Concealed Poet Ignoto
Is he Raleigh? Marlowe? Shake-Speare? Barnfield?
The editor of the third edition of England's Helicon 1812 says in regard to Ignoto: “This signature appears to have been generally, though not exclusively, subscribed to the pieces of Sir Walter Raleigh. It is also subscribed to one piece since appropriated to Shakespeare, [No. xviii,] and to one which, according to Ellis, belongs to Richard Barnfield [No. xxi.] The celebrated answer to Marlowe’s, Come live with me, here subscribed Ignoto, is given expressly to Raleigh by Isaac Walton in his Complete Angler, first published in 1653.”
Ignoto was undoubtedly a concealed poet. Marlowe, Raleigh and Barnfield were not. As early as January 1590, if not a little sooner, Ignoto contributed to Spenser’s first publication of the Faerie Queen. There are sixteen pieces in the England's Helicon subscribed Ignoto. One of these, The Nymph’s Reply is ascribed to Raleigh on the testimony of Walton in 1653; and two others are believed by the editor of the third edition, 1812, to belong to Raleigh, because in an early copy of the same Ignoto was found pasted over “W.R.” Upon such flimsy evidence the modern editor infers that the signature Ignoto was “generally, though not exclusively, [his own italics,] subscribed to the pieces of Sir Walter Raleigh.” Poor neglected Shakespeare has but a single specimen in the Helicon: “On a day, alack a day” taken from Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Fact
Ignoto is Bacon ~ Shake-Speare
In the England's Helicon, edition Ignoto give his Shepherd’s Description Of Love; toward the end he writes:
Faust. A thing that creeps, it cannot go,
A prize that passeth to and fro,
A thing for one, a thing for moe,
And he that proves shall find it so:
And, shepherd, this is Love, I trow.
Finis. Ignoto.
Notice the line of Faust: "A thing that creeps, it cannot go." These words are also noted in Francis Bacon's History of Great Britain and in a letter he wrote to King James I: "Love must creep where it cannot go." It is also noted in Shake-Speare's Two Gentlemen of Verona; IV. ii. 19: "love will creep in service where it cannot go."
- England's Helicon : Ignoto
- History of Great Britain : Francis Bacon
- William Shake-Speare : Two Gentlemen of Verona
In Ellis’s Specimens of the early English Poets, 5th edition, 1845, among the pieces credited to Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke) is a Song, with these words in brackets: "I'd be found in England’s Helicon, where it is signed Ignoto."