Poeta de Tristibus: or, the Poet's Complaint (PdT) was published by two newly established booksellers, Henry Faithorne and John Kersey, early in November 1681 (title-page dated 1682). The poem is only one of a large number of Restoration satires on writers as a group, its nearest neighbors in time being the pseudo-Rochester "A Session of the Poets," the anonymous "Advice to Apollo," Mulgrave's "An Essay upon Satyr," Otway's The Poet's Complaint, Robert Gould's "To Julian, Secretary to the Muses," the anonymous "Satire on the Poets," Shadwell's The Tory Poets, and Thomas Wood's Juvenalis Redivivus. It differs from these in its Hudibrastic meter, the richness of its biographical detail, and a relatively mild degree of animus against its victims, though there is quite a deal against poetry as art and trade.

In the two introductory epistles, we are asked to believe first that the poem is the work of a young writer driven into exile by his poverty and secondly that the manuscript was sent from Dover to a relative on 10 January 1681 in acknowledgment of a piece of gold. It is possible, as will be seen, that this reflects an actual history; however, the matter is complicated by the existence of a second text, published by 12 November 1681 (Luttrell's date on his copy, now at Harvard, and apparently the only one still extant) as The Poet's Complaint (PC) in which the story is presented in a slightly different form and the text of the poem is little more than a third the length of PdT. An advertisement placed in Nathaniel Thompson's Loyal Protestant and True Domestick Intelligence on 19 November 1681 claims that the rival version, published by Dan Brown, was printed from a "spurious and very imperfect Copy which contains only the first Part of the said Poem, the three last Parts (which are the most considerable) being wholly left out, excepting some few lines of them foisted in here and there without any Sense or Coherence" and describes the Faithorne and Kersey manuscript as "from the Authors Original Copy in four parts (together with several Additions and Corrections by an Ingenious Person)." In a recent article (PQ, XLVII [1968], 547-562) the present editor has argued against this account of the poem's genesis, and has proposed the following hypothetical order of versions. (For the details of the argument the reader is referred to the article.)

(1) An impromptu written as The Poet's Complaint on or about 30 December 1680, for despatch to "a Person of Quality," using materials from a commonplace book dating from circa 1677. This assumption is based on the terminal dates of its collection of quotations from other writers which differs from that of PdT, and a disparity between the times of composition alleged in the epistles to the two poems—PdT claiming "less than a fortnight's space" and PC "less than three days space."

(2) An enlarged version of #1 in four cantos completed by 10 January 1681. (The "Authors Original Copy.")

(3) The version of #2 revised and augmented by "The Ingenious Person," who may or may not have been identical with the "Publisher," and printed as Poeta de Tristibus.

It would follow that the near-simultaneous publication of versions #1 and #3 in November 1681 was wholly coincidental. My initial assumption that PC represents an early draft rather than a truncated copy of PdT has been reviewed with approval by my colleague David Bradley, using criteria developed during a study of analogous situations among Elizabethan dramatic texts. One of his most valuable observations is that the two versions are thematically distinct, PC being a satire on backbiting, attacking those who abuse poets and poetry, and PdT a more general study of the notion "Wit versus Wealth." It is unfortunately impossible to reproduce his more detailed comments since this would also involve reproducing sizeable sections of PC; however, the basic point concerning the direction of copying can be made in another way through the pattern of variants revealed in extracts from the epilogue to Lacy's The Old Troop and Dryden's prologue to Aureng-Zebe which are quoted in both PC and PdT. Collation shows that both texts are derived from a lost intermediary which was in close though not complete agreement with PC against PdT. This rules out any chance that this section of PC could be derived from the printer's copy of PdT, and suggests that the intermediary is more likely to have been the hypothetical commonplace book or the MS of PC than any four-canto text, though the second possibility cannot be dismissed on textual grounds alone.

The only real clues to the authorship of the poem are the biographical details of the preface and the signature initials "T.W." following the author's epistle of PC—either or both of which may of course result from a conscious intention to deceive. Surprisingly, both seem to be relevant to the history of Thomas Ward, the author of the hudibrastic anti-protestant satire, England's Reformation (1719), who is known to have left England at roughly the time suggested as that of the poem's composition. In the life of Ward prefixed to An Interesting Controversy with Mr. Ritschel, Vicar of Hexham (1819), which appears to be based at an unknown degree of removal on a personal memoir, he is said to have been born on 13 April 1652, and to have returned to England in the thirty-fourth year of his age after at least "five or six years" abroad, a figure which may just be reconciled with a departure date in January 1680/1. However, other details of the case do not fit so well. To start with, it is hard to see how a man of twenty-eight could refer, as the author does in both epistles, to his "want of years, and a necessary Experience in the Ages humour." Nor is it easy to reconcile Ward's fervent Catholicism with a satiric allusion in PC to non-preaching bishops—a favorite topic of Puritan polemic—or with a reference to the Pope as "Rome's great Idol." Ward is said in the Life to have been a Catholic before his departure, and writes movingly in England's Reformation of his friendship with the Yorkshire anchorite Father Posket, executed in March 1679. The matter is further complicated by the appearance of the initials "T.W." together with the dateline "Rome, June 10. 79. Stilo Novo." on a broadsheet of 1679, A letter from Rome to a Friend in London in Relation to the Jesuits Executed, and those that are to be Executed in the Countryes, which is in fact an anti-Catholic tract vigorously supporting the executions. For this to have been the work of Ward we would have to assume that he had set out for Rome at least two years before the departure of the Poeta and then suffered a violent relapse into Puritanism. On the other hand, if the pamphlet, as is quite probable, was really the work of one of Shaftesbury's propagandists in London, there would have been excellent reasons for attaching the initials of a known Catholic exile. As the year 1679 is also within the stated date-range of Ward's departure, the existence of the broadsheet must count marginally against his being the author of PdT.

I can cast no further light on this mystery beyond proposing that if the story of the exiled poet is in fact a fabrication, the poem may have been the work of a younger (b. 1661) and Protestant "T.W." in the person of Thomas Wood, Anthony À Wood's nephew, later celebrated as a legal writer, poet, and controversialist and for his fondness for anonymous and pseudonymous publication. Two of Wood's poems, Juvenalis Redivivus (published anonymously in 1683) and an elegy on the death of Oldham (included with Dryden's lines in the Remains of 1684), are satires on the poets of a similar kind to PdT, while the second has a striking structural similarity to its opening canto. Neither PdT nor PC is included in Wood's list of his writings sent to his uncle in 1692 for inclusion in Athenae Oxonienses (Bodl. MS. Wood F.45, f.#229), nor do they appear in A Catalogue of Part of the Library of the Reverend Dr. Wood (London, 1723); however, neither omission need be significant. A third possibility is Thomas Walters, claimed by Anthony À Wood as the true author of William Bedloe's tragedy, The Excommunicated Prince (1679); but I have found nothing beyond the fact he was an author to connect him with PdT, nor any evidence that either he or Thomas Wood spent the years 1681-1682 otherwise than accumulating time for their degrees at Oxford.

Monash University

[Pg v]
[Pg vi]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This facsimile of Poeta de Tristibus (1682) is reproduced from a copy (*PR3291/P795) in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

POETA DE TRISTIBUS:

OR, THE

Poet's Complaint.

A

POEM

In Four CANTO'S.

Ovid de Trist.

Parve, nec invideo, sine me Liber ibis in Urbem: Hei mihi! quÒ——