The Passionate Pilgrim was first published in an
octavo volume by William Jaggard, probably in 1599 or possibly the year before, since the printer, probably
Thomas Judson, had set up shop after September 1598. The date cannot be fixed with certainty, as the work was not entered in the
Stationers' Register and the title page of the first edition title page is not extant. The last six poems are preceded by a second title page, headed
Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke, although the reason for the division is not clear. The first edition survives only in two sheets, forming eleven leaves comprising poems 1–5 and 16–18, preserved in a fragmentary composite copy at the
Folger Shakespeare Library, intermixed with sheets of the second edition that were probably added to replace defective leaves. The title page of this edition states that the book is to be sold by
stationer William Leake, who had obtained the rights to Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis in 1596 and published five
octavo editions of that poem (the third edition through the eighth) between 1599 and 1602. Jaggard issued an expanded edition of
The Passionate Pilgrim in 1612, containing additional poems on the theme of
Helen of Troy, announced on the title page ("Whereunto is newly added two Love Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellen's answere back again to Paris"). These were in fact taken from
Thomas Heywood's
Troia Britannica, which Jaggard had published in 1609. Heywood protested the "manifest injury done to me" in his
Apology for Actors (1612), writing that Shakespeare too was "much offended" with Jaggard for making "so bold with his name", a complaint that apparently led Jaggard to revise the title page and remove Shakespeare's name. Two copies of the third edition survive, one in the Folger Library with the original title page, and the other in the
Bodleian Library at the
University of Oxford with the cancel title page omitting Shakespeare's name. The poems in
The Passionate Pilgrim were reprinted in
John Benson's 1640 edition of Shakespeare's
Poems, along with the
Sonnets, ''
A Lover's Complaint,
The Phoenix and the Turtle,'' and other pieces. Thereafter the anthology was included in collections of Shakespeare's poems, in Bernard Lintott's 1709 edition and subsequent editions. ==Variants between editions==