Nashe’s Poem for Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange

Of The Choise of Valentines, editor R. B. McKerrow says, There can, I fear, be little doubt that this poem is the work of ThomasNashe (V, 141). From the 1590s through the seventeenth century, the poem was not printed but was circulated privately in manuscript copies among a select coterie audience. Five of six extant manuscript copies begin with a dedicatory sonnet, one of which includes a dedication To the right Honorable the lord S. and another \u27To the right HonourableLordStrainge (Beal 356), offering clues to the specific coterie for which the poem was composed. Although some editors and critics have suggested that this dedication refers to Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, the idea has not been generally accepted. Ian Moulton describes the six extant manuscript copies of the poem from the early seventeenth century extensively, yet without appraising the significance of the dedications to Lord Strange(Moulton 187). This article makes a case for the dedication to Lord Strange and explores some of its ramifications for the interpretation of the poem. Beyond the significance of this identification for thepoem, establishing the dedication toLord StrangeandNashe\u27s participation in elite literary coteries would also be more broadly significant forNashestudies, in challenging a generally held assumption thatNasheeschewed elite patronage (for which assumption, see Ellinghausen, Hutson, Rivlin). Nashe flaunts the sources of imitation in his Choise of Valentines (c. 1592). In the dedicatory sonnet he names the genre as love elegy, and in the epilogue he specifies his debt to Ovid\u27s wanton muse. The poem begins with a nod to Chaucer, who had introduced Saint Valentine to literature in his Parliament of Fowles