Leonard Digges

Topic: Leonard Digges

1. Verified Sourced Facts

• Andrew Hadfield writes:

“Leonard Digges (1588–1653) was a poet, scholar, and translator”

• Hadfield writes:

“When Thomas died his widow, Anne (née St. Leger), married Thomas Russell of Alderminster”

• Hadfield writes:

“both Digges and Ben Jonson ... wrote commendatory verses for Mabbe’s translation The Rogue (1621–2)”

• Hadfield writes:

“Leonard Digges was a great admirer of Shakespeare”

• Hadfield writes:

“Digges is best remembered now as the author of one of the commendatory verses for Shakespeare’s first folio of 1623”

• Hadfield writes:

“Digges wrote another poem about Shakespeare ... published posthumously as a preface to John Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems.”

• Hadfield writes:

“this poem may have been intended for the second folio of 1632.”

• Hadfield writes:

“the key figure who links Shakespeare’s Stratford and London lives and connects him to the Digges’ family was Thomas Russell”

• John Freehafer writes:

“Leonard Digges (1588-1635) wrote two sets of commendatory verses on Shakespeare”

• Freehafer writes:

“Personal associations made it possible for Digges, a minor poet, to contribute verses to the first Shakespeare folio in 1623.”

• Freehafer writes:

“To his Shakespearian connections were added his personal friendship with Edward Blount, a publisher of the First Folio”

• Freehafer writes:

“These verses are entitled ‘Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and his Poems’”

• Freehafer writes:

“Since Digges’s poem can be dated between 1630 and 1634, the only such volume for which it could have been written is the second Shakespeare folio of 1632.”

• Freehafer writes:

“Digges’s long poem on Shakespeare has been neglected and underrated.”

• Freehafer writes:

“qualifies as the first published expression of Shakespeare idolatry.”

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• A Ken Feinstein blog post dated 7 Jan. 2020 is the current local source trail for Leonard Digges’s 1613 Sonnets note and for the packet’s shorthand summary of his Shakespeare commendatory verses.

• The preserved 7 Jan. 2020 Ken Feinstein blog post is the current local source trail for:
• the 1613 handwritten note on the Sonnets
• the local shorthand summary of Leonard Digges’s 1623 and 1640 Shakespeare commendatory material

3. Citations

• Feinstein, Ken. “New Discovery: Dudley Digges, Henry Neville, and Shakespeare.” Ken Feinstein (blog), 7 Jan. 2020, https://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2020/01/new-discovery-dudley-digges-henry.html.
• Freehafer, John. “Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1, 1970, pp. 63-75. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.com/stable/2868403.
• Hadfield, Andrew. “Shakespeare and the Digges Brothers.” Reformation, vol. 25, no. 1, 2020, pp. 2-17. Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/13574175.2020.1743554.
• virginia-company-overlap.csv. Local project matrix, /Users/kenf/Neville Book/virginia-company-overlap.csv.

4. Notes on Access

• The 1613 handwritten note on the Sonnets is presently represented here through the local source note blog_dudley_digges_discovery_2020-01-07.md. This packet does not yet cite the underlying manuscript witness directly.
• Hadfield and Freehafer disagree on Leonard Digges’s death year in the quoted passages used here:
• Hadfield: 1588–1653
• Freehafer and the local note: 1588-1635
• Hadfield’s 1653 date appears to be an error rather than a genuine scholarly disagreement. Freehafer, the Ken Feinstein source note, and standard reference practice in this project use 1635.
• This packet is strongest on the Freehafer literary-history material and still weaker on the manuscript-side 1613 note, which remains a local-source lead rather than a directly cited witness.