William Shakespeare

Selected poems

The Passionate Pilgrim

The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is an anthology of 20 poems collected and published by William Jaggard that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are considered authentically Shakespearean. These are two sonnets, later to be published in the 1609 collection of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and three poems extracted from the play Love's Labour's Lost. Internal and external evidence contradicts the title page attribution to Shakespeare. Five were attributed to other poets during his lifetime, and two were published in other collections anonymously. While most critics disqualify the rest as not Shakespearean on stylistic grounds, stylometric analysis by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza put two blocks of the poems (4, 6, 7 and 9, and 10, 12, 13 and 15) within Shakespeare's stylistic boundaries. Jaggard later published an augmented edition with poems he knew to be by Thomas Heywood.

Title page of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599)

William Shakespeare