This article concerns two seventeenth-century poems that have not been printed before except for brief extracts. They occupy pages 26–36 in a commonplace book in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C., known as MS.V.a.160 (formerly MS.452.1). The poems are there attributed to Thomas Dekker, one of the better-known Jacobean dramatists, author of The Shoemakers' Holiday and other middle-class comedies, and of a large number of pamphlets of ‘London life’ which are of great interest to the student of colloquial speech in the Jacobean period. Though the commonplace book includes other interesting material, my discussion will confine itself to the two Dekker items, their import and their claim to genuineness, with one slight exception only. The exception is a version of a little-known epitaph attributed, though not very persuasively, to Shakespeare, which I cite in a footnote since it has apparently not been printed for over a hundred years. Of the two Dekker poems, the second one is a bawdy song which probably refers to a special popular entertainment of the day.

The immediate occasion for the hostilities which broke out in 1375 between Florence and the church was the plundering activity of the English mercenary company under John Hawkwood. This ‘santa compagnia’, employed by the church during its struggle with the Visconti, was now without income and consequently moved into Tuscany, plundering and robbing. The costs of ransoming Florentine territory by a series of payments to Hawkwood were met by loans forced partly from the clergy of Florence and Fiesole.

To carry out this task of collecting taxes from reluctant citizens and clergy, the government appointed a balia, or commission, of eight men.

The history of Henry VIII's first ‘divorce’, a topic of so many implications, naturally has mysteries to be solved. Further study of contemporary documents can be expected to clarify much that still tantalizes us. Yet there is another aspect of the subject of Henry's marital status which has hardly been investigated, namely the state of the law on Henry's capacity to act if he were really incestuously married. If it were a fact that he was incestuously married, it must needs follow that he lacked some of the powers he would have had if he were not subject to this disability: and this is a fact of which his advisers will have taken notice. To bring legal material bearing on this aspect of the problem back into light may help to clear up one of the mysteries, namely how we are to explain the king's ambiguous attitude towards his marriage between the years 1525 and 1527.

In praising the poetic talent of Queen Elizabeth the author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) exclaims that she

Few examples of her work survive to provide a basis for measuring the relative amounts of critical judgment and expected flattery in this praise. To these few one more can now perhaps be added. It is a Latin epigram attributed to the Queen that was printed by Paul Melissus, the German humanist, poet, and musician, at the end of a collection of his own Latin poems entitled P. Melissi Mele sive Odae … Epigrammata, published at Nuremberg in 1580. So far as I can determine, modern scholars have not been aware of this poem or of the circumstances that make highly plausible its authenticity as the work of Elizabeth.

Although Richard Johnson (ca. 1573–1659) has received little critical or scholarly attention, his own output was quite large and various, and probably popular. He authored two chivalric romances; several volumes of poetry, including a collection of fast-moving ballads; some descriptive topographical verse; a satiric tract or two; a jest book; and several elegies.

To this list can now be added one more piece. That is the recently recovered elegy of 234 lines entitled Musarum Plangores, a memorial on the death of Sir Christopher Hatton. What is probably the unique copy of this work now lies in the Folger Shakespeare Library. It lacks a title page and bears no colophon. The date of publication, however, was probably 1591, the year in which Hatton died, although there is no record of its being printed. The author is ‘R. Johnson’, for that name, followed by the letters Sa., occurs at the end of the poem.

They bene ybrought into a comely bowre,
And seru'd of all things that mote needfull bee
Yet secretly their hoste did on them lowre,
And welcomde more for feare, then charitce;
But they dissembled, what they did not see,
And welcomed themselves. Supper was dight;
Then they Malbecco prayd of curtesy,
That of his Lady they might have the sight,
And company at meat, to do them more delight.

Any reader of Renaissance News will immediately identify this stanza as one of the thousands that make up The Faerie Queene; in fact, given the name Malbecco and the situation described, he cannot fail to spot it as occurring in the ninth canto of Book Three. In a sense, however, he will be in error. It is actually a spurious composite of two of Spenser's stanzas in that canto: the nineteenth, which supplies everything before the period in line 6, and the twenty-fifth, from which the remainder is taken.

