• 1  Randall Anderson pursues a similar comparison in his unpublished dissertation, (Anderson, 1997). A (...)

3Following previous work on the genre, I define ‘poetry anthology’ as a collection of poems by at least three different authors (Benedict, 1996: 3; Ferry, 2001: 31; Korte, 2000: 2-3). For the purpose of this paper I also follow Barbara Benedict in treating anthologies and miscellanies as “not fundamentally different” (Benedict, 1996: 3). I focus on anthologies that present themselves as surveys of national poetry, rather than of any particular subcategories of poetry (like cat poems) or specific time periods (like Elizabethan poetry), for the reason that such anthologies catering for a specialized market are less likely to be thought “typical” of an entire cultural group. Used as teaching tools in schools or university, as reference works or for private reading when individual editions are not affordable or available, survey anthologies can be said to have the broadest distribution of all poetry publications and poems from survey anthologies are most likely to enter cultural memory. Sixteenth-century anthologies certainly make their presence felt in later survey anthologies, though perhaps not overwhelmingly so.1 More interesting, however, than the sheer numbers of poems represented, is the continued influence of Elizabethan anthologies on the type of relation that the English (or even the British) cultivate to their national poetic heritage. Sixteenth-century poetry anthologies explicitly co-opt the lyrical, and that is to say the private, to the national. This conflation of the personal and the national continues as a defining element of national poetry anthologies still today. In this sense, the Elizabethan anthologies contributed fundamentally to the formation of national cultural memory.

• 2  Pomeroy qualifies the claim: “As Douglas Peterson points out, it is a mistake to describe the rhet (...)
• 3  For the influence of Tottel’s Miscellany on Philip Sidney, see Warkentin, 1984: 17-33, on Edmund S (...)
• 4  Rollins lists the entries #3, #16 (three times, also as parody), #18, #180, #181, #199 (twice), #2 (...)
• 5  Elizabeth Heale also describes Tottel as the originator of misogyny in the production and publicat (...)
• 6  The Paradyse of Daynty Deuices saw ten known editions in the Elizabethan age (Pomeroy, 1973: 53). (...)
• 7  Anderson traces 25 poems (15.72 per cent) from England’s Helicon and 16.25 per cent from Phoenix i (...)

5Songes and Sonettes was not only sold but also read, judging from the influence it seems to have exerted on poets and writers. It has been described as the foundation of the English sonnet craze, which had its height in the 1580s and 90s (Heninger Jr., 1986: 66). It has also been credited with an influential part in the development of English metrics from medieval accentual meter to the more modern syllabic meter and the use of verbal figures that came to be prominent in later poetry (May, 2009: 425).2 Poets like Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser drew inspiration from its pages, and educators like Roger Ascham and George Puttenham relied on it for examples.3 Shakespeare jokes about the miscellany when Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor wishes “I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here” (I, 1, 179-80). In Hamlet the gravedigger sings a song from Songes (#212 in Rollins’ edition) and a number of broadsheet ballad makers seem to have relied on it: Rollins lists twelve texts from the miscellany that were registered as ballads until 1569.4 Songes and Sonettes also became the model for further sixteenth-century poetry anthologies,5 such as The Paradyse of Daynty Deuices (1576), The Phoenix Nest (1593) or Englands Helicon (1600), in their turn considerable sales successes with several editions each to their name (Heninger, 1986: 66, 68).6 Beyond print, the entries of these collections also circulated widely in manuscript, both before and after they found their way into print,7 and Michelle O’Callaghan traces the transmission of these poems into contemporary practices of recreation like singing, dancing and domestic gatherings (O’Callaghan, 2020: passim).

• 8  Mary Crane discusses Tottel’s Miscellany as a handbook for social emulation and imagines a greengr (...)
• 9  For a detailed development of this argument see Lethbridge, 2014: 99-104.

6From the available evidence we can conclude that the cultural presence of these miscellanies at their time of production was considerable and across different social levels.8 What is more, this cultural presence was explicitly linked to the endeavour to forge a national tradition. In his frequently cited “Printer to the Reader” Tottel claims that the English lyric can vie with the works of “diuers Latines, Italians, and other” and he expresses the hope that his collection will be serviceable “to the honor of the Englishe tong, and for profit of the studious of Englishe eloquence” (Rollins, 1965: I, 2).9 Other Renaissance collections, like Brittons Bowre of Delight (1591, 1597) and Englands Helicon announce the connection to the national in their very titles. In this context, Renaissance anthologies assumed a cultural importance that encompassed much more than the development of poetry; these poetry collections were invested with social and cultural capital that was linked to national standing as well as practical use value that brought “the cultural domain of the bookshop and printing house into conversation with other sites for textual production and transmission—the court, universities, Inns of Court, and households in all their variety” (O’Callaghan, 2020: 11).

