About Robert Parry
Robert Parry (1540–1612) was a Welsh poet, writer and translator. In 1595 he published a romance novel entitled Moderatus, the most delectable and famous Historie of the Black Knight, the story of a knight who learns life-lessons through struggle and error, supported by the loyalty of his friend Priscius. It was dedicated to Henry Townshend … one of her Maiesties Justices of Assise of the countie Pallatine of Chester. Parry is believed to be the R.P. who helped Margaret Tyler to translate the Spanish book Espejo de Principe y Cavalleros under the title Mirrour of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, or rather replaced her as translator for the second volume. Robert Parry, as a poet, may properly be ranked with a group of Elizabethan-Jacobean poet-versifiers, who, occupying what may be called a third level, wrote more from a sense of satisfying a fashionable mode . . . than from any deeply-felt emotional involvement.The full title of Parry's poetry book is 'Sinetes passions uppon his fortunes offered for an incense at the shrine of the ladies which guided his distempered thoughtes. The patrons patheticall posies, sonets, maddrigals, and rowndelayes'. Together with Sinetes dompe The patron's pathetical posies have been said to be verses by Salusbury himself, but G. Blakemore Evans argues that they are by Parry, characterised by his typical heavy use of alliteration and word repetition. The main body of the book comprises forty six Passions, a series of four-verse complaints about love. The meaning of the name Sinetes is obscure. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Henry Woudhuyson argue that Shakespeare may have known Parry's work, because there are verbal parallels between his poems and Shakespeare's sonnets.
Browse all poems and texts published on Robert Parry
