 | |  |
Of all the disputed poems of the early seventeenth century, "Wrong not, sweete Empress of my heart" presents for several reasons one of the most severe problems. First, there is the fact that in some versions, but not all, the poem begins with a six-line pentameter stanza, riming ababcc, the -c rime being feminine, while the rest of the poem is in quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, riming abab, the -b rime being feminine. Second, the number of copies is very large; and the texts are radically divergent from one another, showing the nicest gradations of corruption and contamination. Any attempt to establish a more or less definitive text would have to suppose the problem of authorship more or less definitely settled, since the chain of authority of the texts would depend on attribution. If one believes Sir Walter Ralegh to be the author, those copies which attribute the poem to him would be taken to form the most authoritative group, and the "ideal" representative of the group, if there is one, would be chosen for a copy-text. But we have a third complication in that there are four claimants for the poem, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Robert Ayton, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, and Lord Walden. In what follows, the available texts of the poem have been treated from the viewpoint of an editor of Ayton; and it is the Ayton MSS., Nos. 1 and 2 below, from which other MSS. are considered to diverge. This is not a mere assumption, but it is necessary to state the fact so that the procedure will be clear.
| | |