University of Virginia Library

Commendatory Verses: The Rise of the Art of Puffing
by
Franklin B. Williams, Jr.

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.

II

The circumstances in which the puff flourished can be illuminated by more detailed study. During the first half of the STC period, 1478-1559, the books with commendatory verses are about evenly divided into three groups: literature (including serious prose treatises), religious works, and school textbooks. Thus the lasting association of the universities and schools with commendatory verses appears from the very outset. During this earlier period verses, like dedications, are in the main confined to books of serious pretensions, whether in Latin or the vernacular. Ephemera and light literature are not equipped with what is still regarded as scholarly apparatus.

During the second half of the STC period, 1560-1640, the most striking feature of the statistics of literary patronage and commendatory verses is the increasing preponderance of literary works. Not only did the volume of "literature" increase, but, depending on one's bias, one may say that popular literature won cultural status or that dedication and puff apparatus sank to the level that might now be termed mass media. A rough count suggests that during these eighty-one years verse puffs appear in 428 books classifiable as literary in a narrower sense, in addition to 55 English plays of the Stuart period and 261 prose works of literary flavor (history, etc.). Pedagogical books continue steady with a total of 103, while books of religion and devotion number 298, including, after 1600, occasional pamphlets or tomes of sermons (verses never became standard in sermons). This leaves a classification of 238 miscellaneous works, for in the seventeenth century the commendatory vogue extended irregularly into almost every type of publication, such as technical handbooks or even almanacks

(music books had been invaded in Elizabeth's reign).[9] Lighter literature, such as English verse and fiction, began to be provided with dedications about 1570, and puffing followed in sequence. In the Jacobean years the vogue extended to frivolous publications like the pamphlets of Taylor the Water Poet. Meanwhile the plays of the professional dramatists received tardy literary recognition. Apart from a few closet dramas, the first English play with verses was Jonson's learned effort, Sejanus, 1605. This and subsequent plays like Volpone set a precedent for dramatists and booksellers; by the 1630's the practice was common in the quartos of James Shirley and his fellows.

As one would expect of humanists, the earliest commendatory verses are in Latin; this language is dominant into the 1520's and remains common in learned publications all through the STC period. English first appears in 1494 (3175). As recreation from teaching "Cambridge and King Edward Greek," Sir John Cheke contributed the first Greek poem in 1545 (22250). French follows closely in 1549 (3045), Dutch in 1568 (18601), Italian in 1569 (3053), Hebrew and Welsh together in 1577 (6364), and Spanish most timely in 1588 (24579, a work in Spanish). All of these languages except Hebrew are used in Coryate's Crudities, 1611, along with macaronic verses and poems in "Utopian" and parody Irish!

The memorable suggestion of the Rev. Walter Ong, S.J., that in Renaissance England grammar school Latin was essentially a puberty rite may be given the corollary that at school and university the cultivation of complimentary verses in the learned tongue was part of the liturgy of that rite. The numerous pamphlets of Latin verses published at the universities on memorial or congratulatory occasions from the death of Sidney to the royal blessed event of 1640 suggest that able students as well as dons were pressured to produce polished effusions, and one suspects that at times the task was a study assignment with publication of the best as an incentive. Commendatory verses for textbooks and other publications of schoolmasters and university men are a parallel manifestation. They appear from the outset in schoolbooks by Horman, Whittinton, Linacre, and, of course, Lily. They thrive in the reign of Elizabeth I, as in the Oxford works of John Case (4756, etc., one with no less than 26 praisers) and the schoolmaster John Stockwood's Disputatiunculae (23278, 27 poems). Two books by William Gager and William Thorne contain more than half of the

commendatory output for 1592, outweighing ten other works in their volume of flattery. The practice continues in Stuart times, as in Kynaston's Latin version of Chaucer's Troilus at Oxford and James Duport's Greek version of Job at Cambridge (commended by fifteen and twenty men respectively.)[10]

