textual threads , in single copies . To start with one negative example , in the year Willes published his volume , Winchester prepared a poetical florilegium for Elizabeth I . The manuscript is wonderful thing , inked in tricolore throughout , and comprising many Latin and a few Greek poems , but featuring not so much as an acrostic — the bulk are based on that schoolroom favourite , the elegiac couplet . 14
The next collection of note was prepared in probably 1600 , for a prospective visit from the now ageing queen which in fact never took place . The volume was assembled by the Wykehamist poet John Reinolds , and contains no fewer than thirteen technopaegnia , the majority by the editor , but with five other identifiable contributors of this kind of poem . There are altars , pyramids , wings , and eggs , and some geometrical shapes , but the surprises are a regal crown , a book , a lyre , a chalice , and two hearts . 15 It is interesting to compare a second collection prepared by the school for this abortive royal visit , signed by forty-two separate poets , but not overlapping with the Reinolds collection , and containing no pattern poems — this may suggest that shaped poetry was a particular obsession of a coterie of writers gathered around Reinolds . 16 Then there is the school ’ s collection on the accession of James I three years later , by which point Reinolds had left the school for New College . 17 This survives in an imperfect personal copy of what must have been a much grander object . It is unfortunate that all the poems are unsigned , as this volume marks the height of this tradition , and also illustrates the rise , or rather reaffirmation , of Greek as the dominant language for such poems . One opening displays four crowns , all in Greek ; we also have Wykeham ’ s arms , a book , a sun , some wings , a heart , a hand-with-scales-of-justice , an altar in drum form , and — the most striking of all these poems — a wrestling bull ( the Pope ) and lion ( James I ). These two collections show clearly how closely aligned in Wykehamist hands the technopaignion became with the ‘ emblem ’, except that in these cases the emblem and the explanatory text typically accompanying it are one and the same thing .
Thereafter , the tradition went on the wane , as demonstrated by the Wykehamist collection for the visit of Prince Charles in 1618 . 18 Again surviving in a sole manuscript , probably representing an editorial stage before completion , this miscellany features the now ubiquitous anagrams , chronograms , acrostics , versus cancrini — but no strictly figured poetry other than a lone sword-with-calligraphic-hilt , which is certainly a genuflection to
11