John Grange

Abbreviations

Krueger

The Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, ed. Robert Krueger (B.Litt. thesis, Oxford, 1961) in Bodleian, MS B. Litt. d. 871.

Introduction

John Grange is a poet whose work circulated in manuscript in the 1620s and 1630s, appearing in a fair number of extant verse miscellanies, including songs later set to music by Henry Lawes. About him, however, little is known, not even his exact identity. He was certainly not the Elizabethan poet John Grange (b.1556/7), author of The Golden Aphrodite (1577), and his verse, including one about the abortive Spanish Match in 1623, clearly belongs to another generation. As Krueger, the only scholar hitherto to have discussed Grange's output, has observed in his dissertation on the Earl of Pembroke, there were several John Granges in this period. The favourite candidate would seem to be the John Grange (b.1586/7), of Buckinghamshire, who matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1604 and was then at Lincoln's Inn. Nothing more than that can currently be said about him.

The canon of Grange's poems is by no means certain, since contemporary attributions vary. Entries are given below to those poems, some of them apparently still unpublished, found ascribed to him in manuscript copies.

Peter Beal