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# SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
But it is surprising how rare is any alteration of this kind necessary in order to adapt the sonnets to a woman’s fascinations. *Sonnet XX*, which is unmistakably addressed to a man, is headed ‘The Exchange’, and *Sonnet XXVI*, which begins ‘Lord of my love’, is headed ‘A dutiful message’. But such other headings as, ‘In Prayse of his Love,’ ‘An address to his scornefull Loue,’ ‘Complaint for his Loues absence,’ ‘Self-flattery of her beauty,’ &c., which are all attached to sonnets in what is known as the first section of Thorpe’s volume, present no inherent difficulty to the reader’s mind. The superscriptions make it clear that Benson did not distinguish the sonnets from amatory poems of a normal type.
Benson’s text seems based on some amateur collection of pieces of manuscript poetry, which had been in private circulation. His preface implies that the sonnets and poems in his collection were not among those which he knew Shakespeare to have ‘avouched’ (i. e. publicly acknowledged) in his lifetime. By way of explaining their long submergence, he hazards a guess that they were penned very late in the dramatist’s life. John Warren, who contributes new commendatory lines (‘Of Mr. William Shakespear’) for Benson’s edition, writes of the sonnets as if the reader was about to make their acquaintance for the first time.¹ He says of them that they
*Will* make the learned *still* admire to see
The Muses’ gifts so fully infused on thee.
of his everliving Workes.’ ‘Everliving’—the epithet which Thorpe applied to Shakespeare—was in too common use as a synonym for ‘immortal’ to make it needful to assume that Benson borrowed it from Thorpe (cf. Shakespeare, *I Henry VI*, iv. 3. 51, ‘That ever-living man of memorie Henry the Fifth’).
¹ The other piece of commendatory verse by Leonard Digges confines itself to an enthusiastic account of Shakespeare’s continued hold on the stage, and to the playgoer’s preference of his work over that of Ben Jonson.
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