University of Virginia Library

The attribution to Sir Walter Ralegh of twelve poems printed without ascriptions from sigs. K1v through L1 in The Phoenix Nest (1593) was proposed by Hoyt H. Hudson in 1930.[1] In the following year, Hudson announced his discovery of five Ralegh attributions in British Museum MS Harley 7392 and used these not only to support his identification of the "Ralegh group" but also to add to it one more poem, printed on sig. L1-L1v.[2] In her second edition of Ralegh's poems, Agnes Latham included, with a caveat, nine poems of Hudson's thirteen plus the three following poems (through sig. L2) in a section of conjectural attributions to Ralegh. Four poems in the group, which now numbered sixteen poems, Miss Latham printed as authentically Ralegh's.[3]

I list below by first lines the sixteen poems constituting the group, together with such evidence as exists elsewhere for their attributions. The numbers are those of the poems in Miss Latham's edition.

• XLII. Feede still thy selfe, thou fondling with beliefe (K1v-K2). Unique copy.
• XLIII. My first borne loue unhappily conceiued (K2-K2v). Unique copy.
• XLIV. The brainsicke race that wanton youth ensures (K2v). Unique copy.
• XLV. Those eies which set my fancie on a fire (K2v-K3). Printed, perhaps from the present copy, without ascription in William Barley's A New Booke of Tabliture (1596).
• X. Praisd be Dianas faire and harmles light (K3). Originally subscribed "S. W. R." in Englands Helicon (1600); the attribution was cancelled by a pasted-on slip reading "Ignoto." Accepted by Miss Latham as Ralegh's.
• XI. Like to Hermite poore in place obscure (K3-K3v). At least ten anonymous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies, but printed as Breton's in Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591); attributed to Ralegh only in To day a man, To morrow none: Or, Sir Walter Rawleighs Farewell to his Lady (1644). A manuscript in the Edinburgh University Library with a copy headed "Sir Walter Rayeley's Last Eligie" is cited from a secondary source by Miss Latham; the title indicates a derivation from the 1644 print, which gives the poem as among

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  Ralegh's derniers cris, but a confusion in Miss Latham's reference leaves the matter doubtful.[4] Miss Latham accepts the poem as Ralegh's.
• XII. Like truthles dreames, so are my ioyes expired (K3v). Printed over the initials "W. R." in Le Prince d'Amour (1660); the refrain line, "Of all which past, the sorow onely staies," is quoted by Ralegh as his own work in the eleventh book of Cynthia,[5] making this as certain an attribution as one has for Ralegh.
• XLVI. A secret murder hath bene done of late (K3v-K4). Subscribed "finis: Goss:" in Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 85; no other attributions.
• XLVII. Sought by the world, and hath the world disdain'd (K4). Unique copy.
• XLVIII. Hir face, Hir tong, Hir wit (K4-K4v). Ten anonymous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies; subscribed "Raley" in MS Harley 7392 and "W. R." in Le Prince d'Amour. It is, however, included in British Museum MS Egerton 3165, Sir Arthur Gorges's manuscript of his own poems, and is accepted as Gorges's by Helen Sandison.[6]
• IX. Calling to minde mine eie long went about (K4v). Attributed to Ralegh in two sixteenth-century manuscripts, Harley 7392 and Cambridge University Library MS Dd.5.75, and by Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) where two lines are quoted to illustrate a rhetorical figure; also ascribed to Ralegh in three seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies and in Wits Interpreter (1655). A solidly documented attribution, accepted by Miss Latham.
• XLIX. What else is hell, but losse of blisful heauen (L1). Unique copy.
• L. Would I were chaung'd into that golden showre (L1-L1v). Attributed to Ralegh in MS Harley 7392; elsewhere anonymous, but included by Gorges in MS Egerton 3165 and accepted as his by Miss Sandison.
• LI. Who plucks thee down frõ hie desire poor hart? Care (L1v). Unique copy.
• LII. Those eies that holds the hand of euery hart (L1v-L2). Three other anonymous copies; printed as Breton's in Brittons Bowre of Delights.
• LIII. Who list to heare the sum of sorrowes state (L2). Unique copy.

