Zepheria (1595; STC 26124): A Critical Edition

Introduction

Zepheria is an anonymous Elizabethan lyric sequence consisting of a dedicatory poem of thirty-three lines and forty numbered "canzons," mostly of fourteen lines.¹ Originally published at the height of the sonnet vogue in 1594, Zepheria is fascinating but not first-rate, a fair target for Sir John Davies's "Gullinge Sonnets." Both derivative and outrageous (canzon 25: "'Mongst Delian Nymphs in Angels vniuersitie / Thou my Zepheria liu'st matriculated"), it combines allusions to previous sequences with verbal and prosodic experimentation.

Publication History and Critical Commentary

The title page specifies that Zepheria was "Printed by the Widdowe Orwin, for N. L. and John Busbie." Joan Orwin was the wife of printers John Kingston (active 1551-84), George Robinson (active 1585-87), and Thomas Orwin (active 1587-93) and mother of printer Felix Kingston (active 1597-1652).² On her own, she printed a volume of Cicero's De officiis as Joan Robinson in 1587 and a variety of works between Thomas Orwin's death in 1593 and 1597, the year her son was transferred to the Stationers' Company. Kingston, Robinson, and Orwin, presumably with Joan's involvement, printed and reprinted popular Latin school books by authors such as Cicero, Sebastian Chateillon, Erasmus, Aesop, Mantuan, Ovid, and Virgil; indeed, all three printed successive editions of Cicero's De officiis and Susenbrotus's Figuræ, Robinson and Orwin succeeding in turn to Kingston's material.³

During the last five years of Joan's career, the family business continued to be heavy and eclectic. She (she and Thomas up to June 1593) printed a variety of authors and genres, from the school books already mentioned, to reference works such Angel Day's The English Secretorie and Leonard Digges's Tectonicon, to sermons by popular preachers such as Henry Smith, Robert Wilkinson, Thomas Playfere, George Gifford, and William Perkins. Her output extended to plays, like Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe's Dido, Queene of Carthage, and to the self-consciously literary: lyric poetry such as Michael Drayton's Idæa: The Shepherd's Garland, sonnet sequences like Zepheria and E. C.'s Emericdulfe, and ambitious works like William Warner's Albions England (from 1589's six- to 1596's twelve-book edition).

Thomas Man was Joan Orwin's most frequent provider of copy, but she worked with many publishers. Her collaboration with Nicholas Ling and John Busby to produce Zepheria appears to have been a temporary arrangement rather than a long-term partnership; no other works survive from these years with all three names on the title page. Ling and Busby worked together often in the mid-1590s, however, and many books for which Busby provided printer's copy were sold at Ling's shop.⁴ Their most-reprinted titles during these years seem to have been Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Diuell and Robert Southwell's Triumphs ouer Death, and Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, and Michael Drayton are names that recur frequently among their authors. The sonnet vogue, then at its height, did not pass them by: besides Zepheria, Busby published Lodge's Phillis and Nicholas Ling published Drayton's Ideas Mirrour. Other Ling projects involving titles we still recognize were Marlowe's The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Ievv of Malta, entered in the Stationers' Register in 1594, and John Davies's Orchestra, published in 1596. Zepheria is thus representative of Ling's and Busby's interest in "bringing to the press works that had the status of 'literature' in [their] own time."⁵

Zepheria drew comment from the anonymous author of Polimanteia (1595) to the effect, according to Thomas Corser, that it "required some exertions to bring [it] into public notice":⁶ "Then should not Zepheria, Cephelus and Procris (workes I dispraise not) like watermen plucke euery passinger by the sleeue."⁷ Sir John Davies, an Inns of Court man, parodies the legal conceits of contemporary sonneteers in the last three of his nine manuscript "Gullinge Sonnets," beginning the penultimate sonnet with the line "My case is this, I love Zepheria brighte."⁸ After this contemporary notice, the sequence has...