Habitual writers of commendatory verses were, as one might suspect, mainly literary professionals. With the curious exceptions of Sidney and Shakespeare, all the chief poets (including Spenser and Milton) wrote puffs. Jonson led the way with 30 contributions, followed by Thomas Newton with 25, John Davies of Hereford with 18, Drayton with 15. From ten to a dozen were contributed by John Adamson, John Cooke, Thomas Heywood, Hugh Holland, Lawrence Humphrey, Andrew Melville, Patrick Sands, George Wither, and—if my identification of initials is reliable—Christopher Goodfellow.[11] Fully 55 other men wrote verses for from five to nine books. The practice of printing his own verse puffs in his collected works was initiated by Newton and continued by Jonson, Shirley, and others. University men who wrote verses would embrace, of course, not merely recognized scholars (including many of the clergy), but likewise alumni who mingled in fashionable society and cultivated the acquaintance of poets. The fact that Welsh writers affect puffs may be due less to a racial trait than to the proportion of academic books in their output— an observation that may apply also in some degree to the Scots. Few other generalizations can be made about puff writers except that the practice seems to have been beneath the dignity of members of the peerage (apart, of course, from their effusions while at school or university).

Besides men of letters, puff writers include forgotten people and many who either do not sign names or mask themselves under initials and pseudonyms. Of the hundreds of initials, the great majority cannot be identified with assurance. Besides genuine pseudonyms—whatever that means—various fictitious names are attached to facetious poems by authors or their friends. Such mystifications are at times plausible enough to allay suspicion. The type is admirably illustrated in a 1523 work by St. Thomas More (18089), where certainty could be reached only after discovery at the University of Durham Library of a unique

pre-publication state in which alternate fictitious names were used.[12] Unsigned verses are for the most part genuinely anonymous, but a minority—from internal evidence of varying cogency—can be assigned to the writer of signed poems that precede or follow. After excluding such chain sequences, together with poems apparently supplied by author, editor, or bookseller, I find that just under 400 anonymous pieces remain to pique our curiosity—about eight per cent. of the total output.

The fashionable accumulation of puffs in the successive editions of Sir Thomas Overbury's Wife is a convenient locus classicus for studying the genre, though the verses appended to The Faerie Queene may be more familiar. If asked for a type example of the better commendatory poem in its palmy days, I would intuitively cite Joseph Taylor's tribute to Massinger before The Roman Actor, 1629. The mystification apparatus to George Gascoigne's Posies, 1575, is notorious. Other writers who exerted themselves to adorn their books with numerous puffs include—in various kinds of books—Richard Stanyhurst, Joshua Sylvester, Davies of Hereford, John Taylor, Captain John Smith, William Hawkins, Lewis Roberts, and James Yorke.

While usually falling within the span of from fourteen to thirty lines, commendatory verses range in length from the couplet to pieces that in themselves rival verse pamphlets. An extreme instance of brevity is the collection of 23 Latin and Greek distichs before a Cambridge edition of Hippocrates (13519). A prominent contender for the second of the two "gifts of song"—prolixity—is the seven-page effusion provided for William Cartwright's Works by one I. B. Collections of puffs are sometimes dignified with their own half-title (3220, 24756). Scholars seldom pause to realize that some commendatory poems achieved enormous circulation. The most printed poet of the Elizabethan age was not Shakespeare or even Thomas Tusser; probably he was the anonymous author (perhaps Thomas Gresshope) who penned, for the Geneva Bible, the familiar lines, "Here is the spring where waters flowe" (2123). He was reprinted more often than the puffers of Lily's Grammar.

In Stuart times, it is clear from scattered evidence, the task of soliciting puffs was frequently, if not customarily, assumed by the publisher or stationer, often loosely termed the "printer." In 1624

W. B. complains that "The Printers haste" allows him only one hour to write his tribute (17632). As a schoolboy in 1635, Joseph Harrington says that "The Printer writes, our Masters Booke will sell: / And I must write our Master writeth well" (12141). The publisher Humphrey Moseley was undeniably responsible for assembling the tributes for the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio and for Cartwright's Works (both admittedly posthumous). In my Index of Dedications I was unaware of evidence that publishers ever paid for puffs. This remains true for the STC period except for an ambiguous remark in 1609: "I mistrust a gorgeous Frontispice, / Of mercenary penns" (3202). For the Commonwealth, however, contrary evidence is now available. Puffing Cartwright's Works in 1651, R. Hill writes: And Prof. Alexander Sackton draws my attention to James Shirley's assurance to Richard Brome in 1652 that A Joviall Crew will succeed on its merits, One is reminded of Swift's jibe that Dryden's classic prefaces were "meerly writ at first for filling / To raise the Volume's Price a Shilling."

