I
The Court of Venus, a poetic miscellany which
antedates
Tottel by nearly if not quite two decades, is known today in three editions,
of each of which only a single, fragmentary copy is extant. Strong
probability that there were others is evidenced by the condition and rarity
of these remains, attesting to the book's popularity, and by contemporary
references.[3] Fraser describes and
dates the extant fragments as follows:
Bodleian Library, Douce.g.3 (B): lacking title page, but with running
title The court of Venus for portion containing lyrics; printed
by Thomas Gybson between 1537 (or November 1536 at earliest) and 1539.
8, 15 leaves, E-F8 (lacking F8).
University of Texas Library, Miriam L. Stark Collection (S): lacking
title page, but with running title A Boke of Balettes; but may
well have had a title page with The Court of Venus; printed
by
William Copland between 1547 and 1549. 8, 2 leaves,
no signatures.
Bound as end papers in a 1551 copy of More's Utopia.
Folger Shakespeare Library (F): title page The Courte of
Venus; printed by Thomas Marshe between 1561 and 1564.
8,
8 leaves, A8.
"At least two editions of the Court have disappeared
completely," Fraser believes. "There was probably an edition in 1549; there
must have been another edition later than Marshe's 1561-1564 issue, to
account for the continuing attacks on the Court. Presumably
these editions were read to pieces, as was the first edition of Songs
and Sonnets, only one copy of which survives" (p. 76).
That an edition or more appeared later than F seems a reasonable
conjecture, but the idea of one between S and F, especially in 1549,
requires
closer examination. A new appearance of the
Court sometime
between S and F is hypothesized by Fraser for these reasons: (1) The
Court is attacked by name in the Prologue to North's
Dial
of Princes, first published in 1557,
[4] and in the
Works of
Thomas
Becon, dated 1564. But as Becon's
Works were entered in
1560, Fraser concludes that his attack does not refer to F, which cannot
have appeared before 1561. "Obviously, both Becon and North were
attacking another edition, perhaps one that was contemporaneous with their
writings and is now lost" (p. 65). (2) In an attack on vicious literature in
his
Certayn chapters takē out of the Prouerbes (1550),
John
Hall four times singles out for especial opprobrium "the court of Venus."
It is not "likely that Hall was looking back more than a decade" to B, and
we must remember that S, which might have appeared as late as 1549, was
called (in the fragment we have)
A Boke
of Balettes (pp. 56-57, 22-24). (3) Although "Marshe was too
slovenly a printer" to seek out improved texts in manuscript, F is related
to S but textually superior to it — closer, says Fraser, to certain
known
manuscript evidence for Wyatt's text. This dilemma is solved if we posit
an intermediate edition which Marshe, true to his practice, merely copied.
Even the advertisement that appears on Marshe's title page may be a
verbatim reprint from this lost edition: "Newly and diligently corrected with
many proper Ballades newly amended, and also added thervnto which haue
not before bene imprinted" (pp. 44-45).
To satisfy these three needs, two distinct hypothetical editions are
offered us. In 1557 Henry Sutton bought a license "to prynte this booke
Called the Couurte of VENUS" (Stationers' Register, July
19).
If he printed it (which does not necessarily follow) and did so about that
time, his edition might answer the first and third requirements, but leaves
unexplained John Hall's attack in 1550 on a recent (it is argued) book
entitled The Court of Venus. Fraser mentions the possibility
of
Sutton's edition (pp. 11, 45) but does not see fit to include it in his
summary of editions, as quoted above. Instead, he proposes a lost edition
of 1549 — close on the heels of S. This would meet the second and
third
requirements but would be less helpful on the first. Professor R. H. Griffith
(TLS, September 4, 1930, p. 700) had suggested that perhaps
Sutton printed an edition of the Court before 1557 and was
only
led to register it "to protect his copyright,"
threatened by the publication of some of the same poems by Tottel early in
June. Taking up this hint, Fraser considers the possible identity of the 1549
edition he believes necessary and the edition to which the 1557 entry points;
but as Sutton is not known to have printed till 1552, he rejects that
possibility (pp. 23-24).
Let us now examine the arguments for a lost 1549 edition in the light
of the three reasons advanced by Fraser.
