NOTES
1 The rights were assigned to Vicars in November 1624, qv. Short Title Catalogue, #17415. Thorpe appears to have registered his last new work in 1621, A Sermon by John Andrewes.
2 The full text for Watson’s poem reads as follows:
Harke you that list to heare what sainte I serve:
Her yellow locks exceede the beaten goulde;
Her sparkeling eyes in heav’n a place deserve;
Her forehead high and faire of comely moulde;
Her wordes are music all of silver sounde;
Her wit so sharpe as like can scarce be found;
Each eyebrow hanges like Iris in the skies;
Her Eagle’s nose is straight of stately frame;
On either cheeke a Rose and Lily lies;
Her breath is sweete perfume, or hollie flame;
Her lips more red than any corall stone;
Her necke more white than aged swans yt mone;
Her brest transparent is, like cristall rocke;
Her fingers long, fit for Apollo’s lute;
Her slipper such as Momus dare not mocke;
Her virtues all so great as make me mute:
What other partes she hath I neede not say,
Whose face alone is cause of my decaye.
3 Ideas Mirrour went through some eleven new issues between its first publication in 1594 and the author’s death in 1631. The issues of 1599, 1600, 1602, 1605, and 1619 were all new editions, with new sonnets included and old ones rearranged.
4 For almost her entire reign, Elizabeth I had been equated with Diana, the chaste goddess of the moon.
5 The critic in question was Bowyer Nichols, in the introduction to his Little Book of English Sonnets (1903).
6 Robert Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit (1592), called Shakespeare “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” and it may be that the charge stung. The publisher later issued an apology of sorts “to divers play-makers,” but Greene was probably not alone in his opinion.
7 Brian Vickers asserted the candidacy of John Ford. Lisa Hopkins has subsequently suggested that the poem may actually be by Ford’s relative and acolyte William Stradling, thus justifying the initials attributed by Eld and/or Thorpe.
8 W. W. Greg suggests this was often the case, in “The Copyright of Hero and Leander,” The Library 24, 4th series (1944).
9 See Josephine Waters Bennett [JWB], p. 246, note 38.
10 The one copy of Benson’s edition of the gypsy masque resides in the Cambridge University Library (Syn.8.64.13).
11 James Knowles has suggested (in the Times Literary Supplement, February 7, 1997) that Brome took part in one of Jonson’s masques, opening the New Exchange in The Strand in 1609.
12 There is no published version of “Willie o’ Winsbury” from earlier than the nineteenth century, having been collected around 1770. However, one early collector thought the story of the ballad related to the early adventures of James V of Scotland. The reference to standing naked on a stone as a test of virginity is also decidedly medieval.
13 The editor was T. G. Tucker, in his 1924 edition of The Sonnets. He also rejected the possibility that the Dark Lady appeared in Q128, 129, 145, 146, 151, 153, and 154.
14 It was Bernard Shaw, in his 1910 Preface to The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, who described Tyler thus: “He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He was a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of Shakespear and Swift with keen interest.”
15 Grossart published his various editions of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in limited editions, for subscribers only. His two-volume edition of Davies’ poetry lists the hundred subscribers, including Swinburne.
16 The pirate quarto of Pericles, though registered to Blount in May 1608, was not published until the following year, and then not by Blount. In the interim, George Wilkins published a novelized version.
17 The book was registered on September 27, 1605.
18 “The Sea Crabb” has been collected many times from oral tradition, though no version appeared in print until the early nineteenth century, when two Scottish collectors, Peter Buchan and Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, found versions, though only the latter published it at the time, in his Ballad Book (1823).
19 Dylan was inspired by at least one early sonneteer. The verses that “glowed like burning coal / Pouring off the page from me to you,” in “Tangled Up in Blue,” were the sonnets of Petrarch.