INTRODUCTION

1. In 1593 a sonnet cycle was printed at London for William Barley, under the title The Teares of Fancie, or Loue Disdained. This collection is well known and is widely available both in print and on the Web, either as a transcript of the original bool or in the lightly edited form included in Sir Sidney Lee’s Elizabethan Sonnets. This plethora of texts almost inevitably credit this collection to Christopher Marlowe’s friend, a prolific Elizabethan poet in his own right, Thomas Watson. Yet, strangely, despite this sonnet cycle’s obvious popularity with modern readers, no critical edition exists that provides a clean text created by finding and fixing the 1593 misprints, helps the reader by supplying illuminating annotation, and tries to identify all the author’s many literary borrowings in a more or less systematic way. Above all else, the academic community remains sharply divided as to whether or not this cycle can be attributed to Watson, and a closer look at the work may resolve the problem once and for all. The purpose of the present edition is to address all these needs.
2. No author’s name appears on the title page, and there is no dedicatory epistle or any similar front matter, but at the foot of the last item in the collection is printed FINIS T. W. On the strength not only of these initials, but also on an entry in the Stationers’ Register attributing the volume to Watson, his authorship is commonly accepted, and The Tears of Fancie duly appeared in Edward Arber’s 1870 collection of Watson’s poetry (it is still accepted as his by plenty of modern authorities, such as Albert Chatterley at Notes and Queries for September, 2001, p. 242.) Franklin M. Dickey has exposed the relevant Register entry as a Collier forgery. NOTE 1 By itself this demonstration does not disprove the possibility that Watson wrote this work, for we are still confronted with the initials “T. W.”, so in theory it remains possible that The Tears of Francie should be attributed to that poet.
2. But there appear to be strong considerations favoring the exclusion of this work from the Watson canon. Although his sonnet cycle Ἑκατομπαθία is liberally represented in contemporary anthologies, as far as I am aware no collection includes sonnets from Teares or attributes anything from this cycle to Watson. That poet otherwise made a running game of loading his poetry with quotations from, and allusions to, his previous works, and maintained a characteristic outlook and a fund of favorite themes, images, and mythological allusions. While some of the vocabulary, imagery and literary iconography in Teares can be matched in Watson’s work, these features appear to be of the generic kind that were the common coin of Petrarchan erotic poetry, as discussed here, ridiculed by Watson but taken seriously in Teares. But there seems to be a pervasive dearth of features one could point to as idiosyncratically Watsonian. Above all else, the theme of the Ἑκατομπαθία is the eventual triumph of reason over Love (a theme already present in his previous Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone that resurfaces in several subsequent works) but in Teares Cupid is all-victorious and the author confesses himself to be defeated, so that in the last line of the penultimate sonnet he is moved to exclaim Cupid is God, And there is none but he, a conclusion to which Watson would scarcely subscribe.
3. The whole production lacks Watson’s style and way of going about his job, and its poetical technique distinctly differs from his vernacular poetry. In Teares one finds is a heavy reliance on feminine endings pf pentameter lines, largely foreign to Watson (his 1590 English eclogue on Sir Francis Walsingham’s death, for example, contains only four such lines out of a total of 424). The iambic verses of the 1592 The Honorable Entertainement gieven to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Elvetham, to be sure, contain somewhat more, which suggests a moderate degree of stylistic growth, NOTE 2 but this is nonetheless a far cry from the situation in Teares, in which the first sonnet alone contains eight lines of the kind (it has been estimated that approximately a third of the lines in Teares end this way). It is often the case that an author’s writing habits may gradually change and evolves over time (as was true about Shakespeare’s versification). NOTE 3 But a sudden and dramatic change is quite another matter, and seems highly unlikely.
4. It is equally significant that the author of Teares affected a style marked by a fondness for alliteration. This is particularly visible in the first eight lines of Sonnet XXXVII:

Where may I now my carefull corps conuay,
From company the worker of my woe:
How may I winke or hide mine eies alwaies,
Which gase on that whereof my grief doth grow,
How shall I seeme my sighes for to suppresse,
Which helpe the hart which else would swelt in sunder,
Which hurts the helpe that makes my torment lesse:
Which helps and hurts, O woefull wearie wonder.

