Posthumous quartos of the poems.
Of posthumous editions in quarto of the two narrative poems in the seventeenth century, there
were two of ‘Lucrece’—viz. in 1624 (‘the sixth edition’) and in 1655 (with John Quarles’s ‘Banishment of Tarquin’)—and there were as many as six editions of ‘Venus’ (1617, 1620, 1627, two in 1630, and 1636), making thirteen editions in all in forty-three years. No later editions of these two poems were issued in the seventeenth century. They were next reprinted together with ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ in 1707, and thenceforth they usually figured, with the addition of the ‘Sonnets,’ in collected editions of Shakespeare’s works.