Hudson's argument was based primarily upon the grouping of the poems in The Phoenix Nest. He believed that poems IX, XI, XII, XLVIII, and L were "well authenticated" members of the Ralegh canon, that X was "usually accepted," and that XLVII could with confidence be attributed

to Ralegh on biographical grounds. Given this core of seven poems, the eight, later nine, surrounding them he attributed to Ralegh, first, because of their similarity in style to the core poems, second, because of their contiguity, and third, because of groupings of several poems by one author elsewhere in the anthology.[7] By and large, Hudson's hypothesis has met with little disagreement. The discovery of MS Egerton 3165 and its claims for Gorges of XLVIII and L, first announced in 1946,[8] did not prevent Miss Latham from printing the group as conjecturally Ralegh's in 1951, and the authenticity of the group was accepted with little deviation by Philip Edwards, outright and uncritically by Walter Oakeshott, and implicitly by A. L. Rowse.[9]

Now is perhaps the time to point out that Hudson's hypothesis was adumbrated in similar form in 1870 by an anonymous reviewer of John Hannah's edition The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose. This writer observed,

But then, as though to show the perversities of attribution by internal evidence, the reviewer goes on to say that two more poems in Hudson's Ralegh group, XLIII and XLIX, might reasonably be ascribed to Shakespeare.[10] It might further be pointed out that R. W. Bond thought five poems in the group (XLII, XLIV, XLV, X, LII) were, again on internal evidence, attributable to Lyly,[11] that Hyder Rollins thought that XLIII bore similarity to Lodge's manner,[12] and that Ralph Sargent believed LIII to be very probably Dyer's.[13] To consider opinions on the group other than Hudson's is, then, to conclude that the ease with which the latter's arguments have been accepted may have been undeserved. Hudson's and Miss Latham's speculations on the configuration of the group ought to be scrutinized more carefully than they have been, since it is problematical whether their judgments are any more deserving of uncritical acceptance than those of Bond, Rollins, Sargent, or the anonymous reviewer of Hannah's volume. The internal evidence for attributing the group to Ralegh is set forth fairly, with positive and negative points duly noted, by Miss Latham (pp. xlv-li). In what follows, I invite the reader to consider, in more detail than has been previously offered, the external evidence.

We should begin with the principle upon which the alleged existence of the group rests. There are many examples of poems attributed to one author being grouped together in miscellanies, but usually the author's name or initials appear, as do Breton's, Lodge's, and Watson's with their grouped poems in The Phoenix Nest. [14] To postulate such a group in Ralegh's case here would be to suspect, at least, that the mass of unattributed poems from sigs. K1v through N4 in The Phoenix Nest was drawn from a manuscript miscellany which itself grouped the poems supposedly Ralegh's, since it is improbable that the editor of the print would have gone through the trouble of culling them from different sources, grouping them, and yet omitting the attributions. The assumption must then be that the editor suppressed the attributions for some reason. The reason usually adduced, that Ralegh was a courtier and so would have been offended by publicity as a poet (Latham, pp. 102-3), may be sensible, but may equally well be mistaken since there is no unequivocal indication of Ralegh's own feeling on the matter. In any case, there are too many examples of miscellany poems ascribed in print to courtiers, even noblemen, to lend overwhelming weight to the conjecture. All this is, of course, surmise, not evidence, but the doubtful status of the group principle as applied to these poems in The Phoenix Nest ought to be admitted at the outset.

But allow for the moment that the principle may be relevant; if we can suspect that we are here dealing with poems that are somehow demarcated from what precedes and what follows them, the attribution of the entire series to one poet cannot be proposed unless a substantial core of poems within the series can be authenticated as the work of that poet without recourse to speculative or conjectural judgments. For this kind of authentication, stylistic similarities and biographical associations are too vague to be acceptable; only documentation will serve. Hudson believed that the core of seven poems (IX, X, XI, XII, XLVII, XLVIII, L) was substantial enough, and perhaps it might be if one could be certain that all

seven were the unquestionable work of Ralegh. If we begin, however, with the assumption that the core must be authenticated before conjectures can be discussed, and if we apply consistent criteria for attribution to the core,[15] an altogether different view of the problem may be reached.

The discovery of Gorges's collection, MS Egerton 3165, should take away from Ralegh two of Hudson's core poems, XLVIII and L. This manuscript, whose title alone — "The Vanytyes of Sir Arthur Gorges Youthe" — should establish the authorship of its contents, is a secretarial transcript corrected in numerous places by Gorges's own hand; its authority supersedes whatever the miscellanies have to tell, and the attribution of L to Ralegh in Le Prince d'Amour and of both to him in MS Harley 7392 is testimony only of the unreliability of those books.[16] Miss Latham admitted the dubiousness of the case when she wrote, "Gorges should be the best judge of what he himself wrote," but she went on to imply, if I understand her correctly, the possibility that since Gorges had no reason to indicate the authorship of poems other than his own in the manuscript, such poems may be in it (p. xlvii). But Gorges's editor, Miss Sandison, is certain that "The Vanytyes of Sir Arthur Gorges Youthe" is not a miscellany,[17] and it would appear vain to continue to deny Gorges the authorship of XLVIII and L.

