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Title: Englands Helicon. Or The Muses harmony.
Date: London : Printed [by Thomas Snodham] for Richard More, and are to be sould at his shop in S. Dunstanes Church-yard, 1614.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA
Call number and opening: STC 3192 title page, sigs. A2v-A3r & E4v-E5r
View online bibliographic record
Folger Shakespeare Library staff, "Englands Helicon, second edition: names Shakespeare in the table of contents and contains a sonnet from Love's Labor's Lost ascribed to Shakespeare," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/766.
Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 3192. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/766.
Like the first edition of 1600, the second edition of Englands Helicon (1614), includes a sonnet from act 4, scene 3 of Love’s Labor’s Lost (1598). The poem in Englands Helicon is ascribed to “W. Shakespeare,” identical to the “W. Shakespeare” attribution on the title page of the first edition of Love’s Labor’s Lost.
Englands Helicon titles the sonnet “The passionate Sheepheards Song.” In Love’s Labor’s Lost, the sonnet is spoken by Dumaine, one of the three lords who joins the King of Navarre on his scholarly retreat (4.3.105-124). This later edition also includes a table of contents listing “The passionate Shepheards Song” by “W. Shakespeare.” In 1601, the poet and anthologist Francis Davison, evidently preparing for his compiled Poetical Rhapsody (1602), created his own table of contents for Helicon, including “On a day alack the day” (the first line of the sonnet) by “W. Shakespeare.”
Englands Helicon was part of a series of literary anthologies initiated sponsored by John Bodenham (ca. 1559–1610), including Bel-vedére (1600), which includes over 200 extracts from Shakespeare’s plays and poems.
Written by Folger Shakespeare Library staff
Sources
G. Blakemore Evans, general ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997): 1881.
David Kathman, “Chronological List of References to Shakespeare as Author/Poet/Playwright” <http://shakespeareauthorship.com/name3.html>.
Hyder Edward Rollins, England's Helicon: 1600, 1614 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935): 2:37.
Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue. Vol. III, 1590-1597 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), s.v. "324. Love’s Labor’s Lost".
Last updated August 11, 2020