Presumably many authors continued to collect their own puffs (as seems to have been the general custom in earlier years), or managed the job vicariously through a cooperative friend. The former was the case with what was perhaps an amateur rather than a commercial venture, Sir John Stradling's Beati Pacifici, 1623. From internal evidence, Stradling circulated his book among friends before publication with requests for their censures. The replies—at least all that were printed—were enthusiastic and in verse. It is not clear whether Stradling used advance copies in print or the manuscript, but circulation of a manuscript seems to have been fairly common. Thus unpublished manuscripts are extant with sets of commendatory verses, and versifiers quite often refer to the text or to their fellow commenders in terms showing access to the manuscript. For instance, in Romulus and Tarquin (17220), Aurelian Townsend's poem alludes to the three poets who precede him. As Michael Strachan points out, the publisher

of Coryate's Crudities circulated the engraved frontispiece among the Mermaid wits, for their poems show familiarity with it.[13] After assembling puffs, authors sometimes were moved to pen a verse acknowledgement, either a collective thank-you (11544, 14008, 23779, 24631) or, more rarely, individual bows (17997, 24096).

A fraction of commendatory poems—quite apart from jokes and mystifications—may have been faked or ghost-written, but at this distance proof is hard to come by. The striking regularity of some groups of puffs arouses suspicion. But even if daring to impeach the matching verses by nonentities before Robert Tofte's Alba, would one venture to question the sonnets by known friends before Chapman's poems (4985)? The phenomenon could easily occur as a manuscript circulated. The prevalence of initials, pseudonyms, and unsigned pieces may arouse doubts but cannot provide conviction. References to faking are excessively rare, the best being William Cartwright's exculpation of John Fletcher before the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio:

Thomas Jordan has been suspected of providing false verses in the hope they would be considered Jonson's (14788).[14] The notion of ghost-writing is particularly repulsive to index-compilers! Happily few explorations have been made along these lines. The most interesting is George B. Parks's argument that George Peele composed certain verses signed by men not usually thought of as poets, such as Drake, Hawkins, etc. (19523).[15]

The run-of-the-mill versifier feels impelled to deny that he is motivated by the cacoëthes scribendi. Others, perhaps, but not he! It is only human to seek publicity by puffing another's book. As Owen Feltham cleverly expresses it before Thomas Randolph's Poems:

Few have the courage of Peter Heylyn to confess themselves among those "desertlesse men . . . made knowne / By naming lines far better than their owne."[16] Rather, these displays of ineptitude are a response to the stern voice of duty, the need—as Edward Greenfield expresses it (11159)—"to acquit a debt, / Due to right Poets, not the counterfeit." A sense of long-standing personal obligation prompts the average puffer, rather than ambition "under covert of thy sheetes to lurke" (778). Jonson apologizes to Drayton for not having praised his earlier books (7190), while Thomas Jordan disingenuously denies puffing in hope of a reciprocal puff (20770). Alas for human frailty! The evidence is clear that hundreds of versifiers were prompted by vanity—if not the simple thrill of seeing one's name in print, then at least the chance to exhibit one's wit. His Oxford M. A. apparently inspired William Parre to have his puff printed at the end of a book (18496) so as not "to praise thee to thy face." Punning is frequent, as in Henry Upcher's verses before Robert Greene's Menaphon. One's sympathy goes to John Jackson, who concedes himself a jackass in order to achieve his pun: "the world may say, / What is this Iackson that commends the play?" (22454). But scorn not the pun: through its means one commender confirms the authorship of the book he praises (17805).

