A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published.
L6 The Kinge loves you, you him
Notes. This undated epigram exists is a number of different forms, each of which varies in satiric force. While one compiler, in fact, appears to have read the poem as panegyric, and attributed it to Buckingham’s client Richard Corbett (Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. e. 97), another version focuses the hints of sodomy in the “buck-in-game” pun by proclaiming at the end of the poem that the king loves the favourite “Solely, for your looke” (Bodleian MS Ashmole 47). McRae (Literature 170-71) discusses the Corbett attribution and the variant readings of the poem, while P. Hammond (148) analyzes the poem in the context of other allegations concerning James and Buckingham’s homosexual relationship, noting contemporary usage of hunt imagery as sexual metaphor.
“To Buckinghame”
The Kinge loves you, you him
Both love the same
You love the kinge, hee you
Both buck-in-game.
In game the king loves sport
Of sports the buck
But off all men why you,
Why see the luck.
Source. Folger MS V.a.162, fol. 35v
Other known sources. Wit Restor’d 58; Bodleian MS Ashmole 47, fol. 53r; Bodleian MS CCC 328, fol. 47v; Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. e.97, p. 92; Bodleian MS Hearne’s Diaries 66, p. 164; Bodleian MS Malone 19, p. 37; BL Add. MS 30982, fol. 7v; NLW MS 5390D, p. 162; Folger MS V.a.162, fol. 35v; Folger MS V.a.170, p. 248; Rosenbach MS 239/27, p. 194; Rosenbach MS 1083/16, p. 246
L6
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