ABSTRACT
Date. Winter 1625–6. Headed Anno aetatis 17 in 1673 (i.e. Dec. 1625-Dec. 1626). Edward Phillips, writing in 1694, confirms that Fair Infant was written at seventeen, but also claims that its occasion was ‘the Death of one of his Sister's Children (a Daughter), who died in her Infancy’ (Darbishire 62). W. R. Parker, TLS (17 Dec. 1938) 802, taking Phillips at his word, concludes that the only child of M.'s sister who could have been the poem's subject was Anne (baptized 12 Jan. 1626, buried 22 Jan. 1628 — when M. was nineteen, not seventeen). However, two-year-old Anne cannot have been the poem's subject, since the ‘infant’ of whom M. writes did not outlast even a single winter (3–4). If, then, we accept Phillips's and M.'s dating, there is one piece of corroboratory evidence: M.'s references to the horrors of the plague (64–70). The great plague year was 1625 (see Elegia III 6–7n, p. 51 below). As F. P. Wilson says (The Plague in Shakespeare's London (Oxford 1927) p. 174), the next London plague of any importance did not occur until 1636.
