University of Virginia Library

Wyatt and the Several Editions of The Court of Venus
by
Charles A. Huttar

At the end of the careful study which introduces his edition of The Court of Venus (1955) Russell A. Fraser says that in the light of our new knowledge of this miscellany "our conception of English literary history in the sixteenth century will have to be revised substantially" (p. 74). That this prophecy is already coming true is a tribute to Professor

Fraser's scholarship. The conclusions of his study have been incorporated into works directed to the student and to the general reader.[1] The purpose of this article is to support the misgivings other readers have had about one minor aspect of these conclusions[2] and to introduce a note of caution concerning a more prominent aspect.

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:

"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:

This is from the Preface (dated from Canterbury, 17 January 1564) to Volume I of Becon's collected Works (sig. hand C5v) 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. AAA1v). 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:

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.

II

A second and more important issue may be illustrated by the following statement introduced into a college textbook in 1962:

This unequivocal statement is evidently indebted to the establishment by Professor Fraser of an early date for the Bodleian fragment; previous writers had not been sure.[11] But were there really poems by Wyatt in this early Court of Venus?

The three fragments B, S, and F give us altogether fourteen lyrics, a verse prologue, and a pseudo-Chaucerian tale. The earliest, printed by Gybson, has one complete lyric, "Dryuen by dissyr," which Professor Muir

prints among Wyatt's "Doubtful Poems" (No. 228), and the closing ten lines of another. In the two leaves of S, printed by Copland, are five poems (two of them truncated) including Nos. 43, 66, 103, and ("doubtful") 226. Marshe's edition, F, gives us all five of the poems from S and seven more, two of which are known as Wyatt's (Nos. 52 and 177). "My own conclusion is necessarily conservative," says Fraser. "Five of the poems in the fragments are definitely Wyatt's [i.e. Nos. 43, 52, 66, 103, 177], three more are probably his [No. 226 and the two in B], and seven are of uncertain authorship. Of these seven, some or all may have been written by Wyatt too" (pp. 34-35). We must read "six" for "seven" to get the correct total of fourteen lyrics; these six then would be Nos. 224, 225, 227, "Fortune what ayleth the," "I may by no meanes surmyse," and "Now must I lern to faine." We are offered the suggestion that "the short-poem section of The Court of Venus editions may in fact have been devoted exclusively to Wyatt's poetry" (p. 34).

The table of F's contents given above will supply fuller details on the relation of F and S. Neither of the two lyrics in B reappears in S or F. But the fragmentary character of all three extant editions permits us to wonder what else they contained. To put the question in its extremest form: Was the entire Court — a name we apply to Fraser's composite edition — originally in each of the three? This question can be promptly answered in the negative. As we have noted, at least one later edition claims to be considerably augmented.

The statement that B, which was printed before 1540, contained work by Wyatt is true if either of the following is true: (a) that S is textually dependent on B for the Wyatt poems; (b) that Wyatt wrote "Dryuen by dissyr" and/or the other lyric, whose last ten lines are in B.

The first proposition rests entirely on circumstantial evidence. There is nothing at all common today between the fragments B and S. However, S has a great deal in common with F, which in turn has the same title as B and contains a "Prologue" which we have reason to suppose was also in B.[12] Noting that some of the printing types used by Gybson were later used by William Copland (pp. 5-6, 43), Fraser says, "I believe that Copland's source for the Stark poems was Gybson's book. Copland may have acquired this book fortuitously, or it may have come to him through Gybson himself" (p. 44). It must be said that the circumstantial evidence is fairly good. The Bodleian fragment begins with sig. E1. If all of sheets A-D were devoted to the Court lyrics, there were a good many poems, some of which may have survived in S. Still that leaves us a long way from any

positive assurance that the Wyatt lyrics in S came from B. Sometime after B a printer of the Court began to advertise "many proper Ballades . . . added . . . which have not before bene imprinted." To find this notice we must now look in F, but perhaps the lost title page of S had it too. Copland obviously wanted to emphasize the newness of his edition: the distinctive running title A Boke of Balettes is proof of that. The best explanation is that S did in fact contain a good deal of new material, some of which, perhaps, was poetry by Wyatt that became available in the years following his death in 1542. Until a complete copy of B is discovered we cannot conclusively disprove, but it is certainly going too far to affirm positively, that poems by Wyatt were in print before 1540.

