The Paine of Pleasure

When Don Foster found what he thought was a new and interesting Shakespeare poem, he was rightfully dubious and sent it round to be looked at by his fellow academics. A good idea; I'm posting "The Paine of Pleasure" (and an article about it, and a modernized version) on the Web.

It's here in two versions, an Adobe Acrobat .PDF and an HTML version.

It includes:

• An article about the poem. A version of this article originally appeared in The Oxfordian for 2002, it's meant to be semi-scholarly and it might be rather tough sledding. The major points:
  • The poem has been ascribed to Anthony Munday, but doesn't resemble his work.
  • It was probably written by a courtier.
  • Among identified courtier poets, the most likely author is Oxford.
  • In several interesting ways, the poem resembles Shakespeare's work.
  • It doesn't much resemble the mature Shakespeare we know--it tries to be didactic and ends with a series of religious flourishes. But there's no reason why it should sound just like the mature Shakespeare; it was written much earlier than any datable Shakespeare work we have.
• A modernized version of the poem, with footnotes.
• A page-for-page blackletter version of the poem, with the original spelling and punctuation.

Press release about the poem