Chapter 2 turns to examine early modern song culture at Wilton House. The work of Herbert’s aristocratic cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), provides a focal point for ideas about the collaborative enterprise of poets and musicians in the early seventeenth century. Pembroke was a patron of poets and musicians, and much of his verse survived in songbooks and musical settings by some of the leading composers of his day. In Pembroke’s collected Poems (London, 1660) we have a volume in which the voices of poets and musicians – those who compose and sing and preserve these poems – meet and combine and compete with one another. Noting George Herbert’s involvement in this literary and musical coterie, the chapter examines the implications of Pembroke’s patronage on Herbert’s verse, and demonstrates how Herbert’s verse critiques and transforms the worldly dynamics of patronage operating within the Wilton coterie.

This chapter argues that the early published texts of the Sonnets, including The Passionate Pilgrim and the 1609 Quarto, misrepresented them in such a way as to estrange them from their potential readers. The Sonnets make no inroads into early modern anthologies, and are generally ignored in favour of the narrative poems. They were condemned for licentiousness, whilst also not being sexy enough. The baffling plot, lack of characterisation, and confusing physical layout of the Quarto made them difficult for readers to engage with and affected their appropriation. Admiration for the Sonnets seems to have been confined to their manuscript circulation, particularly among the literary coterie of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who played a pivotal role in the dissemination of Sonnets 116 and 128.