Like dedications, commendatory verses develop a stock of commonplaces and allusions that are repeated ad nauseam. These respect both the object of praise and the altruistic motivation and unworthiness of the puffer. Naturally the author's genius is glorified and, if his age allows, it is customary to voice amazement at his youth and precocity. If the book has a propaganda aim, the thesis is promoted. It is in order to console a dramatist if the rabble failed to recognize the merits of his play on the stage (11068, 14782, 18346). That commendatory poems are superfluous and cannot affect the merit of a book was a satirical commonplace, expressed in epigram by Sir John Harington and Henry Parrott; indeed, says Samuel Rowlands, "verses (in laudem authoris) are farre worse then a Horse-coursers commendation of a Smythfield Iade" (21400). In what may be a sour-grapes statement, Wye Saltonstall has the ill grace to spurn praises (18945); he will stand on his own merits. On the other hand, Richard Robinson admits that "I haue been showne / Bookes that sell well, yet not for what's their owne, / But for Commendators before them knowne" (18673). But the compiler of a trifling spelling book boasts absurdly that he has "shut out all verses in laudem Authoris, and tedious Dedicatories,

which now a daies will cost the buyer as much as the Booke it selfe."[17] The very futility of the puff is actually the puffer's favorite gambit: a thousand voices stammer that good wine needs no bush! "Its owne worth / Without a borrowed prayse, shall set it forth" (11163). If "some pieces . . . have stood / In neede of witnesses," certainly to the merit of this book "Friends cannot adde, nor envie make it lesse" (22454). Rather, this tribute, like "a mole on Venus face," is the sole blemish in the book (17636).

IV

In a culture of some sophistication, any popular literary genre may stimulate the burlesque spirit. The tradition of the mock-commendatory poem, the apparatus of ridicule, may—for the sake of proportion—be sketched rather than discussed in detail. The manifestations are various. They range from the high-spirited and playful to the vindictive. They may be prompted by a book's levity or by an attitude to the author or the author's opponent. The ostensible puffs may be authentic or the author's fictions (some mentioned below are ignored in my Index because they are transparent hoaxes).

In an age when the vogue of the mock-encomium overlapped the survival of the flyting, humanists sometimes took pleasure in jesting with their scholarly panoply. An instance among More's works has been cited (18089). More elaborate is William Lily's attack on Whittinton in Antibossicon, 1521, with contributions by a monstrous tribe (Ichnobates Gnosius, Ladon Sicyonius, etc.).[18] There are traces of the mock-commendatory among the Marprelate pamphlets (17452, 22645), especially in Richard Harvey's Plaine Perceuall, to which the "parish vestry" append parody Latin puffs initialed by a carter, shepherd, farmer, cobbler, botcher, and "Schollard." A daring innovation in technique is implied in Marston's charge that Joseph Hall pasted verses in Cambridge copies of Marston's Pigmalion; unfortunately no example is known to have survived.[19] More influential was the series of mock-commendations Englished by Thomas Shelton in his 1612 edition of Don Quixote, for although this translation postdates Coryate, the verses by Amadis of Gaule, Don Belianis of Greece, Orlando Furioso, etc., were probably known to Coryate's friends in the original.

The term mock-commendatory, for the average Renaissance student, inevitably suggests Thomas Coryate's Crudities, 1611. Presumably more people did, and still do, read the fantastic anthology of preliminary poems than plow through the huge volume of travels, though it was mean of Richard Brome to suggest that the text was forgotten before the prelims.[20] Never has such a galaxy of writers, wits, and men about town joined in verse comments upon a single book. Counting a few tardily netted in a supplement (5807), fully sixty men participated in the game (the number of poems is much greater). Jonson, Donne, Drayton, Campion, Hoskins, Bastard, Peacham, Corbet, John Owen, Davies of Hereford, and numerous lesser lights: few notables are missing. When I once indulged the whim of organizing a semester course in Jacobean literature about this Coryate circle, there was no dearth of material. Good natured raillery, rather than contempt, mark most of these comic tributes to the droll personality of the pedestrian of Odcombe. The sequel was in the same spirit. Some malicious soul—as enterprising as unscrupulous—induced a rival bookseller to pirate the whole apparatus of the Crudities as a cheap, though still substantial, pamphlet, adding the barbed note that the 654 pages of actual travels might have been condensed to a four-page epitome if one had taken the trouble.[21] This Odcombian Banquet, 1611, drew an angry but fruitless retort from Coryate (5807). The reference to an epitome leads some to suspect that the perpetrator of the Banquet was Taylor the Water Poet, since Taylor was busy on a Reader's Digest condensation of the Crudities puffs, published in 1612 as Laugh and Be Fat. Lacking Coryate's skill in tongues, Taylor ignores all the poems in foreign languages.