Particularly striking are his lines featuring heavy alliteration (i. e. either lines involving alliteration between more than two words, or multiple pairs of alliterated words within a single line). Examples are the fifth line of the item just quoted, XXII.4 By workemans wondrous skill the garden gracing, XXVIII.3 And framd a fountaine in which Eccho founding, XXXV.5 When weary woe doth worke to wound my will, XXXIX.1 Here end my sorrow, no here my sorrow springeth, and so forth throughout the collection. For the author of Teares lines such as these serve almost as an identifying fingerprint, whereas alliteration in the Ἑκατομπαθία and Watson’s other English poetry is far more moderate. Rather, our author appears to have inherited this taste from his favorite Gascoigne, who was capable of writing stuff like Where might I then my carefull corpse conuay / From companie, which worketh all my woe? Watson had no similar addiction to alliteration (or, for that matter, to Gascoigne). NOTE 4 It is true that Watson somewhat overused alliteration in his early Amyntas (written in Latin), but he quickly cured himself of this fault, not to be found in his maturer work.
5. If these poets differed regarding their “ear” for versification, so they also did with respect to working method and intent. After conducting a close examination of the considerable number of literary borrowings in Teares in an article Janet G. Scott came to the conclusion “On the whole, there is little originality in the Tears of Fancie.” NOTE 5
6. It is possible that in the future more similarities of phraseology and substance in the Ἑκατομπαθία and Teares might be unearthed (especially since an online sonnet database appears to be in the making — thus far English studies lacks a powerful research tool similar to those available for Classicists, and no doubt the commentary attached to this edition suffers accordingly). But one must ask what verbal parallels, as well as other kinds of resemblance observed by various readers, truly have to teach us. Those that have any genuine probative value undeniably serve to show that the author of Teares had read Watson’s Ἑκατομπαθία and been sufficiently impressed that a number of its features stuck in his mind. This would come as no surprise, since nobody would care to deny that “T. W.” was well versed in the sonnet literature of the time. But they scarcely amount to proof that one man wrote both cycles since the differences between them regarding style, contents, and literary sources are vastly more impressive than any similarities that have been remarked.
7. Regarding all his borrowings (drawn from such Elizabethan authors as Gascoigne, Spenser, Breton, Oxford, Marlowe, Shakespeare and others), the ones which consist of mere snippets put one in mind of the way schoolboys were often taught Latin Verse Composition (some of whom, including Milton, adhered to this method in later life): piecing together original poetry out of bits and pieces taken from classical authors. Even if there is little original creativity involved in dredging such scraps out of one’s memory, there certainly can be in the way they are assembled and put to use in the finished product, and at times it almost seems like our author experimented with a similar technique for writing in the vernacular. An impressive number of such extracts are drawn from various works by Spenser, who interestingly enough appears to have taken a couple of turns of phrase from Teares in his 1595 Amoretti. NOTE 5a On the other hand, our author’s special affinity for Spenser may to a certain degree be an optical illusion created by the availability of Charles Grosvenor Osgood’s wonderful A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Gloucester, Mass, 1963) whereas similar resources do not exist for most Elizabethan authors. Even in the two sonnets (other than the ones in the Gascoigne mini-cycle) where our poet’s adaptive borrowing occurs on a larger scale (LI and LX) Scott’s accusation of plagiarism is exceptionally anachronistic. The first English copyright law was not enacted until 1710 — prior to the time when authors began to be paid royalties no theft was involved, and the legal concept of intellectual property lay far in the future — nor, by the standards of the time, was there any serious breach of ethics or even of etiquette, and some highly respectable authors were capable of taking what we would regard as eye-popping liberties in silently appropriating the work of others.
8. Getting back to resemblances between the Ἑκατομπαθία and Teares, it is true that certain elements of Classical mythology figure in both sonnet cycles. Cupid is assigned a prominent role in both, but he is such a stereotyped figure in Petrarchan poetry that this observation counts for little. NOTE 6 About this and other stock features of Petrarchan poetry Scott wrote :

