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Professor Elizabeth Story Donno, in her recent Elizabethan Minor Epics (New York, 1963), has made an important contribution to both scholarship and teaching. Not only has she brought together for the first time in one volume most of the extant Elizabethan minor epics, but in so doing, she has hastened the recognition that the minor epic, or "epyllion" as it has often been called in modern times,[1] is a distinctive literary genre as deserving of study as the sonnet, the pastoral, or the verse satire.

The purpose of the present volume is to supplement and complement Professor Donno's collection by making available in facsimile seven minor epics of the English Renaissance omitted from it. With the publication of these poems all the known, surviving minor epics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will for the first time be made available for study in faithful reproductions of the earliest extant editions.

Of the seven minor epics included here, three—A Pleasant and Delightfull Poeme of Two Lovers, Philos and Licia, STC 19886 (1624); Dunstan Gale's Pyramus and Thisbe, STC 11527 (1617); and S[amuel] P[age's] The Love of Amos and Laura (1613)[2]—have not previously been reprinted in modern times. And of these three, one, Philos and Licia, though listed in the Short-Title Catalogue, seems not to have been noticed by Renaissance scholars, nor even by any of the principal bibliographers except William C. Hazlitt, who gives this unique copy bare mention as a book from Robert Burton's collection.[3]

The remaining four books—R[ichard] L[ynche's][4] The Amorous Poeme of Dom Diego and Ginevra published with Lynche's Diella, Certaine Sonnets, STC 17091 (1596); William Barksted's Mirrha The Mother of Adonis: Or, Lustes Prodegies, STC 1429 (1607), published with Three Eglogs by Lewes Machin; Barksted's Hiren: or The Faire Greeke, STC 1428 (1611); and H. A's The Scourge of Venus, or, The Wanton Lady. With the Rare Birth of Adonis, STC 968 (1613)—have been edited by the "indefatigable" Alexander B. Grosart in Occasional Issues of Very Rare Books (Manchester, 1876–77), limited to 50 copies each and hence extremely scarce today.[5] Dom Diego and Ginevra was also reprinted by Edward Arber in An English Garner, VII (Birmingham, 1883), 209–240. With the exception of Philos and Licia, these poems are printed in their approximate order of composition from 1596 to 1613.[6]