Tottel's Miscellany

Songes and Sonettes, usually called Tottel's Miscellany, was the first printed anthology of English poetry. First published by Richard Tottel in 1557 in London, it ran to many editions in the sixteenth century.

Richard Tottel was an English publisher with a shop at Temple Bar on Fleet Street in London. His main business was the publication of law textbooks but his biggest contribution to English literature would come in the form of the anthology of poetry. He also gave the public Surrey's translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid, which is the earliest known example of English blank verse. He is responsible too for the first edition printed of Cicero's De Officiis in 1556 by Nicholas Grimald, who would later contribute to the poetry anthology.

Tottel also published Thomas More's Utopia and another collection of More's writings, John Lydgate's translations from Giovanni Boccaccio, and books by William Staunford and Thomas Tusser. The majority of his publications were legal treatises, including a legal history of the reign of Richard III, and legal yearbooks covering parts of the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI.

The first edition of this work appeared on 5 June 1557 with the title Songes and Sonettes Written By the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt the Elder and others. The volume consisted of 271 poems, none of which had ever been printed before. Songes and Sonettes was the first of the poetic anthologies that became popular by the end of the 16th century, and is considered to be Tottel's 'great contribution to English letters', as well as the first to be printed for the pleasure of the common reader. It was also the last large use of sonnet form for several decades, in published work, until the appearance of Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) and the anthology The Phoenix Nest (1593).

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