at odds with modern textual categories and standards of literary value, stretching our historical imagination. Indeed, where such volumes survive, their present untreated or unprocessed states are often attributable to some miracle of provenance that caused them to escape modernization. Reading these unlikely survivals together, as records of early reception practices and the organizing categories of early book culture, gives us different, often internally contrasting Shakespearean works in which potential interpretations grow and proliferate.
Folger STC 22341.8
My first compilation exemplifies the narrative of loss and recovery that often attends Shakespearean Sammelbände. Folger STC 22341.8 is a unique copy of The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare (1599) that was rediscovered in 1920 in a lumber room at an English country house, where it had apparently been held since it was purchased and made into a book during the Renaissance.55 The volume, which retains its original limp vellum binding, includes four additional octavos of poetry printed around the same time;56 they are, in order, Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece, the little-known sonnet sequence Emaricdulfe … by E. C. Esquier, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The contents are remarkable for how they seem to lend themselves from the standpoint of production to such multigenre, multiauthor forms of compilation. The Passionate Pilgrim represents something of a microcosm of the volume, mixing Shakespearean with non-Shakespearean works into a verse miscellany.57 And there is evidence suggesting that this edition of Venus and Adonis was sold as a unit with The Passionate Pilgrim, as the same two texts are preserved in similar bindings in other archives and bibliographers have pointed out that they probably issued from a common retailer, perhaps marketed and sold together.58
Structurally and thematically, moreover, there are strong associations between the two works. Four of the first eleven poems in The Passionate Pilgrim are fragments of the Ovidian Venus and Adonis story, dealing, often in sexually explicit terms, with the goddess’s advances on the unwilling boy.59 The narrative poem’s guiding trope of role reversal, already present in the collection, also resonates obliquely with the opening lines of The Passionate Pilgrim anthology, which do not come from Ovid’s story:60
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth
Unskilful in the world’s false forgeries. (1.1–4)
The lines, along with those of the collection’s next poem—which malign the speaker’s tempting “female evil” (2.5)—would later emerge in print as sonnets 138 and 144, respectively. But here the extent to which anthological thinking guides our interpretations and the extent to which those interpretations can change in relation to different forms of assembly are unusually perceptible. Stripped of the familiar context of the Sonnets volume, the speaker’s lying “love” no longer denotes any one “mistress” figure but is free to take on shades of reference from this volume (aided perhaps in this case by the mention of an “untutored youth,” which conjures up Adonis, named only a few lines later).61 The range of potential transpositions, in other words, becomes broader with a new material context. This volume asks us to read sonnets 138 and 144 not in the sequence of poems that for us gives them meaning and a title but in a different textual assembly: one whose most prominent scene of courtship, iterated across multiple works, is Venus’s courtship of the boy.
A similar point can be made regarding the place of Lucrece in this volume. Modern critics, addressing the historical problem of Lucrece’s perceived moral dilemma, have tended to interpret the poem either implicitly or explicitly in the context of the Sonnets or that of Shakespeare’s classical sources. Nancy Vickers, in her magisterial reading, cites sonnet 106 and Shakespeare’s rejection of the poetics of praise, arguing that Lucrece exposes the violence of erotic description as it was practiced by male writers in the Petrarchan tradition.62 Jane O. Newman and others have similarly invoked Ovid’s Fasti and the tale of Philomela to show how Shakespeare departed from the convention of the vengeful rape victim, portraying Lucrece instead as a tragic sacrifice to a patriarchal power structure.63 In both of these interpretive frameworks, Lucrece’s agency is minimal, present only in constitutive relation to male agency, whether sexual or political. But in a compilation where Lucrece is linked to other works by Shakespeare—works attentive to female agency (and indeed, impropriety) in figures like Venus and the “dark lady” of the two sonnets—a different protagonist, one whose will can be conceived outside the male power structure, is freer to emerge.
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