We are lucky indeed if a monumental milestone of scholarship arrives in any one generation of scholars, but that is surely what the Steven W. May and William A. Ringler Jr. bibliography of the first lines of Elizabethan verse is—a carefully indexed listing of more than 32,500 records. Like the three-volume revised Short-Title Catalogue (STC) before it, this project represents decades of painstaking recording and checking—but in early modern manuscripts as well as early modern books. May in his introduction to the three-volume reference work reckons that his Index includes 99 percent of the extant verse printed between 1559 and 1603 as well as 12,000 poems from manuscripts of the period now housed in some ninety-three archives.

This immense scholarly undertaking was launched in 1955 when Ringler began with the publication of the initial first-line index of printed verse in English incunabula. But while he worked subsequently on the Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1962, he ruefully estimated that it cost him two years just to run down all the textual sources known for Sidney's verse, and the visionary idea of the present index was born. He began while teaching at the University of Chicago, working with May and other of his graduate students, but when he sensed the size of the task in 1977, moving to the Huntington Library where he finally retired as a senior research fellow, he limited his own work to pre-Elizabethan verse. In 1989, with Ringler's blessing, May took up the assignment, his patient, diligent, and discriminating research augmented by the help of assistants and librarians on both sides of the Atlantic.

An early challenge, difficult and complicated, is simply put: what, after all, is a poem? For May and his team it was relatively easy when the compositor indented the lines or changed font in quoting them, but the poets did not always do that. May's rule of thumb became the presence of rhyme, while remaining keenly on the lookout for quantitative and blank verse. It was more difficult disconnecting passages of poetry in plays and prose works or in disengaging epigraphs or introductory lines (which ones, for instance, in the case of Spenser's Faerie Queene?). And he stretched the job beyond books and manuscripts to contemporary funeral monuments, poems from Elizabethan paintings, and, in one case, a couplet from a wall painting of the 1580s. There were also prologues and epilogues and songs housed in larger works, and then there were works such as George Ripley's fifteenth-century poem Compound of Alchemy, a “problem with a vengeance,” May says (xiii), because it was, under the Elizabethans, broken up into separate poems often divorced from one another, often apparently single poems: what do you do when indexing a poem like that? (His full rationale is on page xiii.)

In listing printed poems he cites the edition(s) and issues of the STC and those dates, recognizing that many of the earlier STC poems were copied or transcribed from earlier poems yet—Henrician, Edwardian, Marian, or even before—and he acknowledges that some Elizabethan compilations, such as the Arundel MS of Harington poems, were composed but not published until well after Elizabeth's death. And when the first extant copies of Elizabethan texts of poems by Shakespeare or Donne are published after 1603, as most are, they are not available to the index at all.

Such compilations can lead to surprising discoveries, as we know if we compiled an index of a book and find different emphases than we thought the content of the book had actually presented. So the most prolific poet in Ringler and May's collection—the author of more than 1,400 entries—is the translator Philemon Holland. The most popular classical poet in Elizabethan translation is, unsurprisingly, Virgil, May tells us, with 483 entries followed by Ovid with a close 470. But the fifth most popular—with 188 poems—is the otherwise unrecognized St. Gregory of Naziansus, followed (but distantly) by Juvenal, Lucian, and Persius. Some of the subjects covered are clearly a medieval legacy—entries on alchemy, the Dance of Death, and fortune—but there are new or newly expanded concerns too: pastoral poems, poems about poems, love poetry from a woman's perspective, and poems on governance, including kingship and tyranny. Less than 19 percent, or just over 6,000 poems, are religious ones, a statistic May quickly contextualized by noting that much of the outpouring of religious writing after the Reformation was in prose.

The entries do not follow Morris Tilley's Dictionary of Proverbs by giving us the first substantive word but, instead, give us the first word of the line. There are pages and pages of entries beginning with “A,” then, and with “The.” Besides the line and its source, though, we are also given the meter, the verse form, and the number of lines (so it may be easier to see, in the case of derived poems from someone like Ripley, when we get a little or a lot if not the whole thing). There are locations of the poems, and there is often a list of the poem's subjects and its genre.

All of this is remarkable. But in a way even more dazzling—and surely what will invite readers of every discipline to make use of Ringler and May in her or his own work—is the extraordinary cross-indexing by subject. Broad subjects such as morality, love, women, and memorial verse are subdivided and even listed in different places: “morality” is listed under “morality” but also under “moral verse” if that is the verse's primary intent. Religious verse has been subdivided into “scores of categories” (xiv). Fictional names—Achilles, fairies, and Queen Guinivere—are given separate entries from authors or titles, and there are a great many more headings such as astronomy, geography, hunting, medicine, law—these last two are especially extensive—women, actors, ale, and cutpurses. There is also a separate index to English poets, literary kinds, illustrations, poems set to music, rhyme schemes and verse forms, burdens, and refrains.

Most of us now know that opening the Revised STC to author or, at times, a subject—such as homilies—we are led to primary documents that shed contemporary light on Elizabethan culture. What May and Ringler have done, though, is to multiply the ability to locate primary citations to what, in practice if not in these three huge volumes of resources, may seem to be nearly infinite. No serious student of the period should be without access to it.