Tottel's Miscellany : Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others

'Hers will I be, and onely with this thought
Content my selfe, although my chaunce be nought'

Songs and Sonnets (1557), the first printed anthology of English poetry, was immensely influential in Tudor England, and inspired major Elizabethan writers including Shakespeare. Collected by pioneering publisher Richard Tottel, it brought poems of the aristocracy - verses of friendship, war, politics, death and above all of love - into wide common readership for the first time. The major poets of Henry VIII's court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were first printed in the volume. Wyatt's intimate poem about lost love which begins 'They flee from me, that sometime did me seke', and Surrey's passionate sonnet 'Complaint of a lover rebuked' are joined in the miscellany by a large collection of diverse, intriguingly anonymous poems both moral and erotic, intimate and universal.

Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul's introduction considers the tumultuous political backdrop to these works and the fascinating and often dangerous lives of their authors. An extensive notes section detailing the poems' sources in Classical and Petrarchan writing is accompanied by suggestions for further reading.

Edited with an introduction and notes by AMANDA HOLTON and TOM MacFAUL.

About The Author

Tom MacFaul lectures in Renaissance poetry and drama at Corpus Christi college, Oxford. His books include Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2007) and Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson (2010). Amanda Holton is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, and a specialist in Old and Middle English and the English language. Her books include The Sources of Chaucer's Poetics (2008).