The attribution of XI depends entirely on the witness of the pamphlet To day a man, To morrow none, compiled by one R. H. and printed some sixty years after the poem's early appearances in manuscripts.[18] The pamphlet's four leaves contain Ralegh's letter of farewell to his wife, written when he expected to be executed in 1603 (though it is here assigned to 1618, a common error in seventeenth-century copies), and two poems, Ralegh's valediction (XL in Miss Latham's edition) and the one now in

question. The date alone should make the attribution worthless, but it is suspect for other reasons as well. In its sixteenth-century copies, the poem is a sonnet; as printed in 1644, however, the sonnet's concluding couplet serves as a refrain after each quatrain. This form indicates that the printer's copy derives from a musical setting of the poem,[19] and a musical setting would normally not be ascribed to anyone but the composer. Then, it appears alone on the verso of the final leaf, where space needed to be filled; there is at least the possibility that the printer, seeking to fill the need, simply took to hand an available poem of elegiac sentiment and printed Ralegh's name under it. It also might be noted that two of the pamphlet's items, the 1603 letter and poem XL, circulated together in seventeenth-century miscellanies (e.g., Folger Library MS J.a.2, fols. 86v-87), but nowhere that I know is XI found with them.

X provides a more complex problem; it and one other poem, "Sheepheard, what's Loue, I pray thee tell" (rejected by Miss Latham in 1951), had cancel slips reading "Ignoto" pasted over the subscriptions "S. W. R." in the 1600 edition of Englands Helicon. Two other poems, originally subscribed "M. F. G.," also received the cancel treatment in the same book, and Miss Latham believed that Ralegh and Fulke Greville had learned of the ascriptions and insisted the printer suppress evidence of their authorship. Not wishing to offend powerful courtiers, the printer, it is argued, complied by printing the cancels and having them affixed. I find this hypothesis untenable; a cruder and more ineffectual means of disguising authorship is hard to imagine, particularly since the cancels apparently came off rather easily.[20] In the second place, the assumption that Ralegh, or any courtier, would have gone to this length to keep his initials out of print is perhaps exaggerated. Ralegh had himself authorized commendatory poems for Gascoigne and Spenser to be printed in 1576 and 1590 with his name or initials (I, XIII, XIV in Miss Latham's edition), he had been named as a poet and had his verse quoted by Puttenham in 1589 without repercussion, and had in 1596 affixed his initials to the printing of The Discoverie . . . of Guiana. I think we should conclude that the printer of Englands Helicon found that mistakes had been made in these cases, and that the cancels are honest, if futile, efforts at correction.

To support this, one need only look at the epistle to the reader, written probably by Nicholas Ling,[21] whose theme is little more than an apology for the attributions made in the volume, suggesting that the anthology's compiler had small reason to be confident in them. The lack of confidence was justified, and if Ralegh or Greville complained, it was more likely due not to the use, but to the misuse, of their initials. One of the "M. F. G." poems, "Oh Woods vnto your walks my bodie hies," was subscribed "I. F." in the 1614 edition of the Helicon and had been attributed to Lodge in The Phoenix Nest; the other, "Loues Queene long wayting for her trueloue," was, like the first, not printed in the 1633 edition of Greville's Workes. The only authentic poem of Greville's in the anthology (Caelica 52) is unascribed. Of five poems subscribed with Sir Edward Dyer's name or initials, only one ("Prometheus") is certainly his; two are poems from Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), another is attributed to Lodge in The Phoenix Nest, and the fifth has only the anthology's ascription to speak for it. Dyer was an influential courtier in 1600, but he seems not to have complained about the abuse of his initials. The attributions of X and "Sheepheard, what's Loue" to Ralegh in British Museum MS Harley 280, Francis Davison's first-line catalogue of miscellany poems, come from Davison's having lifted the cancels, as he did with the "M. F. G." items as well. It hardly becomes modern scholarship to be as credulous as Davison.

Hudson's biographical ascription of XLVII, since it adduces no specific evidence beyond the supposition that the poem was written to Queen Elizabeth, has nothing more than speculation to commend it. Thus of his seven core poems, there remain two, IX and XII, which can be accepted as authentically Ralegh's. The certainty of two poems is no grounds for the certainty, or even the probability, of fourteen more, XLVIII and L are surely the property of Gorges. A fair, but inconclusive, case can be made for ascribing LII to Breton.[22] The attribution of XLVI to one "Goss:" (Gosson?) in MS Rawlinson Poetry 85 may be worthless. We must be content to leave the rest anonymous.