Henry Bold's bogus valentine

I thought I’d put together a quick post for Valentine’s Day, and was scanning Valentine poems in LION. Henry Bold’s ‘To his Mistris’ seemed familiar:

Chuse me your Valentine,
Next let us marry:
Love to the death will pine,
If we long tarry:

You have broke promise twice,
Dear to undo me;
If you prove faithless thrice,
None then will wooe you.

It is actually a poem by Robert Herrick, recycled with an omitted stanza, and not even taking the trouble to make the obvious correction to the rhyme at the end of the poem:

‘To his Mistresse.’

Choose me your Valentine;
Next, let us marry:
Love to the death will pine,
If we long tarry.

Promise, and keep your vowes,
Or vow ye never:
Loves doctrine disallowes
Troth-breakers ever.

You have broke promise twice
(Deare) to undoe me;
If you prove faithlesse thrice,
None then will wooe you.

As I read the full volume of Bold’s poems, Wit a Sporting in a Pleasant Grove of New Fancies (1657), more and more poems seemed familiar. These ‘new fancies’ were swathes of Herrick’s Hesperides of 1648, bits of Marlowe’s Ovid: a whole chamber of echoes. In the ODNB, Jonathan Pritchard’s life of Henry Bold (for he did exist, I had started to wonder if he wasn’t entirely a publisher’s figment, and invented name that told its own story – making Bold with other’s poems) tells the whole story, and explains my image for this post:

“Wit a Sporting in a Pleasant Grove of New Fancies was the first work to appear under Bold’s initials but the volume is a comprehensive piracy. The portrait placed before the title-page, for example, professes to represent Bold but in fact depicts Christian Ravus, or Ravius, whose likeness had originally prefixed his Discourse of the Oriental Tongues (1649). The text itself also appropriates the work of others. Much of the first fifty pages is taken verbatim, but in a reordered sequence, from the secular section of Thomas Beedome's Poems Divine and Humane (1641); Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648) is the source for many more items scattered throughout the rest of the volume. In making those poems his own, Bold regularizes Beedome’s spelling and changes the names of the addressees (and, thus, the titles), lineation, and even the wording of Herrick’s verse.”

This was one of my favourites among Bold’s interventions into the text of the poet he is plagiarizing. He wants to avoid anything too memorable, of course, so Herrick’s first stanza in

To Anthea , who may command him any thing.

Bid me to live, and I will live
Thy Protestant to be:
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee.

became the lusterless:

To his Mistris to command him any thing.

Bid me to live, and I will live,
thy servant for to be;
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee…

Herrick was still alive, Beedome’s date of death is unknown, but he was probably dead when this Bold volume was concocted.