First, is it necessary to postulate such an edition to account for the
attacks by North and Becon? North's remark in 1557 is best taken as a
response to a fresh
Court of Venus — the presumptive
edition
registered by Sutton in that year. If Sutton registered but did not publish a
Court, it is conceivable that North might have been referring
to
one published in 1549, but S fills that bill nicely. The fact that S does not
call itself
The Court of Venus is not significant enough to
support a conjectural edition; "it is not at all unlikely," says Fraser (p. 24),
that Griffith was right in suggesting that the lost title page of S identified
it with the
Court.
The central question regarding Becon's remarks is, When were they
written? We must first eliminate a certain confusion between two books of
similar title, both associated with this reformer. The goldē boke
of christen matrimonye (1542) advertised itself as "newly set forthe
in English by Theodore Basille," which is Becon's pseudonym, but it had
already appeared in December 1541 (STC 4045) under the name of Miles
Coverdale as translator. To encourage the circulation of this tract Becon
wrote a lengthy Preface to it; this Preface is Becon's only contribution to
the 1542 volume. The title-page description, "newly set forthe" by Becon,
echoes Becon's own language at the end of the Preface, and refers merely
to Becon's role in promoting the republication; but it conveys as well a hint
that Becon was the author: and perhaps this small deception is what the
printer intended. Many years later, returned from exile, Becon wrote:
Forasmuch as tyme hath brought her doughter Truth
vnto
light againe in these our dayes, . . . I being not a litle encouraged with
ye blessed felicitie and happye state of thys our age, . . .
haue at
ye instant desire of certaine godly and zelous brethren
reuised and
diligently perused fyrst of al the bokes, which before .xx. yeares past I
published and set forth vnder ye name of Theodore
Bassille:
which bokes I haue . . . now newly recognised and diligently corrected. .
. . Forasmuch as a certayne boke treatyng of Matrimonie compyled by the
great learned and famous Clerke Master Henry Bullinger in
the
Dutch [German] tonge, and translated into our speche by
ye godly &
zelous man Master Myles Couerdale, . . . was also for the
more
redy sale set forth in my name by the hongry printer with my preface, to
make it the more plausible to ye Readers: in place therof
I haue written
a new worke of Matrimonie, wherin I haue at large handled what
soeuer may seme necessarily to appertayne vnto that matter.
This is from the Preface (dated from Canterbury, 17 January 1564) to
Volume I of Becon's collected
Works (sig. hand
C5
v) of
1560-1564. The work whose origin is here described and which appears at
the end of this first volume is
The booke of Matrimony, a
work
of Becon's own which is quite distinct from
The goldē boke of
christen matrimonye. It was in
The booke of
Matrimony
that Becon inveighed against
The Court of Venus. He wrote
of
a "judgement" awaiting the English because they "banishe not, nor burn
not" (as "the Lacedemonians" did), "but rather Print, publishe, setforth and
sell baudy balades and filthy bookes vnto the corruption of the reders, as
the court of Venus, and suche like wanton bookes" (sig.
AAA1
v). The context is a comparison of contemporary
sexual
mores with those of the past as evidenced by ancient laws and customs. The
pages are broken up with many one- or two-line paragraphs citing specific
instances; for some reason this example of the Lacedemonians has evoked
a prolonged comment and a huffing glance at "vs Englishe men."
It is clear that the whole program of revising his earlier works was
"encouraged" by Elizabeth's accession to the throne. Thus Becon's
reference to The Court of Venus was not penned until 1558
at
least, and more likely after his return to England in 1559. Now one cannot
positively rule out the possibility that Becon, at this date, singled out a 1549
book to condemn; but there is no need to posit a lost edition when we have
S. Far more likely, however, is that a more recent edition aroused Becon
to expand one of the items in his list of ancient laws into an attack on
modern morals. As a returned exile he held great hopes for the reign of
Elizabeth: "Tyme hath brought her doughter Truth vnto light
againe. . . ." Especially in this context did a revival of The Court of
Venus pose a threat which he must counter by name.
Second, is it necessary to postulate a lost 1549 edition to account for
the attack on The Court of Venus by John Hall?
Chronologically there is no reason for Hall's attack not to have been aimed
at S, which cannot be dated more narrowly than 1547-1549. Fraser points
out (p. 24) that S may have been known to contemporaries as an edition of
the Court. Yet he continues: "As a result of the work I have
done on this subject, I feel sure that an edition of The Court of
Venus appeared in 1549. I do not think that this edition is
represented
by the Stark fragment." The grounds on which we are to accept these
statements are not clear to me, but what seems to be Fraser's main
argument for them can be shown to be based on wrong facts.