The first seven [sonnets in our cycle] picture the Alexandrian Cupid of the Latin Elegists, which became the traditional Love of the Middle Ages, caecus et alatus, nudus puer et pheretratus, and was inherited by the Petrarchists. Cupid’s popularity increased after the Pléiade translations from the Pseudo-Anacreon . . . The contest of heart and eyes, sonnets XIX and XX, had come down from the Troubadours through Petrarch. XXIX is an Echo poem, XXXI and XLI are examples of development by enumeration, XXXIX of development by antitheses, a process which can be traced ultimately to the devinalhs and coblas reversas of the Troubadours. XLI, XLII, XLII and XLIV contain an appeal to Fortune, Love and Death, who had already appeared many times together...In LVII we have a sonnet where “all things have release from pain save the lover.” this is a type which comes originally from Horace, Odes II.ix, and sonnets or strambotti beginning Non emprie in Italian and Toujours n’est pas in French were ready in large numbers for the English poet.

Sisyphus makes an appearance in Ἑκατομπαθία Passion LXII, and repeatedly in Teares. But he was so commonplace in erotic literature of the time that he has earned an entire chapter entitled “Sisyphus as Lover“ in Elliot M. Simon’s The Myth of Sisyphus: Renaissance Theories of Human Perfectability (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). And the Labyrinth figures repeatedly in the Ἑκατομπαθία (most especially in Passion XCV) and also in Teares LIII, but the Labyrinth too was a commonplace in Elizabethan literature. NOTE 7 Likewise Echo sonnets appear in both collections (Ἑκατομπαθία Passion XXV, Teares XXVIII), but Echo too is a familiar figure in poetry of the time.
9. But what do our poet’s borrowings and parallels, large and small, really add up to? Scott’s verdict that our poet was a plagiarist is far too harsh: the most important of his borrowings are from Gascoigne, and may more reasonably be considered work by an author who prided himself on his ability to write in an up-to-date fashion, demonstrating how the poetry of an earlier generation, which probably struck later Elizabethans as old fashioned and somewhat uncouth, could thus be so deftly modernized. This in itself deserves to be rated as a specialized form of originality. Most of the sonnets in which this is done are grouped together and perhaps deserve to be regarded as a cycle-within-a-cycle in which the reader was expected to recognize and appreciate the results.
10. Be this as it may, by now it is abundantly clear that the author’s various forms of borrowing from and rewriting of bits and pieces of his predecessors’ work constituted an important feature of his artistry, whereas the Ἑκατομπαθία may be even more chock full of literary adaptations, but these are of a quite different kind and made for a very different purpose: Watson’s are drawn exclusively from Italian (and to a lesser degree French) sources, meant to “transmit the cream of foreign learning into his native language.” NOTE 8 But he exhibited no similar interest in updating obsolescent English authors or appropriating material from his contemporaries. Gascoigne entirely fails to register on his radar.
11. Both Teares and Watson’s Amintae Gaudia appeared in print posthumously (Amintae Gaudia seems to contain no internal evidence for its date of composition, Teares cannot have been written prior to 1591 — see the Commentary note on I.2 and the initial one on VIII), and it seems plausible to think that both works emanate from the same final phase of the poet's career. The alternative would be to think that Amintae Gaudia was composed substantially earlier and yet held back from publication. But this seems unlikely, since in the impecunious final years of his life Watson had a pressing need for whatever money publication might fetch. And if we are to think that "T. W." was Watson, then this sonnet cycle needs to be understood as being substantially autobiographical, documenting a genuine change in our poet's attitude towards the Petrarchan brand of eroticism.
12. Here I must to interrupt myself and explain what I mean by “autobiographical.” I am not thinking of the Thomas Watson the friend of Marlowe, resident in Saint Helens Parish and husband of Anne Swift, that habitual practical joker with a certain knack for getting in trouble with the law, but rather of the persona our poet constructed at the very outset of his literary career and carefully cultivated and assiduously maintained in all his major works, that of a cooly detached, well-read Humanist who looks askance at Petrarchan literary eroticism and its rhetorical trappings (of which, for one reason or another, he obviously had a low opinion), and whose guiding philosophy is “it is scarce granted even to Jove to love and be wise at the same time.” This is a thread that runs through his undoubtedly authentic poetry from first to last and imparts an overall impression of coherence and unity to the entire body of work. Therefore if Watson did write Teares, then for the first and only time in his life he would have been doing violence to thispersona, to the point of explicitly disowning it. On the other hand, what one encounters in Amintae Gaudia is an unaltered persona and more of the same sort of burlesque of Petrarchan love-rhetoric that characterized the original Amyntas (indeed at times it features even broader humor, for example by having heroic English nautical exploits painted on the side of a milkmaid’s bucket in Epistle V, when when Amyntas is sitting with Phyllis' head cradled in his lap, looks down, and congratulates her upon her lack of dandruff at Eclogue III.74f., and the picture of the two lovers playing footsie at lines 32f. in the same poem), which would seem to reflect a continuation of his original mordant appraisal of the traditionally stylized eroticism of Petrarchan literature. In that work there exists no evidence of altered thinking, featuring expressions of the idea "all right, Cupid, I give up, you win.” For this reason,according to what would seem to be a reasonable assumption that these two works were composed in more or less the same time-frame, it would be exceedingly difficult to understand how they could express such radically different views on a subject so central to Watson’s self-created public image.
13. Two final points. First, as an act of piety toward his dead friend and erstwhile cellmate, Christopher Marlowe stepped in as Watson’s literary executor and arranged for the publication of Amintae Gaudia, and we are entitled to wonder why he did not do the same for Teares if Watson wrote the thing.
14. Second, at least one literary parallel would seem to trump all the ones paraded by those who have argued for Watsonian authorship. On p. 106 of an article on Watson Sir Francis Palgrave noticed the resemblance of the final couplet of sonnet XXX,

