Leonard Digges's 1640 poem to Shakespeare

Source-control position

The poem's heading, text, named theatrical examples, and Leon. Digges signature are controlled by direct Folger page images and the independent EarlyPrint/TCP transcription. Freehafer and Hadfield supply scholarly interpretation; neither is used in place of the 1640 witness.

The printed witness

John Benson's Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. was printed in London by Thomas Cotes and sold by John Benson in 1640 (STC 22344; ESTC S106377; TCP A12034). Its preliminary matter contains a long poem headed:

Vpon Master WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the Deceased Authour, and his POEMS.

The poem closes Leon. Digges. Both the heading and signature have been checked in Folger copy 1, as have the intervening references to the King's Men, Shakespeare's plays and characters, the London theatres, Fletcher, Beaumont, and Ben Jonson.

• folger STC22344 copy1 sigs star2v star3r
• folger STC22344 copy1 sigs star3v star4r
• Public Shakespeare Documented record, DOI 10.37078/706
• Public EarlyPrint/TCP text, A12034

Leonard died in 1635. The poem's appearance in 1640 was therefore posthumous.

Image-controlled text and major claims

The opening turns Shakespeare into the example proving that poets are born rather than manufactured by labor:

Poets are borne not made, when I would prove

This truth, the glad remembrance I must love

Of never dying Shakespeare, who alone,

Is argument enough to make that one.

Digges then develops a nature-versus-art argument:

Art without Art unparaleld as yet.

Next Nature onely helpt him, for looke thorow

This whole Booke, thou shalt find he doth not borrow

One phrase from Greekes, nor Latines imitate,

Nor once from vulgar Languages Translate,

Nor Plagiari-like from others gleane.

These lines are Digges's polemical description of Shakespeare's originality, not a modern source study. Their importance lies in what an early reader and Folio poet thought worth asserting.

The next passage makes an unusually explicit company claim:

But oh! what praise more powerfull can we give

The dead, then that by him the Kings men live,

His Players, which should they but have shar'd the Fate,

All else expir'd within the short Terme's date.

Digges argues that Shakespeare's plays sustained the King's Men after the dramatist's death. He also distinguishes theatres by name—the Globe, Blackfriars, Bull, Cockpit, and Fortune—while attacking contemporary “Poetasters.”

The poem then becomes evidence for remembered performance and audience response:

So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,

And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were,

Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience,

Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence.

It contrasts Julius Caesar and Othello with Jonson's Catiline and Sejanus, then gives concrete comedy examples:

when let but Falstaffe come,

Hall, Poines, the rest you scarce shall have a roome

All is so pester'd: let but Beatrice

And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice

The Cockpit Galleries, Boxes, all are full

To heare Malvolio that crosse garter'd Gull.

The syntax moves rapidly across Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night. The theatre statement is Digges's claim, not a surviving attendance ledger, but it is specific contemporary reception evidence from a writer who says “So have I seene.”

The poem's closing image is durability:

Like old coyn'd gold, whose lines in every page,

Shall passe true currant to succeeding age.

Plays, characters, people, and institutions named or unmistakably invoked

Date and proposed original destination

John Freehafer reads “new Fortunes younger brethren” as the King's Revels during their tenure at the Fortune. On that basis he dates composition between November 1630 and July 1634. Because the poem repeatedly addresses a printed collection of plays—“This whole Booke”—he argues that it was intended for the 1632 Second Folio and was excluded, perhaps because its attack on Jonson was incompatible with Jonson's reprinted commendatory poem. This is a substantial scholarly argument, not a fact printed in Benson's 1640 volume.

Andrew Hadfield accepts the importance of the poem and analyzes it as a developed defence of Shakespeare's natural art, originality, characterization, and theatrical power. Hadfield is particularly useful for placing this 1640 witness beside the 1613 Balliol note, the 1623 First Folio poem, Leonard's Spanish translations, James Mabbe, Edward Blount, and the Herbert brothers.

Neville relevance

The poem matters to the Neville case through a documented family bridge:

Henry Neville ↔ Dudley Digges — brothers — Leonard Digges ↔ Shakespeare print and reception

• Dudley has direct political and documentary relations with Neville.
• Leonard is Dudley's younger brother.
• Leonard is independently present in a 1613 Shakespeare/Sonnets note, the 1623

First Folio preliminaries, and the 1640 Shakespeare Poems.

• Leonard's 1622 Gerardo was published by Edward Blount and dedicated to

Pembroke and Montgomery.

The significance is cumulative and familial: one Digges brother is directly in Neville's political world; the other is repeatedly and explicitly in Shakespeare's reading and publication history.

Source evaluation

Verified bibliography

• Digges, Leonard. “Vpon Master WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the Deceased Authour,

and his POEMS.” In Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. London: Thomas Cotes for John Benson, 1640, sigs. 3r–4r. STC 22344; ESTC S106377; TCP A12034. Shakespeare Documented.

• Freehafer, John. “Leonard Digges, Ben Johnson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare

Idolatry.” Shakespeare Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1970): 63–75. DOI 10.2307/2868403.

• Hadfield, Andrew. “Shakespeare and the Digges Brothers.” Reformation 25,

no. 1 (2020): 2–17. DOI 10.1080/13574175.2020.1743554.

Notes on access

The Folger page-image pair and local TCP control were inspected directly. The local Freehafer PDF contains a historical JSTOR access watermark and is retained for research only; it is not embedded in the book or any public PDF.