Geoffrey Whitney

Geoffrey (then spelt Geffrey) Whitney (c. 1548 – c. 1601) was an English poet, now best known for the influence on Elizabethan writing of the Choice of Emblemes that he compiled.

Geoffrey Whitney, the eldest son of a father of the same name, was born in or about 1548 at Coole Pilate, a township in the parish of Acton, four miles from Nantwich in Cheshire, where his family had been settled on a small estate since 1388.

In 1584 the Earl of Leicester, high steward of the borough, made an unsuccessful attempt to procure the under-stewardship for Whitney but the place was bestowed on someone else the following year.

A worke adorned with varietie of matter, both pleasant and profitable: wherein those that please maye finde to fit their fancies: Because herein, by the office of the eie and the eare, the minde maye reape dooble-delighte throughe holsome preceptes, shadowed with pleasant devises: both fit for the vertuous, to their incoraging; and for the wicked, for their admonishing and amendment.

It was mainly from this book, representing the greater part of emblem literature preceding it, that Shakespeare gained knowledge of the great foreign emblematists of the 16th century.

They are addressed to Whitney's kinsmen or friends, or to a notable contemporary, and give information of persons, places, and things rarely to be found elsewhere.

While most are the fables of Aesop to be found in Faerno's Centum Fabulae, which had been issued from the Plantin Press in 1567, there are rarer items like The Dog in the Manger and Washing the Ethiopian white.