Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624). Linche Richard
authority for use of the term "epyllion," though a significant point of scholarship, is not the main issue here. Either the term "minor epic" or "epyllion" is satisfactory, provided its referent is clear, and accurately described.
[2] Published with I. C's [John Chalkhill's?] Alcilia, Philoparthens Loving Folly. Whereunto is Added Pigmalion's Image … and Also Epigrammes by Sir I. H. [John Harington] and Others, STC 4275.
[3] Bibliographical Collections and Notes, 1893–1903 (London, 1903; reprinted 1961 by Burt Franklin), p. 301.
[4] Or Linche's.
[5] Actually Grosart edited the second impression of The Scourge, STC 969 (1614), the earliest impression he knew at the time, though by 1883 he had become aware of the unique Huth copy of the 1613 edition. (See pp. 49–50 issued with copy no. 38 of Grosart's edition of The Scourge.)
[6] Philos and Licia was probably not composed much before Oct. 2, 1606, when it was entered in A Transcript of the Registers … 1554–1640, ed. Arber, III (London, 1876), 330. I have placed it first, however, because of the undeserved neglect from which it has suffered over the years and because of its literary superiority to the other poems in the collection. I have placed Pyramus and Thisbe second because, though not known to have been published prior to 1617, it was doubtless composed by Nov. 25, 1596, the date given in the dedication, and probably printed shortly thereafter in an edition now lost.
[7] "Thomas Heywood's Art of Love Lost and Found," The Library, III (1922), 212.
[8] The Francis Freeling-Henry Huth-W. A. White copy, here reproduced by courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
[9] These evident errors appear to have been corrected in ink on the Bodleian copy of the 1620 impression, of which I have seen a microfilm.
[10] Gerald Eades Bentley has gleaned and summarized a few additional facts about Barksted in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (Oxford, 1941), 357–358. For an account of the correspondences between The Insatiate Countess and the poems, see R. A. Small, "The Authorship and Date of The Insatiate Countess," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, V (1896), 279–282. For a more recent survey of Barksted's probable contribution to The Insatiate Countess see A. J. Axelrad, Un Malcontent Élizabéthain: John Marston (Paris, 1955), pp. 86–90.
[11] The attribution was made by Thomas Corser in Collectanea Anglo-Poetica, LII (Manchester, 1860), 24–25, and has been generally accepted. In further support of Corser's attribution, one might mention the anecdote in Amos and Laura about a merchant seaman, followed by a vivid description of a storm at sea (pp. 218–219). Such a tale and description are appropriate in a poem by Page, who had been a naval chaplain and who published several sermons and other devotional works for seamen.
[12] Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598). Introduction by Don Cameron Allen (New York, 1938), p. 284.
[13] Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses and Fasti Oxonienses, 2 vols. in one (London, 1691), 467. Page was vicar of St. Nicholas Church in Deptford from 1597 until his death in 1630.
[14] Shakespeare's Ovid Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1904; reprinted Carbondale, Ill. 1961), IV, 67–201; X. 327–605.
[15] Not Orpheus, as stated by Professor Douglas Bush in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition (Minneapolis, 1932), p. 183.
[16] Shakespeare's Ovid, X, 343–346.
[17] Despite these departures from Ovid, the British Museum Catalogue continues to list this as a "translation" of Ovid's Metamorphoses, X. For a somewhat later example of an actual translation of this tale, considerably amplified, see James Gresham's (not Graham's, as in STC) The Picture of Incest, STC 18969 (1626), ed. Grosart (Manchester, 1876). In idiomatic English, occasionally ornamented with such triple epithets as "azure-veyned necke" and "Nectar-candied-words," Gresham expands Golding's Ovid by more than 300 lines. Although he invents a suitable brief description of Mirrha's nurse, whom he calls "old trott," and throws in a few erotic tid-bits quite in the spirit of the minor epic, he never departs from Ovid's story line and never introduces descriptive detail of which there is not at least a hint in Ovid.
[18] No. 95 in the edition cited below.
[19] Mary A. Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (Boston, 1916), pp. 20, 144.
[20] Poems by Richard Linche, Gentleman (1596), ed. Grosart, p. x; The Love of Dom Diego and Gynevra, ed. Arber in An English Garner, VII (Birmingham, 1883), 209.
[21] "The Source of Richard Lynche's 'Amorous Poeme of Dom Diego and Ginevra,'" PMLA, LVIII (1943), 579–580.
[22] William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, IV (London, 1929), 74. (Actually, "Catheloigne" in Painter.)
[23] Certain Tragical Discourses of Bandello, trans. Geffraie Fenton anno 1567. Introd. by Robert Langton Douglas, II (London, 1898), 239.
[24] Painter, I, No. 40, 153–158.
[25] Painter, I, 156.
[26] Painter, I, 157.
[27] Bush, p. 139.
[28] Two (Philos and Licia, Amos and Laura) employ the Marlovian couplet, two (Dom Diego and The Scourge) the Shakespearean sixain, and Barksted's two employ eight-line stanzas, with Mirrha