This article concerns two seventeenth-century poems that have not been printed before except for brief extracts. They occupy pages 26–36 in a commonplace book in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C., known as MS.V.a.160 (formerly MS.452.1). The poems are there attributed to Thomas Dekker, one of the better-known Jacobean dramatists, author of The Shoemakers' Holiday and other middle-class comedies, and of a large number of pamphlets of ‘London life’ which are of great interest to the student of colloquial speech in the Jacobean period. Though the commonplace book includes other interesting material, my discussion will confine itself to the two Dekker items, their import and their claim to genuineness, with one slight exception only. The exception is a version of a little-known epitaph attributed, though not very persuasively, to Shakespeare, which I cite in a footnote since it has apparently not been printed for over a hundred years. Of the two Dekker poems, the second one is a bawdy song which probably refers to a special popular entertainment of the day.

Filippo Bruno was born in Nola, Italy, in 1548. At the age of seventeen he joined the Dominican Order in Naples and changed his given name to Giordano. Eleven years later, anticipating an indictment for heresy, he put off his monastic dress and fled. During the next sixteen years he wandered throughout Europe, pausing here and there until his welcome wore out. Three of these years were spent in England, where he became a member of the circle surrounding Florio, Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville. It was during these three years that he produced the writings, in Italian, by which he is best known. In 1591, after further wanderings, he made the fatal mistake of returning to Italy. He was arrested in Venice and, after some dispute among the interested authorities, was consigned to the Inquisition in Rome. His trial occupied the remainnig eight years of his life.