Ben Jonson’s Workes and Bibliographic Integrity

Abstract

In 1612, William Jaggard issued the third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of poems he had first published in 1599. The title page of all three editions attributes the book to “W. Shakespeare,” and the book does include versions of two poems later included in Shakespeares Sonnets (1609), and three songs that had appeared in the 1598 Love’s Labor’s Lost quarto. However, other poems had appeared in printed poetry collections of Bartholomew Griffin and Richard Barnfield, and other poems seem unlikely to be Shakespeare’s.1 The contents of the first two editions are identical, but the third edition greatly expands the book by including, as the title page advertises, “two Loue-Epistles, the first from Paris to Helen, and Hellens answere backe againe to Paris.”2 It also adds an additional seven unadvertised poems, including “That Menelus was cause of his owne wrongs” (107), and “The Tale of Cephalus and Poeris,” and several others. This additional material takes up almost 70 pages, dwarfing the 20 poems that initially appeared in Passionate Pilgrim, and apparently crediting Shakespeare, who had established his poetic reputation with the popular Ovidian poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, with a substantial new canon of Ovidian work.