It has been generally assumed that the extant edition of the Handfull is a re-issue, with additions, of the 1566 Pleasant Sonnets. This was suggested by Ritson.[1] Collier, in his Extracts from the Stationers' Registers,[2] thought that the identity of the two works was not altogether probable, but succeeded in showing that one or two of the ballads that appear in the Handfull were licensed for publication before the Pleasant Sonnets. More recently, most scholars interested in ballads have believed that the Pleasant Sonnets was a first edition of the Handfull,—among them, Hazlitt,[3] Chappell,[4] Sir Sidney Lee,[5] Ebsworth, Arber, and Mr. Harold H. Child.[6] Ebsworth found among the Bagford ballads a single leaf which he believed to belong to "an earlier edition" than the 1584 Handfull.[7] Arber did not feel sure that this leaf belonged to an earlier edition, but he attempted to name the Handfull ballads that could not have appeared in the 1566 Pleasant Sonnets.
Still more recently, however, Mr. Crawford, in his edition of Englands Parnassus,[8] has expressed this opinion of the matter: "Parts of the work [i.e., the Handfull] must surely have been composed after A Gorgious Gallery [1578], for I notice that three poems in it are made up principally from two poems that appear in its predecessor, whole stanzas in each, and several of them coming together in the same order, being worded almost exactly alike. . . The theory that A Handefull of Pleasant Delights may be identical with 'A boke of very pleasaunte sonnettes and storyes in myter,' by Clement Robinson, licensed to R. Jhones in 1566, can hardly be entertained when one finds that it is in parts but a rehash of pieces in A Gorgious Gallery; but it is possible that Robinson gave a place in his anthology to poems that were previously printed in his book of sonnets and stories." Mr. Crawford gives no references, but he was referring to the three ballads numbered 4, 6, and 23 below,
- ↑ Bibliographia Poetica, p. 311.
- ↑ See especially I, 144.
- ↑ Handbook to Early English Literature, p. 515.
- ↑ Popular Music, I, 91.
- ↑ Dict. Nat. Biog., article "Clement Robinson."
- ↑ Cambridge History of English Literature, III, 190.
- ↑ The leaf is reprinted in Ebsworth's Bagford Ballads, I, 41 f., and also in Arber's edition of the Handfull (hereafter cited as Arber), pp. xv–xvi.
- ↑ Page xix. Seccombe and Allen (The Age of Shakespeare, 1903, I, 56) positively declare that "in 1584 appeared A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, a collection of, up to that time, unpublished lyrics."
