First Editions of Drayton’s Poems – Fine Copies

Drayton, Michael (1563-1631)

Poems: by Michael Drayton Esquire. Viz. The barons warres, Englands heroicall epistles, Idea, Odes, The legends of Robert, Duke of Normandie, Matilda, Pierce Gaveston, and, Great Cromwell, The Owle, Pastorals, contayning Eglogues, with the Man in the moone. LONDON: Printed by W. Stansby for Iohn Swethwicke [sic], and are to be sold at his shop in Saint Dunstanes Church-yard in Fleet-streete vnder the Diall, not dated but 1619 BOUND WITH: The Battaile of Agincourt.

London: Printed [by Augustine Mathewes] for William Lee, at the Turkes Head in Fleete-Streete, next to the Miter and Phaenix, 1627.

Price: $12,000.00

Folio: 24.5 x 16 cm. Two works in one volume. I. (Poems): [8], 487 p. Collation: [A4], B-Z4, Aa-Zz4, Aaa-Qqq4. II. (Agincourt): A4, a2, B6, C-Z4, Aa-Ee4 (leaf Ee4 blank and present).

FIRST EDITIONS OF BOTH WORKS. The “Poems” is the second of four issues, for the particulars of which see Bent Juel-Jenson, The Library, Sept. 1953.

Bound in 17th c. speckled calf, wear to edges, nicely rebacked. Crisp copies, clean overall, with minor blemishes and occasional browning in the second work (see below). These books, while printed eight year apart, are often found bound together. As usual, when bound with the 1619 “Poems”, which includes the first printing of the engraved portrait, the 1627 “Battaile of Agincourt” lacks the portrait (which was printed from the same plate as the one used in “Poems”). Contents: I. (Poems): Complete with engraved t.p. by William Marshall and the letter-press title with engraved portrait of Drayton on the verso. The sections: "Englands heroicall epistles"(leaf O2), “Idea”(leaf Kk2), “Odes”(leaf Nn2), "The Legends"(leaf Rr3), “The Owle” (leaf Eee2), and “Pastorals”(leaf Iii3) all have separate dated title pages; pagination and register are continuous. The engraved t.p. reads “Poems by Michael Drayton Esquyer. Collected into one volume. With sondry peeces inserted never before imprinted.” Sheet N1/4 lightly toned, small chip in outer margin of leaf N2, gathering X spotted, ink marks to leaves Bb4, Cc1, Dd3, Cc4. Leaf Mm4 with light smear of printer’s ink, sheet Xx1/4 foxed and spotted, light stain on lvs. Mmm4-Nnn1, verso of final leaf lightly soiled. II. (Agincourt): title lightly soiled, variable browning in gatherings B-G, printed note cropped at lower margin of leaf C2r.

Two first edition printings of the poems of the Tudor-Stuart poet and playwright Michael Drayton, who wrote verse under three monarchs: Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. By 1590, at the age of 27, Drayton was settled in “looking for laurels and patrons”(ODNB). His most important patron would prove to be Sir Walter Aston (1584–1639), to whom Drayton dedicated numerous poems (and this collected volume.) Aston, upon being knighted, had made Drayton one of his esquires (a title that Drayton proudly uses on the title page of the “Poems”.)

The 1619 collection of poems comprises some of Drayton’s earliest and most popular compositions as well as newly-composed lyrics: “Idea: the Shepheards Garland”(1593), “Peirs Gaveston, Earle of Cornwall”(1593), “Matilda: the Faire and Chaste Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater”(1594), “The Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy”(1596), “Englands Heroicall Epistles”(1597), “The Barrons Wars” (1603), and “The Legend of Great Cromwel”(1607). The second volume is the first edition of Drayton’s miscellany, published under the title of one of its poems, “The Battaile of Agincourt”. The 1619 “Poems” was preceded by a number of octavos published under this title, the first appearing in 1605, which had far fewer poems.

The Poems:

By 1590 Michael Drayton was settled in London, looking for laurels and patrons. His first printed work was dedicated to Lady Jane Devereux. “In 1593 came ‘Idea: the Shepheards Garland’, nine eclogues dedicated to young Robert Dudley and modelled on Spenser's ‘Shepheardes Calender’. Drayton later revised them, smoothing their diction and metre. The fourth laments the death of Sir Philip Sidney at the battle of Zutphen in 1586.

“In 1593 Drayton also published the first of his historical poems in the complaint mode made famous by ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’: ‘Peirs Gaveston, Earle of Cornwall’. This was followed in 1594 by ‘Matilda: the Faire and Chaste Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater’, and both poems, revised, were reissued in 1596 with ‘The Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy’ and dedicated to the countess of Bedford.