• 10  Lyric poetry continued largely in songbooks (Pomeroy, 1973: 119). For seventeenth-century miscella (...)
• 11  Edmund Curll republished the “Preface to the reader” and the poems by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (...)

7The cultural presence of Renaissance anthologies is less obvious when one adopts a longer-term perspective. With the beginning of the seventeenth century, the popularity of the Elizabethan poetry anthologies seems to have died down fairly abruptly. The miscellanies that follow in the next century are mixtures of satire, translations, political verse and general instruction, and thus quite different in nature from the Elizabethan lyric collections.10 Songes and Sonettes was republished in the early eighteenth century in incomplete editions,11 and all miscellanies under discussion here were republished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by then for a largely specialist audience with a scholarly interest in Renaissance poetry. My aim is to decide to what extent the texts from sixteenth-century poetry anthologies continue their presence in later survey anthologies of English or British poetry designed for a general public.

• 12  Fowler in fact offers six subcategories of the canon: potential (all available literature), offici (...)

8The immediate result of a simple counting exercise is that in the long run, there is a marked, though not an overwhelming presence of poems from Elizabethan miscellanies in the (easily accessible) national poetic canon. In particular, Songes and Sonettes and Helicon prove to have a notable longevity. Before I proceed to detail the results I need to add a caveat: the presence of any one text in widely used survey anthologies is no proof of this text’s cultural presence. Not all texts in anthologies are read and I present no empirical evidence that the poems from Elizabethan anthologies were indeed among those that were read. Alistair Fowler has made a useful distinction between “official” and “accessible” canon (Fowler, 1982: 214-215).12 While teaching and survey anthologies are frequently taken, in their entirety, to represent an officially sanctioned and institutionalized canon (Herrnstein Smith, 1984: 10), only parts of anthologies are usually read or taught. Anthologies have, however, at all times represented an economical access to poetry for those who are either short of funds or short of time: “paperback publication and anthologizing still limit the accessible canon for some social groups” (Fowler, 1982: 215). Making certain poetic texts thus accessible in collections that in their titles proclaim to be a representation of national heritage activates these poems for cultural memory, even if they are not activated for every individual reader. A second caveat needs to be added: numbers give a reassuring sense of empirical accuracy that is potentially misleading. The 81 poetry anthologies under consideration here only represent a fraction of the available material, though some care has been taken to include all well-known collections. The following figures can thus only be taken to indicate tendencies, not absolutes. I define at least three occurrences in later anthologies as a “significant” repetition. This number is a largely arbitrary choice—Anderson, for instance, considers five repetitions as noteworthy—which aims, however, to take into account that in the much larger number of available anthologies a poem that occurs in three collections is likely to occur in other collections not included in the count. Less than three repetitions are more likely to be idiosyncratic choices of an editor. At best, this system is imprecise, but it goes some way to overcoming the limits of counting.

• 13  This counts “The Shepheard’s Dumpe,” which appears twice in Englands Helicon, as one poem.

9Of the 310 poems in the first two editions of Songes and Sonettes, I have found 67 reprinted in later survey anthologies between the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries (see Table 1). 24 of these are reprinted at least three more times.13 That is to say 7.7 per cent of the poems from Songes and Sonettes continue to have what I called a significant presence in later survey anthologies. They are reprinted in 31 later anthologies (not counting other Tudor anthologies like The Paradyse of Daynty Deuices and Englands Helicon which both include poems from Songes). Poems from Tottel are thus represented in anthologies from the first half of the eighteenth century (starting with Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library, 1737, 14 poems) up until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in anthologies such as Christopher Ricks’ Oxford Book of English Verse (1999, nine poems) or more popular (or populist) collections like Poems on the Underground (ed. Gerard Benson et al., 2003, one poem) or England’s Favourite Poems (ed. George Courtauld, 2007, one poem). In other words, since the eighteenth century, more than one in three survey anthologies I looked at includes one or more poems from Songes and Sonettes.

• 14  Anderson also identifies “‘Amantium Irae’ as ‘the most anthologized poem of the miscellany’” (Ande (...)