The edition of his Proverbs in which Hall attacks
The Court of Venus by name exists in a unique copy in the
Cambridge University Library, of which the title page bears the date
"M.D.L." The same Library has, also uniquely, another edition, undated
and with the title page missing. Both were printed by Thomas Raynalde.
Fraser refers to this undated edition when he says, "In Hall's 1549 edition
of the Proverbs, there is no mention of The Court of
Venus; the first attack occurs in the edition of 1550" (p. 22). This
difference he explains by positing a new appearance of the
Court between the "1549 edition" and 1550. It is not clear
why
this nova cannot be "represented by the Stark fragment."
Still,
let us examine Hall's two editions more closely. Fraser goes on:
In the 1550 Proverbs the "rhymes of vanitie and songes
of baudry" which John Hall thought characteristic of The Court of
Venus were said by him to have been long used heretofore. But in
Hall's 1549 edition of the Proverbs, on sig.
A4r of the
Epistle Dedicatory, we find the phrase: "rimes of vanitie & songes of
baudrye the which of longe heretofore hath ben vsed." This is the same
language as that employed by Hall a year later, save that The Court
of Venus is not coupled with the phrase in the 1549 edition.
Confusion is introduced here by the implication in the last sentence that in
the 1550 edition
The Court of Venus is mentioned in
connection
with the phrase "rhymes of vanitie and songes of baudry." This is
inaccurate. As Fraser points out, the reference to "rhymes of vanitie"
occurs in both editions. In both cases this phrase is in the Epistle
Dedicatory, which is practically identical in both editions. In neither
Epistle, that of the undated edition nor that of 1550, is
The Court of
Venus mentioned. If it were mentioned in the 1550 epistle but not
the
undated, then we might need to seek the reasons that led Hall to insert it.
But Hall's references to it are not simple insertions. They occur four times
in his "Preface to the Reader," which appears for the first and only time in
the 1550 edition; Fraser (pp. 56-57) quotes from this Preface at length. It
is not clear why Hall printed this Preface in 1550 and never again, but
whatever the reasons they were probably quite
unrelated to the
Court, which is only incidentally
mentioned.
It should be added that all of the above argument is unnecessary apart
from the assumption that the undated edition preceded that dated 1550.
There are some reasons for reversing the order of these editions; it might
prove more to the point to ask why the Preface mentioning the
Court was deleted after 1550 rather than why it was added in
1550. But nothing short of another article could do justice to these matters.
To develop the point here is unnecessary, since it is clear that even if the
designation "1549 edition" be accurate, the lack of a reference to the
Court in that edition does not necessitate a new appearance
of
the Court immediately after it.
Third, is a lost 1549 edition needed to explain the differences between
the texts of S and F? The textual study of the Court is of
intrinsic interest because the Court gives us variants in
several
poems known to be by Sir Thomas Wyatt, together with a number of other
poems which may also be Wyatt's, some found in no other source.
The textual agreements between S and F, and peculiar to them, "are
numerous and striking enough to indicate a reprint," Fraser says. Still,
"there remain significant differences between Folger and Stark" which
"cannot be construed as mere misprints or whimsical emendations. . . .
Significant variations (other than obvious misprints) of Folger from Stark
occur thirteen times" (p. 40). In some cases these variations represent an
improvement on S, for which Fraser accounts by supposing that S was
collated with a manuscript having separate authority. He argues (p. 44),
with justification I think, that Marshe would not have troubled to do this
collating or to have it done.
The solution offered is that after Copland had issued S, "another
printer took these poems, collated them with a copy of the Devonshire MS
[Brit. Mus. Add. 17492], and issued an edition of The Court of
Venus in the years between the publication of the Stark and Folger
fragments. When Thomas Marshe came to publish Folger in the sixties, he
simply reprinted
the last edition of the
Court that had appeared" (p. 46). The
Devonshire MS. (D) is specified because Fraser has been able to eliminate
all other known manuscripts of Wyatt's poems. By "a copy of the
Devonshire MS" he means a copy already containing some textual
variations and some additional poems not in D. He supports this conjecture
by two arguments: (a) from a correspondence between the
selection of Wyatt's poems in F and those in D, and (b) from
a correspondence between the
texts of the poems.
(a) Of twelve lyric poems in the seven extant leaves that follow the
title page in F (numbered "Fol. 2" through "fol. 8."), five are in D also or
are related to poems in D. The first is unknown in any manuscript except
D. The poems in F are:[5]
- 103 "My penne take payne" — S (defective), D.
