Complete Works? Thomas Watson's Authorship of Tears of Fancie

Abstract

That Thomas Watson likely wrote the sonnet sequence Tears of Fancie, published posthumously in 1593, has been generally accepted by scholars since the nineteenth century, but an article disputing the attribution was published in 1989. The lack of great critical interest in minor sonnet sequences of the 1590s has allowed doubts raised by that article to go unchallenged for three decades. When the editor of Watson’s Complete Works, Dana Sutton, omitted the sequence from his 1996 publication, credence was given to the idea that the Watson attribution was spurious. A second, online edition of the Works revived the issue in 2022, when Sutton spelled out his reasoning for the first time. This essay reviews the evidence, refutes the arguments that have been made against Watson’s authorship, and presents new arguments in favor of it, based on the similarities between the sonnet sequence and Watson’s English versions of Italian madrigals, published in 1590.