Thomas Heywood and the Much Offended Mr. Shakespeare

It is difficult to think of a more prolific Elizabethan-Jacobean writer than Thomas Heywood.  In the address To The Reader prefixed to The English Traveller (1633) he says he has had "an entire hand or at least a main finger" in two hundred and twenty plays.  This is exclusive of his non-dramatic output, which was also extensive.  His furious pace of production often skirted the borders, if it did not actually enter the territory, of plagiarism.  He was a liberal borrower from Shakespeare.

We are concerned with Mr. Heywood, however, in his famous (if ironic) protest on the misattribution of his work to Shakespeare.  Appended to his Apologie for Actors (1612) is an epistle to the printer and publisher of the same, Nicholas Okes, in which Heywood complains about the publication by the piratical printer William Jaggard (later of First Folio fame), in the third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim (1612) of some of Heywood's own work.  (Note: There were, apparently, two editions of The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, with no extant complete copies of the first.  Thus, the 1612 edition is the "third" edition). 

The Passionate Pilgrim is a collection of poems by various Elizabethan writers, containing only 5 legitimate poems by Shakespeare: poems I and II are early or corrupt versions of his Sonnets 138 and 144; poems III, V and XVI are lifted from Love's Labour's Lost which, in the context of the play, are meant to be satires of sonnets.  The rest of The Passionate Pilgrim is filler, as they say, though some of it quite literate filler, including works by Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Richard Barnfield. 

Among the filler in the third edition are several poems by Thomas Heywood, notably including two love epistles translated by Heywood from Ovid's Heroides which were published as part of his Troia Britannica or Great Britain's Troy (1609), an epistle of Paris to Helen and one of Helen to Paris which are trumpeted on the title page,  a transcription of which is reproduced here from Rolfe's edition of 1906:

THE | PASSIONATE | PILGRIME. | or | Certaine Amorous Sonnets, \ betweene Venus and Adonis, | newly corrected and aug- \ mented. | By W. Shakespere. \ The third Edition. | Whereunto is newly ad- | ded two Loue- Epistles, the first | from Paris to Hellen, and | Hellens answere backe | againe to Paris. \ Printed by W. Iaggard. | 1612.

The title pages of all editions (apparently, since the title page to the first edition is not extant) of The Passionate Pilgrim attribute all the works contained therein to "W. Shakespere."  The printer of the orginal Troia Britannica was the same William Jaggard, who, as we will see, answered Heywood so insolently when he was requested to print a list of his errata.  With this as background, here is Heywood's epistle to Okes, taken from Literary Blunders: A Chapter in the "History of Human Error" by H. B. Wheatley:

To my approved good Friend, MR. NICHOLAS OKES.

The infinite faults escaped in my booke of Britaines Troy by the negligence of the printer, as the misquotations, mistaking the sillables, misplacing halfe lines, coining of strange and never heard of words, these being without number, when I would have taken a particular account of the errata, the printer answered me, hee would not publish his owne disworkemanship, but rather let his owne fault lye upon the necke of the author. And being fearefull that others of his quality had beene of the same nature and condition, and finding you, on the contrary, so carefull and industrious, so serious and laborious to doe the author all the rights of the presse, I could not choose but gratulate your honest indeavours with this short remembrance. Here, likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in that worke, by taking the two epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a lesse volume under the name of another, which may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him, and hee, to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name; but as I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage under whom he hath publisht them, so the author, I know, much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name. These and the like dishonesties I knowe you to bee cleere of ; and I could wish but to bee the happy author of so worthy a worke as I could willingly commit to your care and workmanship.

Yours ever, THOMAS HEYWOOD

We learn here of Shakespeare "and hee, to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name," meaning, I take it, that he has since published his Sonnets in under his own name, referring to the 1609 edition of the Sonnets.  (This, by the way, is evidence contra those who theorize that the Sonnets were somehow surreptitiously transmitted to the printer Thomas Thorpe and printed without Shakespeare's authorization). 

We also learn that Shakespeare is "much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name."  The use of Shakespeare's name to enhance the saleability of a book was nothing new by 1612.  It was much newer in 1599 and signaled Shakespeare's arrival at the pinnacle of his profession.

Jaggard responded to complaints about the 1612 edition by canceling the title page and printing a new one, without Shakespeare's name.  We learn from Rolfe that

The Bodleian copy of this edition contains the following note by Malone: "All the poems from Sig. D. 5 were written by Thomas Heywood, who was so offended at Jaggard for printing them under the name of Shakespeare that he has added a postscript to his Apology for Actors, 4to, 1612, on this subject; and Jaggard in consequence of it appears to have printed a new title-page to please Heywood, without the name of Shakespeare in it. The former title-page was no doubt intended to be cancelled, but by some inadvertence they were both prefixed to this copy and I have retained them as a curiosity."

In 1905 Sidney Lee published a facsimile of the 1599 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, along with an illustration of the two title pages to which Malone refers from the 1612.  I reproduce them here.

This copy, at the Bodleian in the Malone collection, of the 1612 title page without Shakespeare's name, is not known to exist anywhere else. 

We do not know for a fact that it was Heywood's complaints that caused Jaggard to issue the new title page, or whether the "much offended" M. Shakespeare intervened.  Jaggard showed himself insolently unresponsive to Heywood's earlier request for a summary of errata in the printing of Troia Britannica, but in this later instance Heywood took the unusual step of registering a public, printed protest.  Jaggard may have perceived his public reputation in danger and Heywood's philippic may have had its desired effect.  Since Shakespeare, as far as we know, lodged no protest over the first edition(s) of The Passionate Pilgrim, I think it unlikely he became exercised over the 1612 edition either, and that Heywood's overwrought epistle to Okes may well be calculated exaggeration.