Second edition, rare, of The Sinful Mans search (1592), issued with ‘Maries Choise’ and a ‘Godley Praier’ (F8), bound with the fourth edition of The Trumpet of the Soule (1591) printed for the widow of John Perrin, with contemporary annotations.

Henry Smith (c. 1560–1591) was the most popular preacher of the late 1580s and early 1590s, famous for his clear and simple arguments and his persuasive rhetoric: ‘His Church was so crouded with Auditours, that persons of good quality brought their own pews with them, I mean their legs, to stand thereupon in the alleys’ (Fuller, The Sermons of Mr. Henry Smith (1675)).

After his early death, Thomas Nashe (in Pierce Penniless, 1592) eulogised him for his eloquence: ‘Silver tongu’d Smith, whose well-tun’d stile hath made thy death the generall teares of the Muses … I never saw aboundant reading better mixed with delight, or sentences … more melodious to the eare or piercing moore deepe to the heart’. Educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Smith had rejected the traditional career path for a first-born son of the minor gentry to follow a spiritual calling, but ‘evangelical scruples barred him from subscribing to the ceremonial of the Church of England’ (ODNB). In 1587 he was elected lecturer at St Clement Danes, a parish in the patronage of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who acted as his protector when the Bishop of London tried to stop him preaching in 1588. The Trumpet of the Soul, frequently reprinted, was likely preached at St Paul’s Cross: he refers to musing on what text he should choose ‘when I should have preached under the Cross’ and struggling to find one ‘that did not reprove sinne’, fixing on ‘Rejoyce oh young man in thy youth’ from Ecclesiastes. A sermon ‘not so much concerned with exegetical, meditative, or homiletic purposes as with leading the congregation through a narrative experience’ (Davis), it provides a fine example of his poetic style in flow:

‘Whilst the thefe stealeth, the hempe groweth, & the hooke is covered within the baite: we sit downe to eat, & rise up to play, and from play to sleepe: and a hundredth yeres is counted but little enough to sinne in: but how many sinnes thou hast sette on the score, so many kindes of punishments shall be provided for thee … howe many drammes of delight, so manie pounds of dolour: when iniquitie hath plaied her part, vengeaunce leapes upon the stage: the Comedy is short, but the Tragedy is longer …’.

Passages such as the above have led some to conjecture that Shakespeare might have heard Smith preach – his friend Richard Field published an edition of Smith’s Sermons in 1593 – and it is interesting to note the parallel trajectory into print of the unauthorised sermon text and the unauthorised play text. In 1589 ill health drove Smith into retirement at Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire, ‘to edit and revise his sermons, some of which had been copied by their hearers during their delivery and then printed without Smith's consent’ (ibid.) – an authorized edition of The Benefite of Contentation, for example, complained of how his text had been ‘miserablye … abused in printing, as it were with whole limbs cut off at once’.

It is likely that The Sinful Mans search is another of those texts printed without authorial consent because the early annotator here has corrected numerous erroneous Biblical references in the sidenotes. The other annotations comprise further exposition of Smith’s Biblical quotations, as well as elucidations of his theology. For example, where Smith advises that ministers invited to ‘great feasts … shoulde season the table talke with some godly conference unto the hearers’, three manuscript footnotes comment: ‘The ministers of the worde especiallye (unless they will be ye most caytifes of all) must neede leade others by word and deed to this great ioy and felicitie’; ‘youre doctrine must be verye sound and good, yf it be not soe, yt shalbe naught set and cast awaye as a thinge unsaverye and vaine’; and ‘he meaneth yt whereby, men most profyte to the goinge on forwarde in godlynes and love’. Another early hand doctors a prayer mentioning ‘our dread Soveraigne, her Honourable Counsell’ to read instead ‘owre dread sovraygne lord King James’.

This edition of The Trumpet of the Soul is the only work recorded on ESTC and by McKerrow (Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers ... 1557–1640) as bearing the imprint of Widow Perrin, wife of the London bookseller John Perrin (fl. 1580–1592) who operated from The Angel in St Paul’s Churchyard.

I: Five copies only in ESTC (BL, Bodley, Southampton (lacking ‘Maries Choise’); Folger, Harvard). Another 1593 edition is known in two imperfect copies; II: Four copies only in ESTC (BL, Cambridge, Southampton, Folger), none of which preserve the signed blank A1 found here.

ESTC S117432 and S107797; STC 22697.5 and 22709. See Davis, ’Henry Smith: the Preacher as Poet’, English Literary Renaissance 12:1 (1982).