The Passionate Pilgrim



The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is an anthology of 20 poems collected and published by William Jaggard that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are accepted by present-day scholars as authentically Shakespearean. These are two sonnets, later to be published in the 1609 collection of Shakespeare's sonnets, and three poems extracted from the play Love's Labour's Lost.

Other poems in the collection may be by Shakespeare, but it also contains poems definitely identifiable as the work of other authors, and Jaggard later published an augmented edition with poems he knew to be by Thomas Heywood. For this reason the remaining poems cannot be definitively confirmed or rejected as Shakespeare's.

Editions
The Passionate Pilgrim was published by William Jaggard, later the publisher of Shakespeare's First Folio. The first edition survives only in a single fragmentary copy; its date cannot be fixed with certainty since its title page is missing, though many scholars judge it likely to be from 1599, the year the second edition appeared with the attribution to Shakespeare. The title page of this second edition states that the book is to be sold by stationer William Leake; Leake had obtained the rights to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in 1596 and published five octavo editions of that poem (the third edition through the eighth) in the 1599–1602 period.

Jaggard issued an expanded edition of The Passionate Pilgrim in 1612, containing additional poems on the theme of Helen of Troy, announced on the title page ("Whereunto is newly added two Love Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellen's answere back again to Paris"). These were in fact by Thomas Heywood, from his Troia Britannica, which Jaggard had published in 1609. Heywood protested the piracy in his Apology for Actors (1612), writing that Shakespeare was "much offended" with Jaggard for making "so bold with his name." Jaggard withdrew the attribution to Shakespeare from unsold copies of the 1612 edition.

All the early editions of The Passionate Pilgrim are in octavo format. They were carelessly printed with many errors, in contrast to the carefully printed early editions of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

The poems in The Passionate Pilgrim were reprinted in John Benson's 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems, along with the Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, The Phoenix and the Turtle, and other pieces. Thereafter the anthology was included in collections of Shakespeare's poems, in Bernard Lintott's 1709 edition and subsequent editions.

Musical settings
Several of the poems have been set to music. In the nineteenth century, the English composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop produced musical settings for number 7, "Fair is my love", and number 20, "As it fell". Number 20 was also set by Aaron Copland for voice, flute and oboe. Number 12, "Crabbed age", has also been set by several composers, including Hubert Parry and Madeleine Dring.