Sangorski & Sutcliffe Celebrate Elizabethan Poets

by Stephen J. Gertz

Around  1920, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, the famed London bindery established in 1901 by Francis Sangorski (1875-1912) and George Sutcliffe (1875-1943), designed and bound a first edition copy of Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, published in 1808.

It's an extravagant theme binding in full teal crushed morocco with double fillet, gilt-rolled dog's tooth and dotted borders surrounding an inner band of onlaid crimson morocco with quote by vicar and poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674) in gilt with gilt tools, and a gilt-tooled frame with gilt cornerpieces enclosing a central medallion of massed gilt tools encircling an onlaid crimson morocco disc featuring stylized gilt initials, "C.L." (Charles Lamb) to the front cover. The spine is in black morocco.

The rear cover reiterates the design but with a different Herrick quote and a wreath/torch/bow & arrow motif in gilt to the central crimson disc, rather than Lamb's initials.

Deep purple morocco doublures with quote in gilt by Herrick (to upper) and lyre and laurel gilt-tooled cornerpieces highlight the inner covers, the whole framed by multiple gilt-rolled borders. Mauve silk free-endpapers with gilt-rolled border are an attractive detail. Gilt rolled and ornamented compartments, gilt ruled raised bands, and top edge gilt finish it.

The quotes by English poet, Rev. Robert Herrick, that adorn the covers and upper doublure  are pulled from his poem, Upon Master Fletcher's Incomparable Plays (1647). To upper cover band: Here's words with lines, and lines with scenes consent / To raise an Act to full astonishment. To lower cover band: Here melting numbers, words of power to move / Young men to swoon and maids to die for love. To upper doublure: To Master Fletcher / Apollo sings, his harp resounds; give room / For now behold the golden Pomp is come / Thy pomp of plays.

Elizabethan poets whose work is represented by Lamb include Thomas Sackville; Thomas Kyd; Christopher Marlowe; Thomas Decker; Ben Jonson; William Rowley; John Fletcher; Francis Beaumont; etc.

Charles Lamb was born in London in 1775. He studied at Christ's Hospital where he met and formed a lifelong friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When he was twenty years old he endured a bout of insanity and was confined to an asylum. The next year, 1796, his sister, Mary Ann, murdered their mother and was declared a "lunatic." She, too, was confined to an asylum but was eventually discharged into the care of her brother. Charles became friends with a group of young writers who supported political reform, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, Henry Brougham, Lord Byron, Thomas Barnes and Leigh Hunt.

In 1796 Lamb contributed four sonnets to Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796). This was followed by Blank Verse (1798) and Pride's Cure (1802). He worked for the East India Company in London but moonlighted as a contributor to several journals and newspapers including London Magazine, The Morning Chronicle, Morning Post and the The Quarterly Review. He is best known for his pseudonymous essays for London Magazine, collected and published as Essays of Elia (1823), and for Tales From Shakespeare (1807), a wildly successful collaboration with his sister. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare went a long way to re-introducing and popularizing Shakespeare's contemporaries. He died in 1834. 

Stamp-signed to lower doublure.
S&S were proud of this binding;
it is rare to find "Designed and bound"
in their signature. "Bound by" is the usual.

Robert Herrick was a 17th century poet of the tempus fugit-carpe diem school who wrote at least one poem that has earned enduring fame in English literature, with an immortal first line known to everyone even if they don't know the poem or poet.

TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME

by Robert Herrick

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
    To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
    The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
    And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
    When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
    Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
    And while ye may go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
    You may for ever tarry.

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[SANGORSKI & SUTCLIFFE, binders]. LAMB, Charles. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare. With Notes. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808.

First edition. Octavo (7 1/8 x 4 1/4 in; 181 x 108 mm). xii, 484 pp.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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The Elizabethan Poem in Praise of Cannabis

by Stephen J. Gertz

Frontispiece portrait of John Taylor,
engraved by Thomas Cockson,
from The Workes of John Taylor (1630).

“Sweet sacred Muses, my invention raise
Unto the life, to write great Hempseeds praise...”

So begins The Praise of Hemp-seed, a minor epic poem dating from 1620  by John Taylor (1580 - 1653), who, though all but unknown to modern readers, was a prolific writer with over 150 works published in his lifetime and was amongst the most popular poets of the Elizabethan Era.