- 66 "My lute awake" — S (defective and incomplete), D, Bl,
E,
T.
- 224 "To whom should I sue."
- 177 "Dysdaine me not" — M (with major variants),
T.
- —— "Fortune what ayleth the" — Bl.[6]
- —— "I may by no meanes surmyse."
- 43 "If fantasy would fauour" — S (incomplete), D, E,
A.
- 225 "During of payne" — Bl.
- —— "Now must I lern to faine."
- 226 "Loue whom you lyst" — S; cf. 151 in D,
Bl.
- 52 "Meruaile no more" — D, E. T.
- 227 "Shal she neuer out of my mynd" (incomplete) — S,
M
(with an extra stanza).
Four poems are common to F and D; another, No. 226, has an analogue in
D. However, all but one of these are in S as well. No. 52, then, is the only
selection whose presence in F seems to require further collation with a D
derivative after S was printed. (No. 52 appears in E and T also, but the F
version is closest to that in D.) But when we remember the paucity of
remains of S ("Fo. 44" and one other), coupled with the fact that every
poem in S is reprinted in F, we realize how little the omission of No. 52
from the S fragment is capable of supporting any conjecture that would
necessitate extra documents. It is just possible that if we had Copland's
edition in its entirety, we would have every poem reprinted by Marshe. We
must consider, however, the claim on the title page of F: "Newly and
diligently corrected with many proper Ballades newly amended, and also
added thervnto which haue not before bene imprinted." We have noted
Fraser's suggestion (p. 44) that "Marshe is probably only puffing his
edition, or literally copying the title of the preceding edition, which may
have been advertised in the same way." Either explanation would seem to
point to the intervention of new manuscript authority after the printing of
S, to account for the advertised emendations and additions. But what if
Marshe, or the printer of the hypothetical lost edition, copied that title page
directly from S? What if the claim on the title
page of F, which seems to be Marshe's claim, was really Copland's? At
this point, we must be satisfied to ask questions. We cannot prove that all
of F had been in S. What we can affirm, however, is that
if
fresh manuscript authority introduced new poems not in S, it was not a lost
manuscript derived from D.
(b) Nor is such a manuscript needed to account for the F
text, as a close examination of the three poems common to
F,
S, and D shows. In the third of these, No. 43, F has a debased text which
is actually farther from D than is the S text. In No. 66 F is closer to D in
one line, and in No. 103 in several lines, but all of these "restorations" can
be explained as emendation, independent of any manuscript, of obvious
faults in S.[7]
Having disposed of the necessity for a D-based manuscript interposing
between S and F, we return to the question of a lost edition during those
years — an edition based on C but "newly . . . corrected . . .
amended,
and also added . . . vnto," and one subsequently copied by Marshe without
alteration. Corrections might have been made with or without manuscript
help; additions would have required a manuscript source, presumably,
though not one based on D. But as we have seen, the advertisement just
quoted does not itself necessitate such an edition, since it may have been S
that was so advertised. However, sometime after S came out and probably
before Marshe entered the picture, someone edited S carefully and changed
the order of the poems. Such alterations as were made did not
require manuscript help.
[8]
Still, the fact that S was emended suggests that the advertisement quoted
refers to something that happened after S. If so, we may well ask about the
additions also advertised. For them another source than S, presumably a
manuscript, is required. I know of no extant source, however, with which
this can be identified.
[9]
To summarize: a lost 1549 edition is not required by North's or
Becon's reference, nor by Hall's unless we can be sure that S went
generally
unrecognized as part of the
Court tradition; nor is it required
as a textual basis for F. A lost edition by Sutton, c. 1557, is not strictly
needed for Becon's reference nor for North's, though it provides a more
credible gloss than does S; it is of no use at all with Hall's 1550 comment;
and it is not strictly needed as a textual basis for F. The textual differences
between S and F are: rearrangement of selections; perhaps the addition of
new selections; and several internal changes, a few of which indicate
intelligent editing, though not necessarily collation, and certainly not
collation with a D derivative. It is only the pressure of our reluctance to
visualize Marshe either collating S or printing from manuscript that makes
us receptive to an intermediate printed version. These are the weights which
we must put into the balance along with Sutton's entry in the Stationers'
Register. It is not likely that everyone will agree on the specific mass of
these quite unsolid
probabilities and ifs. I for one am willing to say that the Stationers'
Register entry of July 19, 1557, represents a real book and that we may
speak with a degree of confidence of four editions issued by four different
printers in four different decades and four different reigns.