that there are poems by him in the Miscellaneous Works of the Earl of Roscommon, 1709, pp. 162, 164.
Other attributions in the volume, which may possibly be of interest, are:
AN INEDITED MS. OF FORD’S FAMES MEMORIALL
John Ford’s poem Fames Memoriall, or the Earle of Devonshire Deceased, etc., was first published in 1606, with a dedication to the widowed Countess—Penelope Rich, the “Stella” of Sidney’s sonnets—of whom the youthful poet was a warm partisan. It was next reprinted by Haslewood in 1819, and was included in the editions of Ford’s works by Gifford and Dyce in 1827 and 1869 respectively, and in the reissue of Dyce’s edition in 1895. Though its poetry is mostly of the dullest, the personal allusions it contains and the sidelights it throws on the temperament and ideas of the author, lend some interest to the piece.
It apparently escaped the notice of Dyce that Malone in his essay on “Shakespeare, Jonson, and Ford”[1] had stated that he possessed “the original presentation copy” of Fames Memoriall. Malone’s MS., which is now in the Bodleian Library (Malone Collection), contains (inter alia) the following note in his hand:
Apparently the author’s presentation copy, 1606. This is a great curiosity, as it furnishes an exact specimen of the handwriting in which all Shakespeare’s plays were written out for the press, except that they probably were not written near so neatly. E.M.
The MS., which is indeed admirably written, is presumably a holograph; for while it is most unlikely that Ford (then a law student only twenty years of age) would have wasted money on getting his poem copied, it is still less likely that any one but the author would have struggled through the task of copying his
- ↑ Boswell’s Malone’s Shakespeare, vol. i. (1821).
