John Lane’s Verball

In the liminary materials to an anonymously published narrative poem, The First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry the vij (1599–1600), the author announced a dictionary project, promising – four years before the publication of Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall – that he would “set forth a Verball, or littel Dictionarie, with a Prosodia requisite for Poetry.” After a brief account of the context in which this promise was made, I will discuss the author’s identity, which can be narrowed down with some certainty, and established with a high degree of probability, from internal evidence, the likeliest candidate being one John Lane, a member of a well-connected Staffordshire gentry family. I will also discuss the likely form of the dictionary which Lane planned, and suggest why he never completed it.