“The year 1596 saw ‘Mortimeriados’ (on the civil wars during the reign of Edward II), a brief quasi-epic republished in 1603, with many alterations and informative marginalia, as ‘The Barrons Wars’. An address to the reader in 1603 explains that 'the cause of this my second greater labour was the insufficient and carelesse handling of the first'; ‘Mortimeriados’ is in rhyme royal, but for the ‘Barrons Wars’ Drayton reworked these stanzas into ottava rima, a pattern the prefatory epistle calls 'of all other the most complete and best proportioned'. Many more revisions followed before ‘The Barrons Wars’ saw its final shape. 

“’Englands Heroicall Epistles’ (1597) was to be among the most popular of Drayton's works. Modelled on Ovid's ‘Heroides’, at least in terms of genre but with more focus on history than on remote legend, it comprises paired epistles between famous lovers. Later editions added more lovers. As though to stress the historical nature of these mostly English lovers, Drayton appends notes to each epistle and dedicates most to some distinguished aristocrat; that so many of his narratives involve the fall of princes doubtless increased their political interest. The letters themselves show Drayton's interest in imagining his way into other people's interests and outlooks; half of the letters, after all, voice what he takes to be a female subjectivity.”

The “Legend of Thomas Cromwell” (1607) was the fourth and last of Drayton’s tragical legends. The poet’s main sources for this controversial choice were Foxe’s “Actes and Monuments”. It was incorporated into the 1610 edition of the “Mirror for Magistrates”.

“Drayton fretted when not recognized as Britain's laureate bard, and he rightly sensed that his interests and manner were remote from the cavalier poets on the one hand, whatever the lyric lightness he could summon, and from the metaphysicals on the other, whatever the witty compression that often strengthens his lines. Even his acidity can seem a reversion to a tone more suiting late Elizabethan satire. In a common if not wholly useful or valid taxonomy, he is a late 'Spenserian' poet. Yet he had distinguished friends and drew praise from such fellow poets as Richard Barnfield, Thomas Lodge, Joshua Sylvester, Sir William Alexander, Francis Beaumont, and William Browne…

“In the small theatre world he would have known Shakespeare, although no written evidence for this remains except an implausible note made around 1662 by John Ward, vicar of Stratford upon Avon, that mentions a 'merry meeting' at which Shakespeare, Drayton, and Jonson 'dranke too hard, for Shakespear died of a feaver there contracted'. Drayton's epistolary friendship with Drummond brought him great pleasure…

“Writing in an array of genres, Drayton can move from Neoplatonic flights to pastoral retreats free of royal neglect and the sad need to scramble for funds; to grieved witness of Time's hungry destruction of women and walls; to ironic visions of court life; and to an image of the British landscape in which rivers with excellent historical memories, boastful hills that look down on equally voluble valleys, rivers that run on at the mouth, self-assured towns, and lively fauna leave scant room for monarchy as the Stuarts conceived it.”(Prescott, ODNB)

II. The Battaile of Agincourt.

“A volume of miscellaneous works, The Battaile of Agincourt, appeared in 1627. Drayton may have hurried the title poem into print as background marching music for the duke of Buckingham's imminent campaign in France. The collection's best-known poem is 'Nimphidia, the Courte of Fayrie', an entertaining mock-heroic; its fascination with the materials, costumes, and stuffs of its minuscule fairies has been read as satirizing the court's obsession with fancy dress and imported goods. In the same volume are 'The Shepheards Sirena', which combines nostalgia for Elizabeth with anti-court satire, an interminable complaint by Margaret, wife of Henry VI, and 'The Quest for Cynthia'. Among the 'elegies', several of which had already appeared in Henry Fitzgeffrey's Certain Elegies (1617), is an epistle to Henry Reynolds that comments on English poets, including Shakespeare:

‘in thy naturall braine/ As strong conception, and as Cleere a rage/ As any one that trafiqu'd with the stage.’

“The volume is prefaced by liminary verses from friends and admirers, not least Ben Jonson. In 1619, on a visit to Drummond, he had said (recorded his host) that he 'esteemed not' of Drayton, that he disliked the choice of hexameter for Poly-Olbion, and that 'Drayton feared him'. Perhaps age and illness had taught Jonson tact, or perhaps, argues Thomas Cogswell, he perceived in Drayton's Agincourt poem a welcome if belated support for Stuart policies.”(Ibid).