Tottel's Miscellany - Songes and Sonettes

Songes and Sonettes

The first edition of this work appeared on June 5, 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 the sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) and the anthology The Phoenix Nest (1593).

Most of the poems included in the anthology were written in the 1530s but were only published in the first edition in 1557. Many of them were published posthumously. There are in total 54 actual sonnets in the anthology. These include nine from unknown authors, three from Grimald, 15 from Surrey, and 27 from Wyatt.

The incorporated poetry had numerous comments on religion, covering Catholicism, Protestantism, and the English Reformation. Later editors of the early modern period then took out many of these religious references.