Above is an image of contents page from the 1574 edition from the Folger Digital Image Collection
Songes and sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and others.
5th June 1557 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
31st July 1557 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
1st 1559 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
2nd 1559 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
3rd 1559 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
4th 1559 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
1565 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
1574 edition English Short Title Catalogue record
Songes and Sonettes was by far the most experimental book Tottel printed and also the most popular with his contemporaries. It was one of the first, if not the first anthology of English poetry. It included secular verse by the English nobleman Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (b. 1516/1517 – 1547), the courtier Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 1542), Nicholas Grimald (b. 1519/20, d. in or before 1562), the humanist scholar, poet and dramatist and several anonymous ‘uncertain’ authors . Two editions appeared in 1557. The first edition was published on the 5th of June and included 271 poems, with 40 attributed to Surrey, 97 to Wyatt, 40 to Grimald, and 94 to ‘Uncertain Authors’. The second edition was printed very shortly afterwards on the 31st of July. This edition was substantially revised and reorganised, the poems attributed to Surrey remained unchanged, one of the Wyatt’s poems was removed, the number of poems attributed to Grimald decreased significantly to 10, and those attributed to ‘Uncertain Authors’ increased to 134.
The poems cover a variety of subjects such as friendship, war, politics, death and love. The full text of an early twentieth century edition edited by Edward Arber who was the first to refer to it as Tottel’s Miscellany is available online.
Tottel appears to have a been a very cautious businessman at every stage of his career, so it is interesting that he was willing to take the financial risks involved with printing the first edition of Songes and Sonettes. There was no established market for printing anthologies of verse in English, although some French and Italian printers during the first half of the sixteenth century had successfully published miscellanies of secular vernacular poetry. The preface Tottel wrote to the first edition refers to this and suggests that the works of ‘good Englishe writers’ should also be celebrated. 
In the introduction to the 2011 Penguin Books edition of Tottel’s Miscellany, the editors refer to this preface to the miscellany, The Printer to the Reader. In it Tottel implies that he is providing the general public with access to works that had been hoarded by the aristocracy. A comparison is made with the printing of common law texts which also involved bringing the public in on something that had previously been kept from them. Clearly, in addition to his business concerns, Tottel was conscious of the humanist role of a printer to bring written works previously reserved for an elite few to a much wider audience.
The exact extent of Tottel’s involvement in organising the text of the miscellany is not known and there is a long-standing question of who, if anyone, edited the poems. The two main manuscripts that the poems appear to come from, the Egerton MS. 2711 and the Arundel Harington, indicate that the versions in the miscellany were substantially revised before publication. Nicholas Grimald has often been considered a likely editor because of his association with Tottel at this exact period and his widespread literary activities. The other two noteworthy theories are that a group of young lawyers from the Inns of Court connected to Tottel could have edited the works, or that it was Tottel himself. The main evidence supporting the theory of Tottel as editor is that he printed other volumes of verse, was connected contemporary poets like Grimald and that the alterations made to his edition of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes from Richard Pynson’s 1527 edition are of a similar style to those made to the poems in the miscellany from their manuscript versions.
The recent 2011 Penguin edition of Tottel’s Miscellany has a detail from The burning of the remains of Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius on Market Hill in Cambridge in 1557 from Acts and Monuments by John Foxe.
Songes and Sonettes was published during the reign of Mary, when the burning of Protestant ‘heretics’ was at its peak in the summer of 1557. Tottel’s political caution is evident in the selection of the poems. There are none that attack the Marian regime but there are also none that directly praise it. One particular poem, 168. A praise of his Ladye included praise of Mary in a manuscript version and this is edited out of the printed version. Also, one of Wyatt’s most famous poems Whoso list to hunt which is often thought to be about Anne Boleyn, the mother of the future Elizabeth I, also appears to have been deliberately excluded.
Tottel’s Miscellany remained popular for the remainder of the sixteenth century and it is likely to have been the first contemporary English poetry that poets such as William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser and John Donne read. In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Abraham Slender wishes he had his copy with him: ‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here’. He also longs for a Book of Riddles. The fact that it was viewed as a suitable resource for a fool like Slender is a clear indication that the miscellany was no longer in vogue by the end of the century.
Richard Tottel 