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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 59
which came out under independent editorship in the years 1710 and 1725 respectively, and were undertaken by independent publishers, the whole of Benson’s volume of 1640 was reprinted; the sonnets were not separated from the chaff that lay about them there.¹ The volumes which were issued in the middle of the century under such titles as ‘Poems on several occasions, by Shakespeare’ (1750?) or ‘Poems. Written by Mr. William Shakespeare’ (1775), again merely reproduce Benson’s work.
Only one publisher in the early years of the century showed any acquaintance with Thorpe’s version. In 1710 Bernard Lintott included an exact reprint of it in the second volume of his ‘A Collection of Poems (by Shakespeare)’. But no special authority attached to Lintott’s reprint in the critical opinion of the day, and even Lintott betrayed the influence of Benson’s venture by announcing on his title-page that ‘Shakespeare’s one hundred and fifty-four Sonnets’ were ‘all in praise of his mistress’.
It was not until 1766 that the critical study of Shakespeare’s sonnets can be said to have begun. In that year Steevens included an exact reprint, of his copy of Thorpe’s edition of 1609 (with the Wright imprint), in the fourth volume of his ‘Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, Being the whole Number printed in Quarto During his Life-time, or before the Restoration, Collated where there were different Copies and Publish’d from the Originals’. The only comment that Steevens there made on the
¹ Charles Gildon, the editor of the supplementary volume of 1710, whose work was freely appropriated by Dr. Sewell, the editor of the supplementary volume of 1725, denied that any of Shakespeare’s poems were sent to press before 1640, and refuted doubts of their authenticity on internal evidence only. Of the sonnets or ‘Epigrams’, as he calls them, he remarks: ‘There is a wonderful smoothness in many of them that makes the Blood dance to its numbers’ (p. 463).
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