11Though The Paradyse of Daynty Deuices achieved ten reprintings in the Elizabethan age, its longevity proved rather less than that of Songes or Helicon. Of the 99 entries in the original collection I found only nine poems with later occurrences and only two that occur at least three more times. The anonymous poem beginning “The sturdy Rock, for all its strength” had four later entries, though none after the nineteenth century, and Richard Edwards’ elegy “Amantium Irae” comes to nine later entries of which four are in twentieth-century anthologies.14 This amounts to a long-term survival rate of two per cent—if we include the “Sturdy Rock”—and only one per cent overall if we count into the twentieth century.

• 15  Thomas Lodge’s “The Shepheard’s Dumpe” (“Like desart woods, with darksome shades obscured”) is fir (...)

12The count for The Phoenix Nest is even lower. While seven of its 79 entries were obviously popular enough at the time to be taken into Englands Helicon, (one of them actually appears twice there)15 only two of its poems have a noteworthy rate of transmission into later survey anthologies. Raleigh’s “Sweet Violets, Love’s paradise” makes two further appearances after Englands Helicon in nineteenth-century anthologies and the anonymous “Shepheard’s Praise of His Sacred Diana” occurs in Helicon as well as in Archbishop Trench’s Household Book of English Poetry (1879) and in Paul Keegan’s New Penguin Book of English Verse (2001). Neither of these two later occurrences justifies an argument for any extensive cultural presence. Indeed, we might suspect that the survival rate that was achieved is not owing to The Phoenix Nest itself but to the reprinting of these poems in the long-term much more popular Helicon. This conclusion is also suggested by the fact that the alterations made in Helicon in order to “pastoralize” some of the Phoenix poems are repeated in later anthologies: “What cunning can expresse” turns into “What Sheepheard can expresse” (assigned to the Earl of Oxford in Helicon) and “A Description of Loue” has a career as “The Sheepheards description of Loue”.

• 16  Anderson’s results roughly coincide with these findings for Englands Helicon, The Phoenix Nest and (...)
• 17  For a detailed account of The Golden Treasury’s relation to other anthologies see Lethbridge 2014: (...)

This simple counting exercise suggests that while all four of these anthologies leave traces in later survey anthologies, two of them (Songes and Sonettes and Englands Helicon) have a noteworthy long-term survival rate into post-sixteenth-century anthologies of 21 (Songes) or even 41 (Helicon) per cent, and a rate of at least three repetitions of around ten per cent (7.7% for Songes and 11.9% for Helicon).16 I described this survival rate earlier as a moderately high one. This assessment merits a brief explanation. It has become a commonplace in criticism to associate anthologies with canon formation and in this context it is sometimes assumed that a poem’s inclusion in an influential anthology is more or less identical with the canonization of this particular poem (Korte, 2000: 10). In actual fact, and taking a long-term perspective, the majority of anthologized poems do not enter any kind of canon. In the 85 anthologies which I examined, over two thirds (70 per cent) of the poems occur only once; roughly sixteen per cent of poems occur at least three times; about two and a half per cent occur ten or more times (Lethbridge 2014: 33). In this sense, the re-occurrence of about twenty poems each from Songes and Helicon, which amounts to roughly ten per cent of the poems contained in those two anthologies, is in fact a performance that is not dramatically below average. Very influential anthologies, like F.T. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861), it must be said, achieve a considerably higher rate of overlap with other anthologies: Over 50 per cent of the Golden Treasury poems occur in at least three other anthologies, either before or afterwards.17

• 18  StClair’s claim has been questioned by O’Callaghan (2020: 160) who sees no evidence for proceeding (...)

13Compared to Palgrave, of course, Elizabethan miscellanies have a notably worse starting position, for two reasons: first, as it is in the nature of survey anthologies to cover all periods of poetry, any one period, in this case the Elizabethan period, will receive an increasingly smaller proportion of the whole as time goes on. Since the Golden Treasury covers the Elizabethan through to the Romantic period, its chances of overlap with earlier or later anthologies is obviously much higher. The second reason for the disadvantageous starting point of the Elizabethan miscellanies is likely to lie in the development of copyright legislation. Around 1600 came what William StClair has termed the “clamp-down” on anthologies, abridgements and quotations (StClair, 2004: 482).18 With the growing commercial importance of the literary print market, there seems to have come a shift in the awareness and defense of copyright which discouraged the gathering of flowers “from other people’s private gardens” as StClair puts it (StClair, 2004: 69). The circumstances of the civil war and a retreat of elite circles into forms of manuscript transmission might also have contributed to the decline in printed collections. Whatever the reason, the type of publication that offered collections of poetry and song during the seventeenth century offered relatively few Elizabethan poets (see Smyth, 2004: 6-7).

• 19  Ellis also included three poems from The Phoenix Nest and six from The Paradyse of Daynty Deuices. (...)
• 20  Hazlitt had published a first version of his anthology in 1824, but was forced to withdraw it for (...)

15Nor did the change in copyright law in 1774 which released large quantities of literature into the public domain cause an immediate change in the transmission process of sixteenth-century lyrics. It was only in the early nineteenth century, when a number of Romantic poets turned editors of national survey anthologies, that the poems from Renaissance anthologies were able to stage a notable reappearance. The romantic anthology that seems to have had the most marked influence on the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Elizabethan anthologies was George Ellis’ Specimens of Early English Poets (1790 and 1811) which contained 37 poems from Songes and 22 from Helicon.19 With the enthusiasm of the Romantics for the vernacular and pre-Enlightenment past, national survey anthologies began to represent Renaissance verse, starting notably with William Hazlitt’s 1825 anthology Select British Poets20 and S.C. Hall’s three-volume Book of Gems in the 1830s, both of which included large sections of Renaissance lyrics, mostly Shakespeare sonnets, but there are also seven poems from Songes and Sonettes and six from Englands Helicon in The Book of Gems. After that, poems from Songes and Helicon maintained a fairly stable presence in major nineteenth-century anthologies such as T.H. Ward’s English Poets (1880) or Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). While Palgrave’s Golden Treasury included six poems from Helicon, it did not include anything from Songes. In contrast, both Songes and Helicon put in a notable appearance in Beeton’s Great Book of Poetry, an anthology that was published in monthly shilling numbers in 1869-70 and in sixpenny installments in 1881, thus making this particular Renaissance heritage available also to those with leaner budgets. In the twentieth century it is largely establishment anthologies like the Oxford Books of English Verse by Helen Gardner and Christopher Ricks, the Everyman New Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics by Ernest Rhys or the Norton Anthology of Poetry that maintain the cultural presence of these Renaissance texts.

• 21  Shakespeare’s The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, had printed the poem without title and without stanzas (...)
• 22  Isaac Walton’s Compleat Angler (1653) is the first to give Raleigh as author (Rollins, 1935: II, 1 (...)

The all-time favourite from these Elizabethan anthologies is Christopher Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” one of the most successful anthology poems ever, with no less than 30 occurrences in later anthologies from this sample, including such popular twentieth- and twenty-first-century collections as The Nation’s Favourite Poems (1996) or Poems on the Underground (2003). The Helicon version of the poem was the first complete printing (Rollins, 1935: vol. 2, 186-187).21 In terms of number of reprints, Marlowe’s is followed after a significant gap by Raleigh’s answer poem “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (19 later occurrences). Both poems appeared in Helicon, though Raleigh is not given as author there.22 The most popular reprints from Songes are Surrey’s “The soote season” (16) and “Prisoned in Windsor” (13) and Wyatt’s “My lute awake perform the last” (19) and “They flee from me” (12). The four poems are represented in later anthologies throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are still to be found in the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (10^th ed., 2018). All these poems celebrate love relationships and can be linked to an author’s name. The more openly didactic and frequently anonymous poems in Songes do not have a long life in terms of cultural presence, a thematic preference which also explains the meagre survival rate of poems from Paradyse, which focus largely on didactic topics and proverbial wisdom.

• 23  Anthologies like F.T. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury or A. Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Vers (...)

17More significant, however, than the long-term cultural survival of individual poems in my view is the combination of private and public spheres and their explicit connection to or even conflation with a national experience that Tottel was among the first to offer. In fact, pushing the significance of this conflation of the discourses of private elite, public benefit and national fervour one step further, I should like to claim that Tottel’s achievement is precisely to validate the private experience of the reader of lyric verse as nationally relevant. He posits the private as a personal instantiation of the national and in this sense invites buyers and readers, as Sara Lodge has put it for a nineteenth-century context, “to construct their ‘private memories’ upon the foundational “public memories” (literal or figurative)” which the collection purveys (Lodge, 2004: 28). Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, probably the most influential poetry anthology of the nineteenth century, has repeatedly been credited with establishing the lyric as the essence of the English poetic heritage (Clausen, 1981: 67; Lewis, 1962: 23-24). Palgrave’s particular achievement was that he managed to invest lyrical poetry with sufficient public consecration to make it a representative expression of, and for, the imagined community of the English, or even the British nation.23 I would contend, however, that Palgrave merely completes an already present process of combining private and public poetic experience into national significance, a process that was in fact initiated by Tottel’s collection.