YOUTHES Witte, or The Witte of Grene Youth, printed by John Wolfe in 1581 and “Compiled and gathered together by Henry Chillester,” is an unstudied anthology of Elizabethan prose fiction plus 163 poems. Its neglect may be attributed to its survival in a unique copy at the British Library, a copy that was not entered in the first edition of the Short Title Catalogue. It did appear in the second edition, however, duly listed under Henry Chillester in volume 1—and there it sat until swept up in the title-by-title, page-by-page search for poetry for the First-Line Index of English Verse. Youthes Witte is of considerable interest for a number of reasons. First, it preserves scores of unique poetic texts, some of which are quite good. It is historically interesting for including four lyrics in blank verse at a time when blank verse was all but forgotten by English poets, and for including six Surreyean or English sonnets, again, before this form was being widely practiced. Its connection with the Sidney circle is revealed by the refrain to one of its poems, “Arise, O noble Sidney now,” and it includes at least two poems by an unknown and unstudied woman poet or poets.

At first glance, the collection “Compiled and gathered together by Henry Chillester” looks like a one-poet anthology similar to such earlier collections as Barnaby Googe's Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes (1563), George Turberville's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567), or George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573).