The fact that Laugh and Be Fat was incorporated in Taylor's 1630 Works may be evidence of Taylor's vanity rather than a continuing interest in Coryate. But although Tom had been resting in his grave in distant India since 1617, the mock-epic accolade to the Crudities lived in tradition. Coryate is mentioned by more than one wit in the apparatus to the rare pamphlet Joanereidos, 1645. Feminine valor at the roundhead defense of Lyme Regis had inspired some two hundred lines of verse by the Parliamentarian chaplain James Strong. Falling into the hands of Royalists at Oxford, the poem was published in derision, with preliminary matter far outweighing the text. The ridicule

includes, as a verse character of a New Model poor parson, a pastiche from the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales that has attracted little notice from Chaucer scholars. This Civil War oddity was, for some reason, reprinted in 1674.

Meanwhile the playful nature of their texts had inspired facetious preliminaries in a number of minor works after Coryate, such as Robert Anton's parody romance Moriomachia, 1613, the anonymous Exchange Ware, 1615 (1356), and John Gower's mock-epic Pyrgomachia, 1635. The commenders of Exchange Ware are fictitious; those of Gower were his students and friends. Whether the writers were people or fictions is uncertain in some instances. The poems before Sir Edward Hoby's Curry-combe for a Coxe-combe, 1615, appear a mixed lot, and I suspend judgment in the case of the pseudonymous New-yeeres Gift of 1636 (22631). This amusing pamphlet about the court dwarf Jeffrey Hudson has verses by T. Little, W. Loe, and W. Short: the evidence is weak, but these plausible names may be actual men carefully solicited for the purpose. One may rely on the names before William Hawkins' Corolla Varia, 1634, and the initials in Samuel Austin's Naps upon Parnassus, 1658.[22]

Two more memorable chapters of literary history may suffice to complete this sketch of the years beyond 1640, leaving other Restoration examples for future research. The first is the flurry of excitement accompanying the publication of Sir William Davenant's unfinished epic Gondibert, 1651. An initial shower of compliments by Waller, Cowley, Hobbes, and others, both within and outside the book, aroused derisive opposition from Denham, young Jack Donne, and other satirists of Royalist views. Many of these were gathered in two dozen pages published in 1653 as Certain Verses Written by severall of the Authors Friends; to be reprinted with the Second Edition of Gondibert. Alluding with tiresome repetition to poor Davenant's nose, the poems run to abuse more than to literary criticism. The ill-spirited pamphlet went into four printings within a year, to one of which was attached a mock-reply, The Incomparable Poem Gondibert Vindicated (reprinted 1655). England had never seen such an extensive and light-hearted critomachia, as Arthur H. Nethercot terms it.[23] This Davenant feud presumably inspired the similar onslaught at the end of

the century against Sir Richard Blackmore, a more prolific pretender to the epic. For it was "some of his particular friends" who published Commendatory Verses on the Author of the Two Arthurs, 1700. Blackmore replied to his anonymous enemies seriatim in the same year in Discommendatory Verses. In view of the prominence of these enemies—supposed to include Tom Browne, Steele, and Garth—and of the survival of copies of Commendatory Verses with conflicting manuscript keys to the contributors, this comic chapter has been more discussed in print than any similar episode except Coryate's.[24] With Blackmore the wheel has come full circle from Lily's attack on Whittinton in 1521.

* * * *

So pontificated the poetical physician Thomas Lodge before his 1621 translation of Goulart's enormous commentary on Du Bartas (21666). As a translator, Lodge could praise the book without embarrassment, conveniently forgetful that in his youth he had not disdained friendly puffers (16653). The present study reviews the anomaly that almost 1500 Renaissance English books were provided with unnecessary bushes. To the reference above that Shakespeare was among the few poets to refrain from puffing may be added the curious fact that no work of Shakespeare's published in his lifetime contains a commendatory poem as its bush. Can it be significant that in Shakespeare's pattern of imagery, bushes are associated with Moonshine?

Notes