The Life of William Bosworth

Abstract

Bosworth's The Chast and Lost Lovers first appeared in 1651; unsold sheets were reissued with a new title page in 1653. The volume comprises several works of a young poet, relatively obscure, but important enough to have been noticed in all of the standard histories of the literature of the period and good enough in Saintsbury's opinion to have been reprinted in full in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period. 1 Very little is about the author, but most of the facts of his have been incorrectly known for the last century-and-a-half or so. For instance, all modern authorities, including Saintsbury, give Bosworth's dates as 16071650[?].2 In Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition,3 Douglas Bush acknowledges relying upon Saintsbury's dates for Bosworth's life, which dates are also in the volume Bush contributed to the Oxford History of English Literature.4 Saintsbury does not say whom he relied on, but it seems most likely that it Sidney Lee in the entry he wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. 5, 1886). Most of Lee's information taken from a letter by one Francis Allison in the August 1811 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine (81, pt. 2: 124-125).5 But Lee should have looked elsewhere, for nearly the entire range of details of Bosworth's life arises from the mischievous conjectures of Francis Allison. William Bosworth, Gent., says Allison, was descended from the antient and illustrious families* of Bokesworth, Boxworth, or Bosworth, of Boxworth, by Harrington, in Cambridgeshire, born in 1607, and died about 1651-2-3 (The Gentleman's Magazine, 81: 124). The asterisk refers to a note which Allison introduces to prove the illustriousness of Bosworth's family: