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In 1630, according to the date that is affixed to the title of the poem, Milton wrote "On Shakespeare," which I cite from the text of the Second Folio of Shakespeare's plays in which it was first published:
An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. SHAKESPEARE
What neede my Shakespeare for his honour'd bones,
The labour of an Age, in piled stones
Or that his hallow'd Reliques should be hid
Vnder a starre-ypointing Pyramid?
Deare Sonne of Memory, great Heire of Fame,
What needst thou such dull witnesse of thy Name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy selfe a lasting Monument:
For whil'st to th' shame of slow-endevouring Art
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each part,
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued Booke,
Those Delphicke Lines with deepe Impression tooke
Then thou our fancy of her selfe bereaving,
Dost make us Marble with too much conceiving,
And so Sepulcher'd in such pompe dost lie
That Kings for such a Tombe would wish to die.
The ultimate origins of the poem lie in the Collegiate Church of
St Bartholomew, in the village of Tong, in Shropshire (above). The church is
known to the older generation of literary pilgrims as the burial place of Sir
Richard Vernon, the "King of the Peak" in Scott's Peveril of the Peak.
Perhaps more famously, it is the church beside which Little Nell dies in The
Old Curiosity Shop. In the Dickens version of the story Nell is buried
inside the church, but some time in the nineteenth century a verger discovered
that showing Little Nell's grave to literary pilgrims was a good source of
income, and so erected a gravestone and forged an entry in the burial register.
[End Page 95]
The church is filled with monuments, including one to three
members of the Stanley family, which has some memorial verses carved into the
stone at each end (Figs. 2,3,
and 4):
ASK WHO LYES HEARE, BUT DO NOT WEEP,
HE IS NOT DEAD, HE DOOTH BVT SLEEP
THIS STONY REGISTER, IS FOR HIS BONES
HIS FAME IS MORE PERPETVALL THÊ
THEISE STONES
AND HIS OWNE GOODNES, W'HIM SELF
BEING GON
SHALL LYVE WHEN EARTHLIE MONAMENT
IS NONE
NOT MONV[M]ENTALL STONE PRESERVES
OVR FAME
NOR SKY ASPYRING PIRAMIDS OVR NAME
THE MEMORY OF HIM FOR WHOM THIS
STANDS
SHALL OVTLYVE MARBL AND DEFACERS
HANDS
WHEN ALL TO TYMES CONSVMPTION
SHALL BE GEAVEN
STANDLY FOR WHOM THIS STANDS
SHALL STAND IN HEAVEN [End Page 96]
"Ask who lies here" is on the east end of the tomb, at the head of the effigies, and "Not monumental stones" is on the west end, at their feet. It is accordingly not absolutely clear whether they constitute one poem or two, and if one, which stanza comes first.
Milton's poem would seem to be modeled on this text. Both rhyme "bones" and "stones" and "fame" and "name," and perhaps most strikingly, the original of Milton's "star-ypointing pyramid" is recognizable in this poem's "sky-aspiring pyramids," which conveys the same idea in the same rhythm.
The tomb is surmounted by four obelisks that would seem to be the "pyramids" of the memorial poem; in early modern English the word "pyramid" could be used of any structure of pyramidical forms, including spires, pinnacles and obelisks. The main structure commemorates Sir Thomas Stanley, second son of the third Earl of Derby, and his wife Margaret. The figure beneath is their son Sir Edward Stanley. Sir Thomas died in 1576, Sir Edward in 1632, the year in which the Second Folio was published. The date of the tomb cannot be precisely fixed, but various inscriptions on it, together with stylistic considerations, incline me to think that we should think in terms of two dates. The tomb of Sir Thomas and Lady Stanley seems to date from the opening years of the seventeenth century, perhaps 1602 or 1603; the effigy of their son Edward was slid in afterwards, presumably shortly after his death in 1632. Milton's poem was dated 1630 by Milton. If it is imitating the verse on this tomb, then the verse must have been there by 1630, so it cannot commemorate Sir Edward. We may therefore conclude that it is one poem rather than two, though we cannot be certain which stanza comes first, and that it commemorates Sir Thomas Stanley.
The poem also survives in at least five seventeenth-century manuscripts. One of these is in the Rawlinson manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. In this and subsequent transcriptions I have retained punctuation but modernised spelling, except for the word "Stanley":
An Epitaph Not monumental stones preserves thy fame
Nor sky aspiring pyramids thy name
The monument of him for whom this stands
Shall outlive marble or defacers hands
Ask who lies here but do not weep
He is not dead he doth but sleep
This earthly register his [sic] for his bones
His fame is more perpetual than these stones
And when to time consumption shall be given
Stanlye for whom this stands shall stand in heaven
(MS 2, fol. 269v)
This is clearly a corrupt text; it has no title, offers no context, omits two lines, transposes two others and contains seven substantive variants from the other texts: in line 3, for example, it reads "monument" for "memory" and in line 7 it reads "earthly" for "stony." The scribe assumes that it is a single poem, beginning with "Not monumental stones," the quatrain at the foot of the effigy. That does not seem to me likely, because "Ask who lies here" is surely a more appropriate opening, and the last line of that stanza, with its mention of the earthly monument, would seem to lead naturally on to "nor monumental stone."
The second and third manuscripts add some significant details.
One is in a collection of epitaphs in the Portland manuscripts at Nottingham
University:
An Epitaph on Sir Edward Standly
Shakespeare Engraven on his Tomb
in Tong ChurchNot monumental stone preserves our fame
Nor sky-aspiring pyramids our name;
The memory of him for whom this stands,
Shall outlive marble, and defacers hands:
When all to times consumption shall be given
Standley for whom this stands shall stand in heaven.
Idem, ibidem On Sir Thomas Standley
Ask who lies here, but do not weep
He is not dead, he doth but sleep;
This stony register is for his bones
His fame is more perpetual than these stones:
And his own goodnes with himself being gone
Shall live, when earthly monument is none.
(MS 9, p. 12) [End Page 97]
The other is in a related collection in the Folger Library (Fig.
5):
An Epitaph on Sir Edward Standly
Shakespeare Engraven on his Tomb in
Tong ChurchNot monumental stones preserves our fame,
Nor sky-aspiring pyramids our name;
The memory of him for whom this stands
Shall out live marble and defacers hands
When all to times consumption shall be given,
Standly for whom this stands shall stand in heaven.
Idem, ibidem On Sir Thomas Stanley
Ask who lies here but do not weep,
He is not dead he doth but sleep;
This stony register is for his bones,
His fame is more perpetual, than these stones:
And his own goodness with himself being gone,
Shall live when earthly monument is none.
(MS 7, fol 8)
These manuscripts assume that there are two poems, transcribe them in the opposite order to the Bodleian manuscript and identify, as the Bodleian manuscript does not, the poems as having been written in memory of Sir Edward Stanley and Sir Thomas Stanley. This identification is clearly problematical, because Milton could not have imitated in 1630 an epitaph written for Sir Edward Stanley, who died in 1632. The other striking feature of these manuscripts is that they attribute the poems to Shakespeare. They are not, however, independent witnesses, because the two manuscripts are written in the same hand, and the pages on which the "Shakespeare" poem is written contain among other memorial poems transcriptions of the Latin poem in memory of Dr Godfrey Goldsborough, Bishop of Gloucester (who had died on 26 May 1604) on his tomb in the Lady Chapel of Gloucester Cathedral.
The final texts are in the College of Arms, in London. Both are
contained in Dugdale's "Visitation of Shropshire, 1663-1664" (MS c.35). The
first is in the hand of the antiquarian Sir William Dugdale:
These following verses were made by William Shakespeare
the late famous tragedian
Written upon the east end
of this tomb
Ask who lies here, but do not weep
He is not dead he doth but sleep
This stony register is for his bones
His fame is more perpetual than these stones.
And his own goodness with himself being gone
Shall live when earthly monument is none.
Written upon the west end
thereof
Not monumental stone preserves our fame,
Nor sky aspiring pyramids our name
The memory of him for whom this stands
Shall out-live marble and defacers hands.
When all to times consumption shall be given
Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven.
(MS 7, p. 20, Fig. 6) [End Page 98]
Once again the poems are attributed to Shakespeare. Why? It is,
I suppose, remotely possible that Dugdale had seen a manuscript attribution, and
it is possible that as a native of Warwickshire he knew of some tradition there,
but it is surely more likely that he heard about the attribution to Shakespeare
when he visited the church that contains the tomb. There must have been a local
oral tradition, and that tradition may have been independent of the manuscript
tradition.
The final text, which occurs later in the same manuscript but in a different hand, is one that is unknown to Shakespeare scholars. It presents yet another text:
At the head of the tomb are these verses
Not monumental stone preserves our fame
Nor sky aspiring pyramids our name
The memory of him for whom this stands
Shall out-live marble and defacers hands.
When all to times consumption shall be given
Standley for whom this stands shall stand in heaven
a little lower on the verge
Beati mortui qui in Domino moriantur
[drawing]
At the foot of the monument
Ask who lies here, but do not weep,
He is not dead, he doth but sleep.
This stony register is for his bones
His fame is more perpetual than these stones
And his own goodness with himself being gone
Shall live when earthly monument is none.
(MS 8, p. 41)
Although it lacks an attribution, this text does contain a
drawing that shows that the obelisks--the pyramids--originally surrounded the
tomb. The drawing is in the hand of Francis Sandford, who was then Lancaster
Herald (Fig.
7).
The attributions in the manuscript tradition lend respectability to the contention that the poem is Shakespeare's. It does not seem to be an improbable attribution. There are clear analogies with Shakespeare's Sonnets (e.g. Sonnet 55), and his Richard II speaks of "sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts" in [End Page 99] the tournament scene. Shakespeare is linked in various ways with the Stanley family, the family of the earls of Derby, so the biographical evidence is consistent with the probability that he was the author of these verses. If it is Shakespeare's, then one of the rhymes becomes significant, in that the bones-stones rhyme appears on Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford. It does not matter for my argument whether or not Shakespeare wrote the Stanley verses, but it does matter that this attribution was current in the seventeenth century, because it means that Milton wrote his poem on Shakespeare in the belief that he was imitating a poem by Shakespeare. That raises the question of how Milton might have known about the poem, given that he seems never to have visited Tong and that the poem was never printed. I do not know the answer to this, but I might observe that many manuscripts survive, and that Milton, like Shakespeare, was connected with the Stanley family. The Dowager Countess of Derby, widow of Ferdinando Stanley, the fifth Earl of Derby, was entertained with Milton's Arcades. James Stanley, Lord Strange, who in 1642 became the seventh Earl, had been a client of Milton's father (MSS 3 and 34); he was a nephew of the Dowager Countess. Sir Francis Leigh, godson of the Dowager Countess (and nephew of the Earl of Bridgewater) was also a client in the 1620s (MSS 3, 4, 10 and 34), and Milton's father testifies to knowing him (as Lord Dunsmore) in 1634 (MS 16). The seventh Earl of Derby, who became known as "the Martyr Earl" following his execution after the Battle of Worcester, was a patron of literature and the theater, a family tradition that extended back at least as far as the fourth Earl, patron of the company known as Lord Strange's Servants, of which Shakespeare may have been a member.
There are some well-known variants in the text of Milton's poem,
even within issues of the Second Folio, and the most contentious is the
"star-ypointing pyramid." The groundwork for a solution to the notorious
difficulties presented by these variants was laid in two fine bibliographical
studies by R. M. Smith (1928) and his pupil William Todd (1952). These scholars
examined in meticulous detail the three published states of the page on which
Milton's poem had been printed. Their work superseded that of one of the most
delightful of the Shakespearean cranks, Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, who had
argued at the beginning of this century that the "star-ypointed" text, a copy of
which he happened to own, was the first issue. In pursuit of this claim he wrote
a pamphlet which he sent to 1,000 libraries around the world and to 15,000
newspapers, with the result, he claimed, that 10 million copies were circulated
in full and another 10 million in abbreviated form. It would seem that some 20
million people pondered the question of whether Milton wrote "y-pointed" or
"y-pointing" (Fig
8).
Durning-Lawrence's argument centred on the occurrence in his copy of the archaic "y-pointed"; the usual reading, as in the other two versions, is "y-pointing". Durning-Lawrence argued that the English "y," like the German "ge," is a prefix of the past participle, and that Milton, who did not make grammatical mistakes, must therefore have written "y-pointed." Moreover, said Durning-Lawrence, Milton wrote it that way to signal to the initiated that Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays, a pyramid with a star on it being a beacon, which was then pronounced "Bacon"; the leaves so printed were of course only issued to those to whom Bacon's secret had been entrusted. I am sorry to report that Durning-Lawrence was wrong. The first issue reads "y-pointing." The fact that one of the later issues amends this to "y-pointed" merely reflects the fact that someone was correcting Milton's error; Milton, if he was aware of this variant, seems to have dug in in defense of his mistake, because in the later texts "y-pointing" is restored.
It is now clear that the variations in the three states of the Second Folio are compositorial rather than authorial, and that Milton was not involved in later printings of the Second Folio, which, pace the date of 1632 on the title page, can be shown from the evidence of paper and watermarks to extend as late as 1640 or 1641. The bibliographical hare started by Professor Smith in 1928 has evaded many scholars. Smith understood the problems, but became mired in the complex relationships between the three states, and his loyal disciple Professor Todd was unable to extricate him from the bibliographical treacle. Meanwhile, Pollard and Redgrave, in the first edition of their Short Title Catalogue, unhelpfully listed all issues as if they had been published in 1632. In the second edition the STC reassigned some issues to 1640, but the damage was done: the Folger [End Page 100] cataloguers followed the original STC in declaring all issues to have been published in 1632. The bibliographical hare was finally cornered by John Shawcross, who unobtrusively sorted out the variant issues in his magisterial Biblio graphy. The textual variants in Milton's text are inextricably tied to the variants on the frontispiece of the volume, which bears a effigy of Shakespeare; the reason for this connection is that the other half of the folio sheet on which Milton's poem is printed is the frontispiece. Professor Shawcross rightly places the issue dubbed by Smith as "Effigies C" in 1632, and consigns Effigies A and B to "1641 (?)." The other half of the Effigies C page contains Milton's text, and the variations in the texts attached to Effigies A and B originate in the printing house.
The text of the poem published in Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare (1640) is an altogether different matter, because it contains changes that would seem to be authorial. The last word in line 10, which is "part" in the 1632 text, becomes "heart" in the 1640 text; the "dull witness" of 1632 is transformed into a "weak witness." Another bit of tinkering occurs in line 13, which has "her self" in 1632 and "our self" in 1640; the phrase was to be changed to "it self" in 1645. The fact that Milton had a hand in the text of the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's poems would suggest that he had some connections with those responsible for the volume, and these may have been theatrical connections. After 1640, the text of Milton's poem bifurcates: the 1632 text continues in the second, third and fourth folios, and the 1640 text evolves through further authorial adjustments into the text of Milton's 1645 Poems, which in turn leads to the 1673 Poems.
The final problem that I should like to consider is the question of how Milton came to publish the poem. Milton was utterly unknown as a poet and indeed as a person, and had no known theatrical connections, and yet his first publication was a poem prefaced to the Second Folio of Shakespeare. One way ahead lies in a consideration of a poem published in the First Folio:
We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon
From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room.
We thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth,
Tells thy spectators that though went'st but forth
To enter with applause. An actor's art
Can die, and live to act a second part.
That's but an exit of mortality;
This, a re-entrance to a plaudite.
The poem is signed "I.M.", who has been variously identified in the scholarly literature as Jasper Mayne or John Marston, but the best claimant is said to be the Hispanist James Mabbe, who was well-known as a translator of Spanish works into English. The attribution to Mabbe centres on the phrase "grave's tiring room": "tiring" is an aphetic form of "attiring," so the phrase means "the grave's dressing room." This phrase is said to echo Mabbe's use of a similar metaphor, [End Page 101] "the tiring- house of the grave" to translate the Spanish phrase "el vestuario del sepulcro." The difficulty with this argument is that the idea that the grave is the tiring-house of death is very common. Indeed, there is an example elsewhere in the dedicatory poems of the First Folio, in that Hugh Holland uses the phrase "the grave/Death's public tiring-house."
My candidate for the authorship of this poem is John Milton the
elder. Only two of his poems survive: one is a six-line epigram that survives in
the Bodleian Library (MS 1) and the other is a sonnet in the Harleian collection
in the British Library(Fig.
9):
Johannes Melton, Londinensis civis, amico
suo viatico in poesis laudem. S.D.P.If virtue this be not, what is? Tell quick!
For childhood, manhood, old age, thou dost write,
Love, war, and lusts quelled by arm heroic,
Instanced in Guy of Warwick (knighthood's light):
Heralds' records and each sound antiquary
For Guy's true being, life, death, eke has sought,
To satisfy those which praevaricari;
Manuscript, chronicle (if might be bought);
Coventry's, Winton's, Warwick's monuments,
Trophies, traditions delivered of Guy,
With care, cost, pain, as sweetly thou presents,
To exemplify the flower of chivalry:
From cradle to the saddle and the bier,
For Christian imitation, all are here.
I.M.
This sonnet is on the verso of the title-page of an unpublished sequel to Lydgate's Guy Earl of Warwick, written by a versifier called John Lane. The Latin at the beginning means "John Milton, citizen of London, to his traveling friend, in praise of his poetry." The letters "SDP" are an abbreviation of salutem dicat plurimam, the superscription of Cicero's letters. The rhyme that is central to my argument is "antiquary" (line 6) and "praevaricari" (line 8).
Lane's book was never published, and so the elder Milton's sonnet was assigned to oblivion, perhaps rightly so. Lane's enormous and equally dreadful "Triton's Trumpet to the Twelve Months, husbanded and moralised," dated 1621, also remains unpublished, and lies in manuscript among the Royal Manuscripts in the British Library and in Trinity College Cambridge. Both versions of the poem contain a passage that describes the music of the elder Milton:
Those sweet sweet parts Meltonus did compose,
As wonder's self amazed was at the [c]lose,
Which in a counterpoint maintaining hielo
Can all sum up thus: Alleluia Deo.
(MS 6, fol. 179v; MS 35, fol. 187)
That odd word hielo is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but I suspect that it is an English word, i. e. high-low, used in a musical sense which is appropriate to counterpoint. If one considers all three poems together it becomes clear that they have a common feature, one that I have never seen in serious Renaissance poetry (though it does occur in macaronic burlesque), namely the rhyming of an English word with a Latin word. Milton's sonnet in praise of Lane rather painfully rhymes "praevaricari" with "antiquary"; Lane's encomium strains to return the compliment by imitating this striking feature, and he rhymes "hielo" and "Deo." The IM sonnet contains the same odd feature, in that it rhymes "morality" and "plaudite." Those rhymes are the sandy foundation of my suspicion that Milton's father is the author of the poem in the First Folio. That comforting hypothesis provides the explanation, albeit a [End Page 102] contingent one, for the publication of the young Milton's poem in the Second Folio: Milton the elder published a poem in the First Folio, and so arranged for his son to publish a poem in the second.
Is there a demonstrable connection between Milton's father and the theatrical world of Shakespeare? One possible link might be musical. Thomas Morley, who was a patron of the elder Milton and had been the first to publish his music, was a close neighbor of Shakespeare and the author of versions of "It was a lover and his lass" and "O mistress mine," though not, apparently, the versions sung when Shakespeare's As You Like It and Twelfth Night were performed. Shake spearean scholars have long known about the five Exchequer documents (MSS 22-26) that establish Shakespeare's residence in the tiny parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, but despite the fact that the parish had only seventy-three rateable residents, the fact that Thomas Morley was another of the residents is not noted by scholars such as Chambers and Schoenbaum. Morley's name is clearly listed, and he is identified as one of the defaulters, as is Shakespeare (MS 23). The fact that the valuation of their properties was identical (£5) makes it likely that they lived in the same tenement. These facts are almost certainly verified somewhere in the Accounts of Subsidies, Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer (MS 24), but I have not been able to conduct a systematic search of that vast and difficult document.
A few years ago the Shakespearean scholar Herbert Berry noticed two documents in the Wallace transcripts in the Huntington Library that named Milton's father as a trustee of the Blackfriars Playhouse. Berry was not absolutely certain that the John Milton named in the documents was Milton's father, because he is described as a gentleman, and Berry was right to assume that scriveners did not normally style themselves gentlemen. Milton's father, however, is described as a gentleman in a series of Chancery documents drawn up in 1634 and 1645 (MSS 15-18), so the term is not an obstacle to the identification of this John Milton with the poet's father. Indeed, as Berry has noted, there is a firm piece of evidence for this identification within the documents, because one of the other trustees is named as Edward Raymond, to whom the elder Milton lent £50 on 9 February 1622; Milton's father struggled unsuccessfully to regain his money after Raymond's death in 1623; documents relating to the dispute submitted to the Court of Chancery in May 1624 describe Raymond as an attorney in the Court of Common Pleas (MS 12).
The documents that Berry noticed were transcriptions of two Exchequer manuscripts, a bill of April 1640 (MS 20) and an order from the following autumn (MS 21). These documents relate to an action in the Court of Requests the previous year (MSS 30-33) and to earlier King's Bench records (MSS 27-29) and Chancery suits (MSS 13 and 14). The Exchequer documents refer to a (lost) contract of 4 July 1620 in which Milton's father is named as a trustee of the Blackfriars Playhouse, along with Raymond and two ale brewers called Henry Hodge and William (or Robert) Hunt.
What are the implications of the trusteeship? Berry speculates agreeably that "if the descendants of James Burbage dealt with their trustees as he did with his landlord at the Theatre in Shoreditch, the trustees and their families could even have had the right to attend plays gratis at the Blackfriars Playhouse" (Berry 514). Could young Milton have attended the Blackfriars with his father? Perhaps. In Elegia Prima, which may have been written in April 1626, Milton tells Diodati that he has been enjoying the plays of classical antiquity. Greek and Roman plays were not performed in Caroline London, so he must be referring to plays that he had been reading. Berry notes hopefully (510) that the theatre Milton had in mind was sub tecto (under a roof), as was the Blackfriars, but it seems more likely that Milton was simply referring to reading as an indoor activity. It is difficult to be certain of the date at which the trusteeship lapsed, but the documents specify that in the event of a trustee's death, the trusteeship would pass to his heirs. It is possible, though arguably unlikely, that the trusteeship was still in effect when Milton's father died in March 1647, in the which case Milton would have become a trustee and retained that position until the Blackfriars was sold by William Burbage in 1651 (MS 19).
In conclusion, it would seem that the young Milton who wrote "On Shakespeare" and appreciatively noted "sweetest Shakespeare fancy's child" in "L'Allegro" (possibly echoing "child of fancy" in the opening scene of Love's Labour's Lost) had grown up [End Page 103] in a home with closer connections to the playhouses than has hitherto been assumed. Nothing except the trusteeship of the Blackfriars can be proved, but it seems not altogether improbable that Milton's father was also connected to the playhouses through Shakespeare's neighbour Thomas Morley, that his father had contributed a poem to the Shakespeare First Folio and had arranged for his son to contribute one to the Second Folio.
University of Leicester
Manuscripts
Bodleian Library, Oxford:
1. MS Douce 170 (John Lane's continuation of Chaucer's "Squire's Tale".
2. MS Rawlinson Poetical 117 ("Shakespeare" poem fol 269v).
British Library:
3. Cottonian Charter 1/5/4 (Schedule drawn up by Thomas Bower (Milton's father's partner) of Thomas Cotton's bonds, including loans to Sir Francis Leigh, Mr Lea and Mr Leigh (all three may be the same person) and James Stanley, Lord Strange.
4. Cottonian Charter 1/5/5 (records debts of Sir Francis Leigh and Lord Strange to Milton's father).
5. MS Harleian 5243 (John Lane, "Historie of Sir Gwy, Earl of Warwick").
6. Royal MS 17, B.XV (John Lane, "Triton's Trumpet to the Twelve Months").
College of Arms, London:
7. MS c.35 (William Dugdale, "The Visitation of Shropshire, 1663-1664"; "Shakespeare" poems pp 20 and 41).
Folger Shakespeare Library:
8. MS V.a.103, Pt 1 ("Shakespeare" poem fol 8).
Nottingham University Library:
9. Portland MS Pw.V.37 ("Shakespeare" poem p. 12).
Public Record Office, London:
10. C2 Charles I/D37/49 (records Sir Francis Leigh's repayment of his debt to Milton's father).
11. C2 Charles I/D39/47 (another record of Sir Francis Leigh's debt to Milton's father).
12. C2 James I/A6/35 (Milton's father's loan to Edward Raymond).
13. C2 James I/E4/9 (Chancery suit relating to Blackfriars).
14. C2 James I/K5/25 (Chancery suit relating to Blackfriars).
15. C24/587/46 (deposition of 14 September 1632, describing Milton's father as a gentleman).
16. C24/591/2 (deposition of 17 April 1634, describing Milton's father as a gentleman and affirming that he has known Sir Francis Leigh, Lord Dunsmore, for about ten years).
17. C24/596/33 (deposition of 5 August 1634, describing Milton's father as a gentleman).
18. C24/600/37 (deposition of 8 January 1634/5 describing Milton's father as a gentleman).
19. C54/3579/m.39-40 (record of sale of Blackfriars in 1651).
20. E112/221/1215 (bill naming Milton's father as trustee of Blackfriars, April 1640).
21. E125/27/199-200 (order naming Milton's father as trustee of Blackfriars, autumn 1640)
22. E179/146/354 (Subsidy Defaulters, Bishopsgate, 15 November 1597).
23. E179/146/369 (Subsidy Defaulters, Bishopsgate, 1 October 1598).
24. E359/56 (Enrolled Subsidy Accounts, 1598-99).
25. E372/444 (Residuum London accounts, 6 October 1599).
26. E372/445 (Residuum Sussex accounts, 6 October 1600).
27. KB27/1408/m.303 (King's Bench records relating to Blackfriars).
28. KB27/1414/m.456 (King's Bench records relating to Blackfriars).
29. KB27/1432/m.359 (King's Bench records relating to Blackfriars).
30. Req 1/85, p. 283 (Court of Requests action relating to Blackfriars).
31. Req 1/87, p. 187 (Court of Requests action relating to Blackfriars).
32. Req 1/90, p. 29 (Court of Requests action relating to Blackfriars).
33. Req 2/388/48 (Court of Requests action relating to Blackfriars).
34. Req 2/630 (records debts of Sir Francis Leigh and Lord Strange to Milton's father).
Trinity College, Cambridge:
35. 0.ii.68 (MS copy of John Lane's Triton's Trumpet).
Printed Articles and Books
Berry, Herbert (1992), "The Miltons and the Blackfriars Playhouse", MP 89, 510-14
Durning-Lawrence, Sir Edwin (1913), Milton's Epitaph to Shakespeare (in the 1632 edition of the plays known as the second folio (London).
Shawcross, John (1984), Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1624-1700 (Binghamton)
Smith, R. M. (1928), "The Variant Issues of Shakespeare's First Folio and Milton's First Published English Poem: A Bibliographical Problem", Lehigh University Publications 2, no. 3.
Todd, William (1952), "The Issues and States of the Second Folio and Milton's Epigraph on Shakespeare", SB 5, 81-108.
Permissions:
Figure 5: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Figure 7: By permission of the College of Arms.
Photographs of Tong Church and Stanley Tombs by Gordon Campbell and Roy Flannagan.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/milton_quarterly/v033/33.4campbell.html