is evidently a salute from one student of British antiquities and earlier English poets to another.[9] The balance of probabilities favors the assumption that the editor "I.S." was John Stow.
Notes
Bodleian Fairfax 16 (3896); British Museum Additional 29729, Harley 367, 542, and 2251; Lambeth 306; and many others. We need a checklist of the literary manuscripts that were in Stow's possession, with an analysis of his marginalia and of the quotations from and comments on poets in his historical writings. If this were done, Stow might appear as the most important preserver and cataloguer of early poetry before Thomas Warton. René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (1941), discusses Leland, Bale and others, but omits Stow.
Z6-8v; see Annales (1615, p. 488). Stow may have found Cornysshe's poem in what is now Brit. Mus. MS Royal 18 D II (5), which also contains Skelton's Northumberland elegy that was first printed in the 1568 Workes.
The volumes reprinted are: A Goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell (STC 22610) A-D6v and X8r-v; The Bowge of Court (22597) D6v-F1v; Certayne Bokes (22598-600) G4-L4; Why Come ye nat to Courte (22615-617b), Colyn Cloute (22601-603b), Phyllyp Sparowe (22594-596b), and Agaynste a Comely Coystrowne (22611) L4-V8v. The poems not hitherto printed are: "The duke of Albany" F2-G3v; "Epitaphes of two knaues of Dise," "Lamentation for Norwiche," "Against ye Scottes," "Praise of ye palmtre," "Bedel quondam Belial," "The dolorus death of . . . Northumberlande," "Epitaphium Margarete countisse de Derbi," "Epita. Hen. septi.," "Eulogium pro suorum temporum," X8v-Z5v; "Against venemous tongues," and "Of Calliope," Aal-3v. "Of thre fooles," X1-8, was shown by F. Brie (Englische Studien, XXXVII [1907], 18-21) to be an extract from H. Watson's The Shyppe of Fooles (STC 3547).
Dyce reprinted Dyuers Balettys and Dyties (STC 22604), Magnyfycence (22607), and A Replycacion (22609); he omitted A Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge (22593), an earlier version of "Against the Scottes," which was first reprinted by John Ashton in 1882. Dyce printed from manuscripts "The Rose both White and Rede" (I, ix-xi), "Agenst M. Garnesche" (I, 116-131), and the presentation verses beginning "I, liber, et propera" (I, 147).
In the Garlande Skelton said he had written poems on "Mannerly Margery" (printed by Dyce, I, 28-29), "Woffully araid" (I, 141-143), and "Vexilla regis" (I, 144-146); but we cannot be certain that the texts of the surviving songs, the first two set to music by William Cornysshe and John Browne (d.1498), are Skelton's—"Vexilla regis" is definitely not his (Brie, op. cit., pp. 22-26; E. B. Reed, Christmas Carols [1932], p. 71). The attributions of "The Maner of the World Now a Dayes" (I, 148-154), "Salve plus decies" (I, 177—printed in the 1568 Workes but not claimed as Skelton's), and "Hoyda joly rutterkyn" (II, 245-246) have no acceptable evidence to recommend them.
"Petevelly Constraynd am y," proposed by W. Birch, Athenaeum (29 Nov. 1873), p. 697; rejected by Brie, op. cit., pp. 21-22—both these scholars were unaware that an earlier and more complete text (beginning "Petyously constraynyd am I"), with music by Doctor Robert Cowper, is in Brit. Mus. MS Royal Appendix 58, ff.17v-19; it was published by E. Flügel, Anglia, XII (1889), 266-267, who did not recognize it as a separate piece and obscured its identity by printing it in long lines as part of another song. "Masteres anne" and "How darest thow swere," proposed by Brie, op. cit., pp. 29-32; rejected by L. J. Lloyd, RES, V (1929), 302-306. "Syth ye went," a fragment of a morality play with characters Good Order, Old Christmas, and Prayer, proposed by G. L. Frost and R. Nash, SP, XLI (1944), 483-491; doubtful because the only basis of attribution is Bale's unsupported assertion that Skelton wrote a comedy De bono ordine.
For a full bibliography of each poem see Carleton Brown and Rossell H. Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (1943), Nos. 3258, 671, and 1982. The original belonging to the Norfolk gentleman has disappeared, for none of the surviving manuscripts could have been the source of the print, which is therefore an independent substantive text. L. R. Zocca, Elizabethan Narrative Poetry (1950), pp. 143-145, is in error in ascribing "Guistard and Sismond" to the second quarter of the sixteenth century—see H. G. Wright's thorough study of all the early English versions, EETSos, CCV (1937), xxxvi.
In his Annales (1615, p. 811), Stow listed Spenser in his roll of honor of "our moderne, and present excellent Poets"; just as in the same place he enrolled Skelton, along with Chaucer and Lydgate, among "the chiefe of our auncient Poets . . . by whose singuler paines, and industry, our natiue language, hath from time to time, been much refined: and at this time directly by them, brought to great perfection."
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