To identify the author of the lyrics in B, arguments are presented based on similarities of style and on other sorts of evidence. The former, it seems to me, are valid only to corroborate an attribution for which the other evidence is also pretty strong. The attempts to identify the author of the first poem in B — a headless relic of which only ten lines remain — illustrate the inadequacy of stylistic evidence by itself. Fraser's statement that this poem is "probably" Wyatt's is based on two premises: "If Stark was a reprint of Douce, this poem was probably included in Copland's book of 1547-1549. If, further, one agrees with Mrs. Stopes . . . that the poems in Douce, on internal evidence, are probably the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt . . ." (p. 34).

For the other poem in B a stronger case is offered, based on its supposed similarity to a poem in the Devonshire MS., fol. 81v, in the midst of a section of "nearly 70 poems by Wyatt, copied neatly in one hand."[13] The version in D, a single rime royal stanza, follows:

Here is the version in The Court of Venus: Besides a reference to "the proof," the phrases "driven by desire" and "not like to speed" are all that these two versions have in common. If the second is Wyatt's "reworking" (p. 33) of the first, he effected a rather complete transformation. These two phrases may well have belonged to the stockpile of poetic clichés which enriched, or at least obliged, many a court poet. The presence in the Blage MS. of another poem beginning "Dryuyn to Desyre"[16] suggests that this is the case; further testimony to the existence of standardized and interchangeable parts is borne by a hitherto unnoticed parallel between two Court poems: "My fanzy alas doth me so bynd" (line 9 of the poem just quoted), "Alas her ioy doth [me] so bind" (line 3 of No. 227, F version). On an accumulation of many similar parallels current scholarship is erecting a new understanding of the methods of composition in the early Tudor court and even of the term "authorship" when applied to poems like these. In fact, it is questioned whether Wyatt was, in the modern sense, "author" of all the poems in the Egerton MS. which bear his name.[17] Surely there is little in the parallels cited to support the attribution to Wyatt of the poem in B.

There is another line of argument, however. When the poet writes ". . . to set affection./a great way alas aboue my degre" and "I loke alas alytell to hye," may it not be Wyatt referring to his quest of Anne Boleyn? Apart from the difficulties of being certain about either (a) the seriousness with which the poet intends this as an autobiographical allusion, (b) the social significance, as opposed to mere poetic diction, of "degre" and "hye," or (c) the facts of that episode in Wyatt's life, this might be a convincing argument; but those who advance it are curiously in disagreement. Professor Fraser says, "At the time of Anne's downfall in 1536, Wyatt perhaps attempted to efface his suddenly dangerous expressions from the poem" as it stood in the Devonshire MS., and B was the result (p. 43). This fits the chronology of D and B, but it turns our attention away from the very phrases in B that seemed so pointed. Mrs. Stopes, on the other hand, taking the B version to contain direct allusions which the politic Wyatt excised from the poem as it appears in D, reverses the chronological order.[18]

The safest conclusion, I believe, is that Nos. 159 and 228 are two different poems and we have no way of knowing who wrote the latter.[19]

To summarize: While it cannot be proved that there were no poems by Wyatt in print before 1540, the latest edition of The Court of Venus does not justify the opposite claim. The Wyatt poems in S were in print by 1547-1549, the earliest date of which we can be certain.

The statement that "Wyatt intended to publish a collection of his poems"[20] reflects an old conjecture[21] which may or may not be true: the evidence simply is not enough to constitute proof. Fraser offers his study as a contribution toward settling this question: "Since the Douce fragment was printed in the lifetime of Sir Thomas Wyatt, we must consider the possibility of Wyatt's having sanctioned the publication and even having supervised it himself" (p. 74). But he offers little real justification for being any more dogmatic about the matter than we were inclined to be previously.

Notes