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Albert Chatterley, The Tears of Fancie Or Love Disdained by T.W. (1593), Notes and Queries, Volume 59, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 48–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr227
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Extract
AN examination of this book of sixty ‘English’ sonnets printed by John Danter reveals two significant problems. One is well-known—John Payne Collier's upgrading of the author's initials to stand for the poet Thomas Watson. These initials appear in two places: after the final sonnet in the printed copy, and in the original Stationer's Company Register entry of 11 August 1593 to which Collier has added his intervention as a note in ‘a shaky and painstaking imitation of Elizabethan secretary’. His many forgeries and ‘afterthoughts’ have been by now thoroughly exposed, this particular one (and its type) having been effectively dealt with by Franklin Dickey in 1960.1 The second problem, the implication of the complete removal from the book of the two leaves containing sonnets 9 to 16 has been noted but, to my knowledge, never examined.
The book itself exists only as a unique copy and this demonstrably a proof, so one may perhaps assume that although it is dated right in the middle of the sonnet-publishing period of the early 1590s it was never put on sale. A calculation to show that it was 122 years old in 1715 and a faded inscription of a gift offering are penned on the title-page, and the name ‘Elizabeth’ in a seemingly sixteenth-century hand stands below at the left, the right-hand side now torn away. The signature Jo. Walker and the date 1761 (so possibly the father of the antiquarian) are written on the third binding leaf. Some time after this date the copy became part of the great library of Richard Heber (1773–1833). Its present condition is Heber's rebinding for it bears the ticket of Robert Seton, 423 Lawn Market, Edinburgh, who started work in 1809, thus dating the event in the early nineteenth century. The binding incorporates earlier endpapers.2 If these endpapers are the originals then this would suggest that the book stayed in its first format from 1593 to after 1809. In the late 1830s Heber's entire library was put up in various sales, and in Part IV of an 1836 sale catalogue the note to this book, Number 2869, records that the two folios are missing. Inspection shows they are folios 1 and 2 of the B gathering, and nothing is left of them, so it seems that at some earlier point they may have been excised deliberately. The note goes on, ‘Had Steeven's ever seen this collection of Watson's sonnets, there would have seemed better ground for his statement that Watson was “a more elegant sonneteer than Shakespeare” for the poems are generally superior to any being found in the Ekatompathia’. While we may disregard the reference to Shakespeare since it seems that Steeven's had refused to include those sonnets in his edition because of their homoerotic content, this comment on the relationship of the Tears to Watson's earlier set should give us some pause regarding Collier's intervention.
