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I
Commendatory poems, in which friends and well-wishers testify to the merits of favored authors, are a familiar feature of the preliminary leaves of English books during the two centuries that span the Renaissance. Seldom of intrinsic value as poetry, these verses are commonly searched for evidence on conditions of publication or for biographical clues on the contributor or his subject. They are not without interest for the study of Renaissance social conditions and literary taste. Occasionally someone ventures to appraise them as documents of literary criticism, although it is conceded that few approach the serious interest of the most famous example, Ben Jonson's tribute to Shakespeare before the First Folio. This mass of material is now accessible through the present writer's Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641.[1] The card file for that nominal index was shuffled into chronological order to permit the systematic survey here offered as a contribution to bibliography and literary history.
Whereas the custom of dedicating books had a continuous tradition from antiquity, commendatory verses are an innovation of the Renaissance humanists. It is tempting to suppose that the notion came to them as they collected classical testimonia for their editions of Latin and Greek authors. England imitated Continental publishers in the
The magnitude of this bibliographical phenomenon and the course of its growth may be indicated in a table that eliminates verses that can be attributed to the authors or to the printers, booksellers, and editors with a professional interest in advertising the books. This table records only the earliest known appearance in print, and ignores all reprints or incorporations into larger collections. The two columns show for each period the number of books with commendatory verses and the total of poems (the number in individual books varies widely).[6] A middle column showing the number of verse-writers has been omitted as unreliable, since the same versifier may contribute to several books over a decade,[7] and the only way to handle anonymous verses
Years | Books | Poems |
1478-1520 | 22 | 32 |
1521-1533 | 29 | 47 |
1534-1539 | 0 | 0 |
1540-1560 | 44 | 78 |
1561-1570 | 70 | 166 |
1571-1580 | 132 | 466 |
1581-1590 | 133 | 405 |
1591-1600 | 151 | 533 |
1601-1610 | 162 | 499 |
1611-1620 | 229 | 828 |
1621-1630 | 207 | 594 |
1631-1640 | 293 | 1100 |
Totals | 1472 | 4748 |
The table shows that the commendatory vogue, fitful in earlier years, caught on among the humanists in the 1520's. The complete absence of puffs during the Reformation years 1534-1539 is fresh evidence of the cultural set-back in that troubled period. Thereafter the practice resumed and grew steadily; one judges that it more than kept pace with the increasing volume of publication. There were notable spurts during the 1570's and in the second and fourth decades of the next century (the years 1568, 1578, 1599, and 1611 were outstanding). Sporadic variations included lean years in 1582, 1593, and 1601 and the plague year 1625-26 (yet the plague years 1603 and 1635 saw verses flourish). The trend was constantly upward, culminating in a record 178 poems in 1640, the final year of my statistics. My impression is that the vogue reached its peak about 1650, a peak exemplified by the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 and the Works of William Cartwright in 1651. Indeed, the fifty-five poems before Cartwright's posthumous book occupy 107 pages, more than a sixth of the thick volume; one ruefully concedes that Prof. G. Blakemore Evans had some reason to exclude the lot of them from his edition of Cartwright.[8] The Neoclassical spirit of the Restoration had a soothing effect on the commendatory itch. By about 1700 the sophisticated literary world
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