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Richard Johnson's ‘Musarum Plangores’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jerry H. Bryant
Jerry H. Bryant*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Summer 1963 , pp. 94 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1963

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References

1 Willkomm, Hans Werner, Über Richard Johnsons Seven Champions of Christendom (1596) (Berlin, 1911)Google Scholar; David Allan Robertson, ‘Richard Johnson and The Seaven Champions of Christatdome’, unpublished dissertation (Princeton, 1940); articles include Chester, Allan G., ‘Richard Johnson's Golden Garland ’, MLQ, x (1949), 61–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dickson, Arthur, ‘ “Fat” (Hamlet, v, ii, 298)Google Scholar’, SQ, II (1951), 171-172; Maxwell, J. C., ‘ “Fat and Scant of Breath” Again’, English Studies, xxxii (1951), 29–30 Google Scholar; Williams, Franklin B. Jr., ‘Richard Joimson's Borrowed Tears’, SP, xxxiv (1937), 186–190 Google Scholar (shows that Johnson's Anghrum Lacrimae was plagiarized from Thomas Rogers' Celestiall Elegies of the Goddesses and the Muses [1598]).

2 Athenae Oxonicnses, ed. Bliss, 1, 583.

3 Sir Christopher Hatton, Queen Elizabeth's Favourite (London, 1947), p. 357.

4 Oxford, 1912, II, 32.

5 Willkomm and Robertson assign A Remembrance to one Ralph Jackson. Their authority is Hazlitt, who in the Handbook (p. 294) writes that ‘this tract is wrongly given to Richard Johnson [the ascription had been made by Malone in his copy of the piece, now in the Bodleian Library]. See Peck's Desid. Cur.’ The citation is to Peck, Francis, Desiderata Curiosa (London, 1779), 1, 205–211 Google Scholar, which contains an account of the carl's last days by John Bowles, Salisbury's chaplain. The critical sentence reads, ‘My lords head laye upon two pillowes upon master Townsends lapp: Raphe Jackson was mendinge the swinge which supported him’ (p. 210). There were, apparently, two issues of A Remembrance. One contains only the initials of the author, the one probably which Hazlitt saw. The other, however, puts all conjecture to rest, for it contains Richard Johnson's full name. The Short-Title Catalogue correctly assigns the book to Johnson.

6 Robertson thinks his authorship is unlikely (p. 3).

7 See Smith, Hallett, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the conventions of elegiac poetry.