University of Virginia Library

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

practice sketched by Konrad Haebler: "Italian humanists had begun very early to add accompanying verses to issues edited by themselves or their friends, or to their own productions. With the German classical scholars it became the fashion to place such verses on the title-page."[2] The international flavor of early puffing is shown by the fact that in the first forty years of English examples the slender output includes contributions by (besides Morus) Surigonus, Carmelianus, Andreas, Aggeus, Ammonius, and Remaclus [Arduenne]. The list would be longer if this survey included Latin works published by Englishmen abroad, such as Utopia.[3] In the incunabula period I accept eight poems in six English books as qualifying for the genre of the verse puff. The first three of these were probably gleaned by Caxton from verses already in manuscript circulation. Pride of place goes to the epitaph on Chaucer by the Italian humanist Stephanus Surigonus, presumably written during or just after his years in England.[4] This Caxton appended to his [1478] edition of the Boethius (3199).[5] Similarly there is no evidence that the two poems in Confessio Amantis (12142) were produced to order. But the verses before an undated classical text (19827) and a Horman grammar (13809) show that well before the end of the century commendatory poems were being composed for specific English books.

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

would be to proceed on the arbitrary and unsafe assumption that each is by a separate writer. To relieve concern over this omission, the generalization is offered that fewer than one-tenth of the contributors supply more than one poem in a single book. In brief, the total number of poems does not seriously misrepresent the number of contributors as long as the books are considered individually.

                           

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

had assumed a condescending attitude, and in the eighteenth century the practice lapsed into unimportance. The comparable careers of Jonson and Dryden illustrate the situation. During a writing life of forty years Jonson contributed verses to thirty books, whereas over a span of fifty years Dryden commended fourteen. At the same time ten of Dryden's numerous books were commended by his friends, usually one or two puffs each (the maximum was five in the Virgil). But the Tribe of Ben contributed thirty poems to only seven Jonson books (maximum of ten in Volpone). As Sherlock Holmes might deduce, either the Restoration was bored with puffing, or Apollo preferred the tavern to the coffee house.