Filippo Bruno was born in Nola, Italy, in 1548. At the age of seventeen he joined the Dominican Order in Naples and changed his given name to Giordano. Eleven years later, anticipating an indictment for heresy, he put off his monastic dress and fled. During the next sixteen years he wandered throughout Europe, pausing here and there until his welcome wore out. Three of these years were spent in England, where he became a member of the circle surrounding Florio, Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville. It was during these three years that he produced the writings, in Italian, by which he is best known. In 1591, after further wanderings, he made the fatal mistake of returning to Italy. He was arrested in Venice and, after some dispute among the interested authorities, was consigned to the Inquisition in Rome. His trial occupied the remainnig eight years of his life.

This summary description of 143 recently acquired Italian Renaissance manuscripts is not a detailed list nor an evaluation of the collection. An evaluation would require considerably greater familiarity with the business history of Florence than this reporter possesses.

According to the limited information available, the entire group of these business records originally formed part of the Gondi archives, described by Roberto Ridolfi in Gli archivi delle famiglie fiorentine. More specifically it belonged to that part of the Gondi archives which was left by the sisters Caterina (b. 1694) and Elisabetta (b. 1693), descendants of Giuliano il Vecchio, to the Ritiro della Quiete in Florence. Ridolfi refers rather briefly to the commercial papers then in the Ritiro, but fails to explain how they came to include so few Gondi and so many Medici and Amadori volumes.

In 1961 I published a Catalogue of Italian Plays, 1500–1700, in the Library of the University of Toronto (University of Toronto Press). Since then the Library has acquired several more plays, some of them of major importance in the history of Renaissance drama. Of outstanding interest are the first edition of Giordano Bruno's Il Candelaio, the first edition of the prose version of Ariosto's Gli suppositi, the first edition of Ottavio Rinuccini's L'Euridice, and the 1620 edition of Prospero Bonarelli's Il Solimano with the handsome plates etched by Jacques Callot.

Satan's fall from heaven to hell is an external or physical reflection of his moral degeneration from Lucifer to Adversary. Yet Satan himself understandably rejects this parallel, insisting that his is

That is Satan's conclusion; the major premise upon which his argument depends is this:

As Isabel MacCaffrcy notes, Satan's boast is at odds with the action of the epic as a whole; and, as D. C. Allen's scholarship has shown, it perhaps is based on heresy. I nevertheless suggest that to reject Satan's speech out of hand is in one way wrong, for the premise of his argument—if not the conclusion—is partially true. And fully to appreciate the way in which Satan's logic goes awry requires, I think, an understanding of the philosophic background from which Satan's words arise.

A real event in Renaissance scholarship was the publication of Bernard Weinberg's monumental History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, already reviewed in Renaissance News [xv, 215-217], Manuscripta, Italica, and elsewhere as a work that will stand for many a long year as the definitive treatment of the subject. Of the more than 400 documents studied, not less than 89 are in unpublished manuscripts, the vast majority being in humanistic Latin and all awaiting further research.

Most of the authors discussed by Weinberg are men who were also of the first importance in the history of classical scholarship. In that particular field, by far the most important production of the year is Deno John Geanakoplos' Greek Scholars in Venice (Harvard, 1962) [RN xv, 305–306]; this is not a rehash of old material but an independent investigation of the unfamiliar.

After years in which several important contributions on the drama of the Renaissance appeared, it is disappointing to have to record that 1962 was a poor year for new works on the literature of the period. No new book of full length has conic to my notice. A revised version of the second volume of the Annalen der deutschen Literatur provides a useful work of reference for those seeking the names of authors and works written during the sixteenth century but it can scarcely claim new interpretations. Such editions of texts as have appeared are either reprints of the Neudrucke deutscher Literaturwerke, e.g., Luther's Fables, or popular versions such as the Stiasny paperbacks of Rebhhun's Susanna. One important series should be mentioned. The Realienbücher für Germainisten being produced by the Metzler Verlag plans volumes in the field of sixteenth-century literature, and if all are of the same high standard as Bert Nagel's Meistersang they will indeed be useful.