Fresh Light on Notable Elizabethan Poems

IN working at the Seventeenth Century I came upon evidence which throws new light on the date or text of certain well-known poems included in my anthology, Elizabethan Lyrics.

1. Of Sir Walter Raleigh's poem, 'Even such is time,' said to have been written on the eve of his execution, the earliest text hitherto recorded is that in The Prerogative of Parliaments, 1628, which I printed (op. cit. p. 481). It had however appeared (omitting the final couplet) within three years of Raleigh's death, in A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse, 1621, with the following interesting introduction: The Court hath made few happy, it hath undone many: and those that it hath most favoured it hath undone, dealing with her favourites as Dalilah with Sampson, or as time with her minions, that still promiseth better and longer days, when in a moment she withdraweth the one, and performeth not the other, but falsifieth in both, as one lately to this purpose hath both experienced, and uttered as followeth.

'Even such is time / that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys and all we have
And pays us but with age/and dust,
Within the dark/and silent grave,
When we have wandred/all our ways,
Shut up the story/of our days.'

2. The poem On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey' (18 lines), usually ascribed to Francis Beaumont, consists, as I was able to show (op. cit. pp. ix-x), of three extracts from a longer poem by some unknown author. Beaumont died in 1616; and the familiar short version was first printed in Wits Recreations, 1641, without an author's name; and was thence reprinted (together with other poems by other writers) in that strange gallimaufry, the second edition of Beaumont's Poems, 1653. I'included the longer poem (op. cit. p. 455), taking the text (the earliest then known to me) from Weever's Ancient Funerall Monuments, 1631, and giving in a note the variant readings of the two MS. texts I had also found. I have since lighted on further proof of the originality of the longer recension, it being printed without attribution in A Helpe to Discourse, ¡ or A Miscelany of Merriment, by W. B. & E. P., 1619, and there entitled A Memento for Mortality. Taken from the view of Sepulchres of so many Kings and Nobles, as lie interred in the Abbey of Westminster.' It was reprinted in the edition of 1620, and in all the later editions cited in the Short-Title List' on P. 493 of the present volume. The 1619 and 1631 texts differ in only three places; the earlier readings being-1. 15, world a snare; 1. 24, royalst seed; 1. 41, sports a-day.

3. The hours of sleepy night decays apace,' the 'Last Song'in The Mountebank's Masque (performed 1618), was printed in Elizabethan Lyrics (p. 482) from the oldest known text of the song, namely that in J. Nichols' Progresses. . . of Queen Elizabeth, 1788. The masque had not been printed before, and all trace has since been lost of the MS. from which Nichols took his text. J. P. Collier next printed the masque (Shakespeare Society, 1848) from a Devonshire MS. which omitted this 'Last Song'; and A. H. Bullen (Marston's Works, 1887), stating that the Devonshire MS. had likewise vanished, printed the masque from Collier's text, but inserted this song from Nichols' text. The only other recorded MS. of the masque is the B.M.Add. MS. 5956, but there again the song is omitted. While searching through Bodley MS. Ashm. 36-7 (a well-known collection of some 150 MSS. of various dates) I discovered on two closely written leavesobviously a fragment of an early Seventeenth Century MS., but hitherto unidentified the latter part of The Mountebank's Masque containing 'The Last Song. The MS. begins with the twenty neuter paradoxes' read by Paradox, but, towards the end, has an excision where these words occur: 'His [Paradox's] deciphering of them particularly and his after speeches are omitted because tedious. Happily the old transcriber, unlike the other two, cut the dull speeches rather than the charming song. The MS. fragment gives much fuller stage directions than the Nichols or Collier text, which suggests an earlier transcription from the original; the writing is officially dated probably not later than 1630."' It contains nothing which throws any light on the problem of authorship; but it enables us to correct the 1788 text of the song in two places (1. 1, decay apace; 1. 6, odour), and it supplies the omitted' Chorus,' now printed for the first time: Yet let us not too much tire out delight

Chorus.

But roundly sing to all good-night, good-night.

N. A.