The Passionate Pilgrim
CHAPTE R 5 "TJ.ates ' . cozne· d" : ''W. S''-na kespeare , zn· Jagg' ar,d 's The Passionate Pilgrim [William Jaggard was] an infamous pirate, liar, and thief [who pro duced a] worthless litrle volume of stolen and mutilated poetry, parched up and padded our with dirty and dreary doggerel. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894), 90 W ith the 1623 First Folio and rhe 1599 and 1612 editions of The Passionate PiLgrim, William Jagga rd had primed the first collecrions of both Shakespeare's plays and his poems. Margrcra de Grazia, Sbakespeare Verbntim (1991). 167 T he above epigraphs pi npoint changing critical perceptions of William Jaggard's role in Shal(espeare's professional career. At the end of the nineteenth century, Swinburne works from a "Romantic" view of the autonomous author to judge Jaggard morally and The Passionate Pilgrim aesthetically. Jaggard is a cheat and the poetry poor. Since the poems' only begetter is a pirate, liar, and thief, and his li ttle volume stolen, mutilated, patched, padded, dirty, dreary, and worthless, who could find interest in the enterprise? A hundred years later, de Grazia helps us begin to under stand why. Even if we condemn Jaggard, he occupies a historic position in the printing of the national poet-playwright. He is the first to anticipate modern editors, including Malone, in the publication of both "the plays and poems ofWill iam Shakspeare." In between Swinburne and de Grazia, W illiam Empson gets at the crux of the histori cal matter when he remarks, "The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is a cheat, by a pirate who is very appreciative of the work of Shakespeare" ("Narrative Poems," u ).
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