University of Virginia Library

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

headed: "Workes of Skelton newly collected by I. S. as foloweth." At this time Stow was working for the printer Thomas Marsh, who published five editions of his Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles between 1565 and 1573; and in his own historical works he showed a knowledge of the satirical poems of William Cornysshe, whose "Treatise bituene Trouth and Information" is added to the present collection.[3] It is therefore highly probable that the editor "I. S." was John Stow.

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

posed as additions to the Skelton canon.[7] The 1568 Workes, therefore, contains all but eleven of the poems which can certainly be assigned to Skelton.

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.