Thomas Edwards (poet)
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Thomas Edwards (died 1595) Ovid inspired epic poems Cephalus and Procris; Narcissus.In 1595 he said of Edmund Spenser By his toil we do nourish ,And by him we are enlarged He has been identified as probably the Shropshire law student who transferred from Furnival's Inn to Lincoln's Inn in June 1587; here Edwards shared a room with a known friend of John Donne.
Edwards possibly contributed the Latin verse to Adriaan van Roomen's Parvum theatrum urbium which was published in 1595.
Cephalus and Procris; Narcissus
Cephalus, Procris and Narcissus all feature in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses.
Edward's poems were published as a single volume in 1595; Cephalus and Procris in couplet form, Narcissus in a seven-line stanza. In the first poem Edwards is more particularly imitating Marlowe and in the latter Shakespeare. Various authors starting with Thomas Warton have suggested
- Pyramus: Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.
- Thisbe: As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.
- (Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v. 1)
is a reference to Edward's work, but this is generally discounted.
The author concluded each work with a long postscript; in Narcissus this includes, using aliases, references to other poets including: Amintas (Thomas Watson); Collyn (Edmund Spenser); Leander (Christopher Marlowe) and Rosamond (Samuel Daniel). Others such as Adon have not been convincingly identified, though Katherine Duncan-Jones has recently put forth the case for Adon as an allusion to Shakespeare.
Contemporaries such as William Covell and Thomas Nashe derided the work; Covell listing it, among the ‘smaller lights’ of modern poetry and the book disappeared from the record until a fragment was discovered in the Lamport Library of Sir Charles Edmund Isham in 1867. The full copy was subsequently discovered at the Cathedral Library at Peterborough. It was republished by the Roxburghe Club in 1882.
