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Notes
In a review of The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M. C. Latham (1929), MLN, XLV (1930), 200-2.
Ruth Hughey (The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry [1960], II, 315) found that the source cited by Miss Latham, The North British Review, LII (1870), 543, mentioned no such manuscript. I can confirm the nonexistence of the reference. John Payne Collier ("Continuations of New Materials for a Life of Sir Walter Raleigh," Archaeologia, XXXIV [1852], 160-1) quoted a letter he said was in his possession that, purporting to be news of Ralegh's disgrace in 1592, speaks of his oncoming imprisonment in the imagery of lines 1-2 of this poem. No twentieth-century authorities take this to be anything but a Collier fabrication; even were it genuine, it hardly constitutes an attribution.
Four poems are attributed to Breton continuously from sigs. D3-E3v, sixteen poems are attributed to Lodge from G3v-I3, and three poems from N4-O2 are attributed to Watson.
Helen Sandison, "'The Vanytyes of Sir Arthur Gorges Youthe' (Egerton MS. 3165). A Preliminary Report," PMLA, LXI (1946), 109-13.
Edwards, Sir Walter Ralegh (1953); Oakeshott, The Queen and the Poet (1960); Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons (1962).
The North British Review, LII (American ed., 1870), 280-1. This reviewer seems also to have been the first to date Ralegh's Cynthia fragments to 1592, the now commonly accepted date.
Examples of Ralegh groupings in other miscellanies are in British Museum MS Harley 7392, four poems attributed to him on fols. 36-37v; in Folger Library MS V.a.103, four poems attributed to him on fols. 29-31; and in Le Prince d'Amour (1660), three poems attributed to him plus one by him but not attributed on sigs. K1v-K3. I know of no examples of Ralegh groups more extensive than four poems; further, it should be pointed out that a string of poems attributed to Ralegh in a miscellany is not to be equated with a string of authentic ascriptions.
In particular, a principle adduced by Samuel Schoenbaum with reference to drama attributions: "External evidence cannot be ignored, no matter how inconvenient such evidence may be for the theories of the investigator" ("Internal Evidence and the Attribution of Elizabethan Plays," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXV [1961], 107; reprinted in Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution, ed. David Erdman and Ephim Fogel [1966], p. 191; see also Schoenbaum's extended study, Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship: An Essay in Literary History and Method [1966], pp. 163ff).
William Ringler (The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney [1962], p. 353) found the manuscript incorrect in one-third of its ascriptions.
Poems of Gorges, pp. xxxiv-xxxvii; this despite the appearance in it of a poem subscribed with Churchyard's name. It should be recorded that Oakeshott was content to omit XLVIII from the canon, but insisted on retaining L for what, to me, seem absurd reasons (The Queen and the Poet, pp. 95, 166-7).
Poem number XI dates from the 1580's, as evidenced by its transcription in British Museum MS Additional 38823 (fol. 58v), a notebook of Sir Edward Hoby, there headed "Incerti Authoris." Today a man is reprinted by E. W. Ashbee, Occasional Facsimile Reprints, No. XXVI (1872).
This was the common practice in setting sonnets; cf. the treatment of Sidney's Old Arcadia 45 in British Museum MS Additional 15117 (Ringler, Sidney, p. 556) and that given the present poem in Ferrabosco's Ayres (1609) and in Playford's Select Musical Ayres (1652), where lines 13-14 follow lines 1-4. The 1644 text may be derived from or related to an anonymous copy in Folger MS V.a.169 (fol. 10v), which uses 13-14 as a refrain and matches the 1644 text in transposing what are in the earlier copies the second and third quatrains. This textual similarity has been noted by Miss Hughey (Arundel Harington MS, II, 314).
The John Rylands Library copy is the only one known to have kept its cancels intact; its text of X and that in one of the Bodleian copies are shown in photographs in Oakeshott, plate VI.
See J. William Hebel, "Nicholas Ling and Englands Helicon," The Library, 4th ser., V (1925), 153-60.
Its appearances in Brittons Bowre of Delights and in The Arbor of Amorous Devises (1597) do not constitute authoritative attributions, but the poem is transcribed in British Museum MS Additional 34064 among poems tolerably well established as Breton's. In his edition of the Bowre (1933), pp. xvi-xix, Hyder Rollins discussed the problems of attribution in that book and the Arbor and came to an estimate of Breton's share. On the manuscript cited, see Jean Robertson (ed.), Poems by Nicholas Breton (1952), pp. livlv.
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