The leaves conspiring with the winds sweet sounding
With gentle murmur plained my heart’s deep wounding.

to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis 433f.:

Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh sounding,
Ears’ deep sweet music, and heart’s deep sore wounding.

(There may be a second echo of Venus and Adonis at VII.3.and and elsewhere one seems able to discern another one involving a 1593 music publication by Thomas Morley). Here we seem to have definitive proof that Watson did not write Teares, for Venus and Adonis first appeared in 1593, at which time Watson was dead and buried. Then too, the date of Nicholas Breton’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion is not known since it only survived in manuscript prior to its publication in 1853, but if we are to assume that it was written after the publication of The Pilgrimage to Paradise, coyned with the Countesse of Penbrooke’s love in 1592, the borrowings from this item in sonnets LVI and LVII may show that these two items were also written after the death of Watson. NOTE 9 The profoundly learned Mark Eccles NOTE 10 and the sensitive and sensible Wendy Philips, author of the most exact and intelligent Teares scholarship available, were in all probability right to deny that this was written by Thomas Watson. Then why did the author fail to sign the work with his full name? One possibility is that the printer substituted the initials “T. W.” precisely in order to encourage confusion with a better-known, established literary figure, in the hope of increasing sales.
15. And so, speaking as the editor of that poet’s complete works, I find myself unable to endorse the admission of Teares into the Watsonian canon. Nevertheless, because this is a work of considerable interest in its own right, one of the better Elizabethan sonnet cycles that has enjoyed well-deserved popularity in modern times, I have chosen to present this edition if The Teares of Fancie as a supplement to my previous one of Watson’s authentic works.

NOTES

NOTE 1 ”The Old Man at Work: Forgeries in the Stationers’ Registers,” Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960) 39 - 47, exposing the fraud perpetrated by J. Payne Collier, A Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (London, 1865) III.220 - 7.

NOTE 2 The only evidence to the contrary might seem to be the high percentage of lines with feminine endings in the English translation of The Poets Speach to her Maiestie in Watson’s 1591 The Honorable Entertainement gieuen to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Eluetham in Hampshire. But at Notes and Queries for March 2000, pp. 39f., Albert Chatterley anticipated my conclusion that this translation was not written for the performance by Watson, but subsequently supplied by the printer for the benefit of Latin-less readers.

NOTE 3 Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561 - 1642) Farnham, Surrey, 2014.

