The Paine of Pleasure: Introduction to the Text

While working on Chasing Shakespeares, I had the pleasure of coming across the poem "The Paine of Pleasure," traditionally ascribed to Anthony Munday. In Chasing Shakespeares, Joe has an instinctive revelation: the poem cannot possibly be by Munday; it is by an upper-class poet, who must be Oxford, and it is Shakespearean.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss this attribution in more detail. From internal evidence, the poem was not written by Munday; it is unlike his contemporary work in style and scope. Again from internal evidence, "The Paine of Pleasure" was probably written by a poet familiar with the court. In his Elizabethan Courtier Poets [1], Steven May has identified about forty such poets, and of those, the most likely candidate is Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who was Munday's employer at the time The Paine of Pleasure was published.

Some (limited and tentative) conclusions may be drawn from "The Paine of Pleasure" to the Shakespeare authorship controversy. We will not find in it a major new Shakespearean work; in many ways "The Paine of Pleasure" is a fairly typical late mid-century poem. However, the poem is important, for no other reason, because of its size (1200 lines, 36 printed pages) and its early date.