Choice of Emblemes
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Choice of Emblemes[1] (1586) is an emblem book by by the English poet Geoffrey Whitney (c. 1548 – c. 1601).
Here is an example engraving of Chaos[2].
Its full title reads A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises, for the moste parte gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and moralised, and divers newly devised, by Geffrey Whitney. A worke adorned with varietie of matter, both pleasant and profitable: wherein those that please maye finde to fit their fancies: Because herein, by the office of the eie and the eare, the minde maye reape dooble-delighte throughe holsome preceptes, shadowed with pleasant devises: both fit for the vertuous, to their incoraging; and for the wicked, for their admonishing and amendment. It was published in a two-part quarto edition from the Plantin Press in Leyden and dedicated to the Earl of Leicester from London, 28 November 1585, with an epistle to the reader dated Leyden, 4 May 1586.
The work was the first of its kind to give to Englishmen an adequate example of the emblem books from the great continental presses. It was mainly from this book, representing the greater part of emblem literature preceding it, that Shakespeare gained knowledge of the great foreign emblematists of the 16th century. There are 248 emblems, each accompanied by a woodcut with a motto and a poem in English. 202 of the illustrations were chosen from the stock held at the Plantin Press and are the work of Andrea Alciato, Claude Paradin, Johannes Sambucus, Hadrianus Junius, and the illustrator of Gabriele Faerno's Centum Fabulae. Twenty-three more are suggested by the work of others and a further 23 are original.
The poems are for the most part in six-line stanzas; a few are in quatrains or are even two-line epigrams. They are addressed to Whitney's kinsmen or friends, or to a notable contemporary, and give information of persons, places, and things rarely to be found elsewhere. The verses are often of great merit and always show extensive learning. Some are translations or adaptations of Classical authors such as Horace (p.59), Ovid (p.121) and Anacreon (p.182). It is noteworthy that there are a higher proportion of fables in the collection than are usual in other emblem books. While most are the fables of Aesop to be found in Faerno's Centum Fabulae, which had been issued from the Plantin Press in 1567, there are rarer items like The Dog in the Manger and Washing the Ethiopian white.
