Description
at the very idea of publication in print had hardly occurred to many writers’ minds. When the book appeared, both its main contributors, Surrey and Wyatt, had been long dead, as well as others (Sir Francis Bryan and Anne Boleyn’s unlucky brother, George Lord Rochford) who are supposed to be represented. The short Printer’s Address to the Reader gives absolutely no intelligence as to the circumstances of the publication, the person responsible for the editing, or the authority which the editor and printer may have had for their inclusion of different authors’ work. It is only a theory, though a sufficiently plausible one, that the editor was Nicholas Grimald, chaplain to Bishop Thirlby of Ely, a Cambridge man who some ten years before had been incorporated at Oxford and had been elected to a Fellowship at Merton College. In Grimald’s or Grimoald’s connection with the book there was certainly something peculiar, for the first edition contains forty poems contributed by him and signed with his name, while in the
