Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury; Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth is a 1598 commonplace book written by the minister Francis Meres. It is important in English literary history as the first critical account of the poems and early plays of William Shakespeare. It was listed in the Stationers Register 7 September 1598.[1]
Palladis Tamia contains moral and critical reflections borrowed from various sources, and included sections on books, on philosophy, on music and painting, as well as the famous "Comparative Discourse of our English poets with the Greeke, Latin, and Italian poets" that enumerates the English poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Meres' own day, and compares each with a classical author. While Meres is considerably indebted to George Puttenham's earlier The Arte of English Poesie (1589), the section extends the catalogue of poets and contains many first notices of Meres's contemporaries.
The title refers to Greek Πᾰλλᾰ́δος (Pallados, "of Pallas," a name of Athena), and ταμεία (tameia, "treasury"). There is also probably a pun on Tamia, a Latin name for the River Thames.[2]
The book was reissued in 1634 as a school book, and was partially reprinted in the Ancient Critical Essays (1811-1811) of Joseph Haslewood, Edward Arber's English Garner, and George Gregory Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays (1904).
- ^ Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery (1987, 1997), William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-812914-9, p. 90.
- ^ Orgel, Stephen (6 August 2021). Wit's Treasury: Renaissance England and the Classics. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9780812299878 – via Google Books.