NOTE 4 At Notes and Queries for September 2001, p. 242, Albert Chatterley wrote about Watson’s “experimental writing not intended for publication,” which seems like a feeble and unconvincing attempt to paper over a very substantial problem confronting those who insist on Watson’s authorship. And Watson was not otherwise an experimentalist (had he been one, far more likely he would have been one of those erudite poets, such as Sidney, Campion and Alabaster, who attempted to apply the principles of Latin verse quantification to working in the English language). For further arguments against attribution to Watson based on a more detailed catalogue of stylistic details see Wendy Philipps’ online article “No More Tears.”
Without any necessary reference to the authorship problem, the stylistic difference between Teares and Watson’s undoubted English poetry has already attracted notice. The observations of William Ellery Leonard, “Sonnets on the Self of William Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies (Madison, 1916) pp. 191f. are worth quoting in extenso:

The influence of Spenser . . . may be suspected in the case of Thomas Watson. Watson’s Hekatompathia, published three years after the Shepherd's Calendar, in 1582, is entirely independent of that poem and its style; the rhyme-words are mostly monosyllables, double rhymes are very rare, and there is no trace of the old laxity. It is one of the most regular and frigid poems of the age. By 1590, however, when he published a translation of his own Latin eclogue on the death of Walsingham, Watson had in some slight degree altered his style, and though the praise of Spenser in that poem has no particular significance, there is one example of the laxity in rhyming that Spenser practised:

Heards and tender flocks, handsmooth plains,
Eccho dwelling both in mount and vallie,
Groves and bubling springs, nimphs, swains,
Young and old, weepe all Arcadie.

Later still, in The Tears of Fancy, 1593, he altered his manner of rhyming fundamentally. Double rhymes become almost the rule, and laxities of various kinds are frequent enough to attract attention. One example may suffice here, from sonnet 46:

Envying that anie should in joy her image,
Since all unworthie were of such an honor,
Tho gan shee mee command to leave my gage,
The first end of my joy, last cause of dolor.

Tho gan shee mee command is definitely Spenserian — more so, it must be admitted, than Watson's habitual language . . . the rhymes may not unfairly be ascribed to the influence, direct or indirect, of Spenser. Other interesting examples may be found in sonnets 31 and 33.

NOTE 5 Janet C. Scott, “The Sources of Watson’s “Tears of Fancie,” Modern Language Review 21 (1926) p. 305. Scott subsequently published her doctoral thesis as  Les sonnets élisabéthains, les sources et l'apport personnel (Paris, 1929), in which she explicitly and repeatedly called our author a plagiarist. Her observations of borrowings from Gascoigne were anticipated by Alexander Grosart (ed.), The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton (1879) pp. lxviii - lxx. It is more than slightly curious that a scholar so outspoken in leveling an accusation of plagiarism against “T. W.” should have indulged in a wholesale unacknowledged appropriation of Grosart’s findings, as would appear to be the case..

NOTE 5a I am grateful to Sir Brian Vickers for drawing my attention to William Ringler, “Spenser and Thomas Watson,” Modern Language Notes 69 (1954) pp. 484 - 87.

NOTE 6 Cesare G. Cecioni, Thomas Watson e la Tradizione Petrarchista (Milan, 1969). Cf. more generally Irene Zocco, Petrarchismo e Petrarchisti in Inghilterra (Palermo, 1906).

NOTE 7 See Sophie Chiari-Lasserre’s article “La diversion comme genre: L'écriture et ses labyrinthes à l'époque élisabéthaine, Diversion as a Genre: The Writing and its Labyrinths during the Elizabethan Period,” posted on the internet here. The Labyrinth sonnet by Lady Mary Wroth is a particularly fine example.

NOTE 8 So Philipps p. 79.

NOTE 9 “I for one have not a shadow of doubt that...Breton was the original and Watson the copyist. Breton’s was too rich a mind and too self-contained to filch from so meagre a poet as Watson” — Alexander Grosart in introducing his edition of Breton’s works, p. lxxi.

NOTE 10 Mark Eccles, Brief Lives: Tudor and Stuart Authors (Studies in Philology Texts and Studies 79, 1982) p. 130.