1. ‘Fail not to let her see all this letter’: in G.P.V. Akrigg ed., Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 75. Speculatively dated 27 November 1586; William Keith was one of James’s two London agents.
2. ‘Heere shalt thou see clearlie, as in a glasse, the miseries of this wauering world’: ‘The Avthovr to the Reader’, The Furies, printed in His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at vacant houres (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1591), sig. 3r; James Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 98. Citations from James’s poetry are orthographically based on the first printed edition or, in the case of unpublished poetry, the most appropriate ‘copy text’ manuscript (all relevant manuscript sources are identified; where a manuscript text exists in two orthographic versions, Scots and Anglo-Scots, the former is usually preferred as, by inference, the earliest version); in citation of texts, reference is also made to Craigie’s two volume edition, abbreviated as STS to distinguish it from Craigie’s edition of the Basilikon Doron.
3. BL Add. MS 24195, f. 2r; STS vol. 2, 69, see note 22 below for detail of manuscript context. For readings of the erotic poems to date, see Murray F. Markland, ‘A Note on Spenser and the Scottish Sonneteers’, SSL, 1 (1966–7), 136–40 (139);
4. Antonia Fraser, James VI of Scotland and I of England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974; 1994), 52;
5. R.D.S. Jack, ‘Poetry under King James VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), vol. 1 ed. Jack, 125–39 (128, 130);