February 25 – English QueenElizabeth I awardsEdmund Spenser a pension of 50 pounds per year for life[1] (see Spenser'sComplaints, in "Works" section below)
The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch, Part 1 adapted fromTorquato Tasso'sAminta; Part 2 a revision of Fraunce's translation ofAmyntas1587 byThomas Watson; volume also includes translations of the second Bucolic ofVirgil (first published in Fraunce'sThe Lawiers Logike) and of the opening ofHeliodorus'sAethiopica (see alsoThe Third Part1592)[2]
George Peele,Decensus Astraeae, a pageant for the lord mayor of London[2]
SirPhilip Sidney,Astrophel and Stella published (posthumously) first this year from an unauthorized, corrupt text, with 107 sonnets and 10 songs by Sidney, with other verse bySamuel Daniel,Thomas Campion, Greville,[2]Edward de Vere and others, as well as a preface byThomas Nashe. The text, copied down by an employee of an associate of Sidney, had so many errors and misreadings that Sidney's friends secured all the unsold copies.[4] The volume was then published again this year in a corrected edition, also unauthorized, with 94 sonnets by Sidney and none of the additional poems.[2] (The poem was again published in about1597,[2] with at least one source, Mona Wilson, stating1598.[4] This version of the poem, now commonly used, appeared in the folio of the 1598 version of Sidney'sArcadia, although even that version was not completely free from error. It was prepared under the supervision of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke.[4])
Complaints, including "The Ruines of Time"; "The Teares of the Muses"; "Virgils Gnat"; "Prosopopoia; or, Mother Hubberds Tale"; "Muiopotmos"; "Visions of the Words Vanitie";[2] the volume lampoonsWilliam Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, who had interceded with QueenElizabeth I to reduce the handsome pension she had originally promised Spenser (see "Events", above); although this volume was printed, it was suppressed (or "called in") almost immediately[5]
Daphnaïda. An Elegy upon the death of the noble and vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier (although one source states this was the year of publication,[2] another states the work was first published in London in January1592, according to one source[5])
Giordano Bruno,Italian philosopher and poet writing inLatin in a style imitatingLucretius and expressing his philosophical, cosmological speculations in their final form; printed by John Wenchel in Frankfort,Germany:
