If we were to rate obscurity in an author (or rather, obscurity disclosed) as something of value (because, hey, isn’t there something to be said, some kudos to be had, for Carl Van Doren, Raymond Weaver, and D.H. Laurence transforming the renown of Melville from an author of amusing sea-tales to the anticipator of modernism who penned Moby Dick?), two of the conditions for evaluating such a rediscovery would be: 1) the author in question needs to be something extraordinary, such as the world was previously unable to appreciate (Emily Dickinson being the prime example) and 2) they need to be such as has passed notice from most of the major commentators.

Edmund Bolton seems to fit qualification #2 easily, while on the measure of qualification #1 his merits are more tantalizing than actual. Certainly the author of this tour de force of rhetoric, featured alongside Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and others in the famous Elizabethan anthology England’s Helicon (1600) is a poet of no inconsiderable skills (and stands up well besides those illustrious others):

As withereth the Primrose by the river,
As fadeth Summers-Sunne from gliding fountaines;
As vanisheth the light blowne bubble ever,
As melteth Snow upon the mossie Mountains.
So melts, so vanisheth, so fades, so withers,
The Rose, the shine, the bubble, and the snow
Of praise, pompe, glory, joy (which short life gathers,)
Faire praise, vaine pompe, sweet glory, brittle joy,
The withered Primrose by the mourning river,
The faded Summers-sunne from weeping fountains:
The light-blowne bubble, vanished for ever,
The molten snow upon the naked mountains.
Are Emblems that the treasures we up-lay,
Soone wither, vanish, fade, and melt away.

For as the snow, whose lawne did over-spread
Th’ambitious hils, which Giant-like did threat
To pierce the heaven with their aspiring head,
Naked and bare doth leave their craggie seat.
When as the bubble, which did empty flie
The daliance of the undiscerned winde:
On whose calme rowling waves it did relie,
Hath shipwrack made, where it did daliance finde:
And when the Sun-shine which dissolv’d the snow,
Colourd the bubble with a pleasant varie,
And made the rathe and timely Primrose grow,
Swarth clouds with-drawne (which longer time do tarie)
Oh what is praise, pompe, glory, joy, but so
As shine by fountaines, bubbles, flowers, or snow?[note]The “rathe Primrose” is echoed in Milton’s Lycidas, suggesting he may have been familiar with Bolton (or picked up the image by way of William Browne.)[/note]

As for qualification #2, I do not find Edmund Bolton written of in my Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, although he is written on in Britannica and has a Wikipedia page. His poetry is scanty in volume and his prose works have a certain chaoticness of style that limit their appeal; he is not someone like Robert Burton, whose sheer magnificence overwhelms you, whose fecundity would be a marvel in any language.

Bolton also wrote a set of dialogues on arms and armor, as well as three critical essays concerning history writing in his work Hypercritica (which exists outside of manuscript form only buried at the back of a Latin work printed in 1722), with a fourth section listing the greatest authors of his time, among whom he includes Raleigh, Bacon, Edward de Vere, and Richard Hooker for prose, and Henry Constable, Samuel Daniel, and Samuel Drayton for verse. (I read two letters of de Vere he describes as models of eloquence; they were certainly of a very grave subject matter, though I see little evidence for de Vere’s candidacy as The Real Shakespeare; I agree with those who say that the entire Who Really Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays? nonsense seems to totally discount the autodidactic dray-work and mindset that goes into perfecting such verse.)