Jonson, Camden and the Black Prince's PlumesAuthor(s): W. Todd FurnissSource: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 69, No. 7 (Nov., 1954), pp. 487-488Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3039614 .

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SPENSER AND THOMAS WATSON 487

was only beginning to receive recognition as one of the significant new poets. He had begun his public literary career in 1581 with a Latin translation of Sophocles' Antigone; followed it a year later with a collection of English love poems, The Ekcatompathica; and in 1585 printed his Latin Amynt as. In about a dozen years he pub- lished ten books, six in Latin and four in English. The first printed notice of his work came from Thomas Nashe, who in 1589 wrote that Watson's "Amintas, and his translated Antigone, may march in equippage of honour with any of our ancient Poets." 6 The next printed reference to him is the Amaranthus passage in the Faerie Queene. But in the following years he received a chorus of praise from Peele, Harvey, Barnfield, Meres, Allot and others, and be- came so highly esteemed that the young Shakespeare was compli- mented by being called " Watsons heyre." 7

Spenser's praise of Watson, I think, was probably motivated simply by his admiration for him as an artist. If this is so, it indicates Spenser's independence of judgment in singling out for commendation a man whose reputation was not yet fully established, reveals something about his literary taste in his evident liking for Watson's Italianate Latin finery, and shows that even in faraway Ireland he managed to keep abreast of the latest literary publica- tions in England.

WILLIAM RINGLER Washington University

JONSON, CAMDEN AND THE BLACK PRINCE'S PLUMES

In Ben Jonson's Prince Henries Barriers, written for the crea- tion of Henry as Prince of Wales in 1610, Merlin speaks of the Black Prince who at Crecy

teares From the Bohemian crowne the plume he weares, Which after for his crest he did preserue To his fathers vse, with this fit word, I SERVE.

(11. 263-66)

6 Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, III (London, 1910), 320.. 7 Arber, ed. cit., pp. 11-17, collects several references. See also Thomas

Edwards, Cephalus and Procris (1595), A2v and H3v; .John Dickenson, The Shepheardes Complaint (c. 1596), A2v; Thomas Dekker, A Knigths Con- juring (1607), Percy Society xxi (1842), 75.

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488 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, NOVEMBER., 1954

Holinshed, from whom Jonson took much of the historical material for the Barriers, records that the ancient and blind King John of Bohemia was killed in this battle and that after the battle his death was mourned, but he says nothing of the plumes and does not even imply that the Prince slew him.' Jonson's source for these lines is apparently William Camden's second edition of the Remctines . . . Concerning Britaine (1614), published four years after the performance of the Barriers but before its first printing in the folio of 1616. Camden says, " The victorious Blacke Prince his sonne vsed sometimes one feather, sometime three . . . the truth is, that hee wonne them at the battell of Cressy, from Iohn King of Bohemia, whom he there slew: whereunto he adioyned this olde English word IC DIEN, that is, I serue " (p. 214).

Camden's source in turn appears to be a fourteenth-century MS, a copy of " Medica " written by the Black Prince's physician, John of Arderne, and now part of the Sloane collection in the British Museum. Next to a drawing of a plume with the legend " Ic Dien," referring to the same symbol on an earlier page, either John of Arderne or William Seton, the copyist of the MS, says, " ubi dipingitur penna principis Walliae . . . Et nota quod talem pen- nam albam portabat Edwardus, primogenitus E. regis Angliae, super cristam suam, et illam pennam conquisivit de Rege Boemiae, quem interfecit apud Cresy in francia." 2 Since in the first edition of the Remaines (1605) Camden says only, "the tradition is, that he wonne them at the battell of Poitiers, whereunto hee adioyned this oldc English word IC DEN, that is, I serve" (p. 161), he probably came upon the MS between the years 1605 and 1614.

W. TODD FU-RNISS Ohio State University

' Raphael Holinshed, Chroniles, 2 vols. (London, 1577), II, 934. Jonson's indebtedness to Holinshed in the Barriers is documented in my unpublished dissertation, Ben Jonson's Masques and Entertainments (Yale University, 1952).

2 Sloane MS. 56, f. 74. Cf. Boutell's Manual of Heraldry, rev. by V. Wheeler-Eolohan (London, 1931), pp. 111-12; article on the Black Prince in DNB.

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