'Sweet Rose, Fair Flower': A 'Shakespearean' Poem in The Passionate Pilgrim'

TY - JOUR

T1 - 'Sweet Rose, Fair Flower': A 'Shakespearean' Poem in The Passionate Pilgrim'

AU - Kingsley-Smith, Jane

PY - 2025/1/30

Y1 - 2025/1/30

N2 - The poem that appears as number 10 in William Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim (c. 1598), 'Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely plucked, soon vaded’, is rarely given any critical attention; its authorship by Shakespeare neither proven or disproven. This article argues that it is a unique and transgressive lyric, which turns a number of Renaissance elegiac conventions to profane use, and that the ‘Shakespearean effect’ it produced for readers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was created not just by its resemblance to Venus and Adonis but by some intriguing similarities with Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It is a poem which asks us to think again about what kind of ‘sonnets’ Shakespeare may have written and what we allow into the Shakespearean poetic canon.

AB - The poem that appears as number 10 in William Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim (c. 1598), 'Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely plucked, soon vaded’, is rarely given any critical attention; its authorship by Shakespeare neither proven or disproven. This article argues that it is a unique and transgressive lyric, which turns a number of Renaissance elegiac conventions to profane use, and that the ‘Shakespearean effect’ it produced for readers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was created not just by its resemblance to Venus and Adonis but by some intriguing similarities with Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It is a poem which asks us to think again about what kind of ‘sonnets’ Shakespeare may have written and what we allow into the Shakespearean poetic canon.

KW - The Passionate Pilgrim

KW - Shakespeare

KW - Sonnets

KW - elegy

KW - authorship

M3 - Article

SN - 0034-6551

JO - REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES

JF - REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES

ER -