Known as “The Water Poet” - his primary source of income derived from his profession as a waterman, the trade of boatmen who ferried passengers across the Thames - his poetry, while far from gemstone, was notable for its diamond wit and keen  observations of the contemporary social and cultural scene.

Of what use is hemp?

“This grain grows to a stalk, whose coat or skin
Good industry doth hatchell twist, and spin,
And for mans best advantage and availes
It makes clothes, cordage, halters, ropes and sailes.”

Taylor enumerates the many manufacturers and trades dependent upon hemp, not the least of which are pharmacy:

“Apothecaries were not worth a pin,
If Hempseed did not bring their commings in;
Oyles, Unguents, Sirrops, Minerals, and Baulmes,
(All nature’s treasures, and th’Almighties almes),
Emplasters, Simples, Compounds, sundry drugs
With Necromanticke names like fearful Bugs,
Fumes, Vomits, purges, that both cures, and kils,
Extractions, conserves, preserves, potions, pils,
Elixirs, simples, compounds, distillations,
Gums in abundance, brought from foreign nations.”

All manner of physical complaint is relieved. “Most serviceable Hempseed but for thee, These helpes for man could not thus scattered be.”

One of the more notable aspects of The Praise of Hempseed is that within Taylor acknowledges the death of Shakespeare four years earlier and his place in poetry’s firmament; he was the first poet to do so:

“In paper, many a poet now survives
Or else their lines had perish’d with their lives.
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the laurel wore,
Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excell,
Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel,
Sylvester, Beaumont, Sir John Harrington.
Forgetfulness their works would over run
But that in paper they immortally
Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.”

Taylor may have known William Shakespeare. In The True Cause of the Waterman’s Suit Concerning Players (1613 or 1614) he writes about the waterman’s dispute with London theater companies, which in 1612 had moved from the south bank of the Thames to the north, thus depriving the ferrymen of lucrative traffic.

Taylor was unabashedly attracted to the pleasures of life; amongst his many poems is A Bawd. A vertuous bawd, a modest bawd: as she deserves, reproove or else applaud (London: [printed by Augustine Mathewes] for Henry Gosson, 1635).

While we're on the subject , let us not pass over Taylor’s statement of hemp’s efficacy in matters of passion:

“Besides it is an easie thing to prove
It is a soveraigne remedie for love.”

A fascinating aside: Taylor wrote one of the earliest palindromes whose authorship can be firmly credited, one that celebrates a lifestyle of dubious morality, hempseed and the flesh:

“Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel.”

The title page to The Praise of Hemp-seed contains a declaration that could have come out of the mouth of hemp’s favorite spokesman in the modern world, actor Woody Harrelson:

“The Profits arising from Hemp-seed are
Clothing, Food, Fishing, Shipping
Pleasure, Profit, Justice, Whipping.”

Don’t know about the whipping. Lashes made from braided hemp threads? Shades of psychopathic Harrelson in Natural Born Killers!

In seventeenth century England the hemp plant was exploited for all it was worth. Contrary to Armour Meat Packing’s famous claim that when processing pigs they used everything but the squeal, when hemp was processed in Elizabethan England, they used everything and the squeal - of pleasure.

It is a measure of how literary reputations, popularity, and book collecting tastes ebb and flow that in 1902 a copy of the 1630 folio edition of The Workes of John Taylor sold for an astounding half of  what a Shakespeare Second Folio (1632) fetched, 100% more than what a first edition of John Donne’s Poems (1633) sold for in the same year (Out of Print & Into Profit, p. 203).

Now, unfortunately, when we think of the Waterman, if we think of him at all, we probably think of this latter-day H2O-guy:

It’s enough to drive a body into the arms of Mary Jane. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

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TAYLOR, John. The Praise of Hemp-Seed. With the voyage of Mr. Roger Bird and the writer hereof, in a boat of brown-paper, to Quinborough in Kent. First edition. London: [printed by E. Allde] for H. Gosson, 1620.

STC 23788.

The Praise of Hemp-Seed is an exceedingly rare book. OCLC/KVK record only one hard copy (many on microfilm or digital file) of the first edition and only a handful of the second edition i1623) in institutional holdings worldwide. ABPC reports no copies of either edition at auction within the last thirty-five years.

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Read the complete text of The Praise of Hemp-Seed here.
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