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- ‘I here presume (under favour) to present to your view, some excellent and sweetely composed Poems, of Master William Shakespeare, Which in themselves appeare of the same purity, [as those which] the Authour himselfe then living avouched; they had not the fortune by reason of their Infancie in his death, to have the due accomodatio of proportionable glory, with the rest
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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.
H
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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
The theory that the publisher Benson sought his copy elsewhere than in Thorpe’s treasury is supported by other considerations. *Sonnets* CXXXVIII and CXLIV, which take the thirty-first and thirty-second places respectively in Benson’s volume, ignore Thorpe’s text, and follow that of Jaggard’s *Passionate Pilgrim* (1599 or 1612). The omission of eight sonnets tells the same tale. Among these are one of the most beautiful, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ No. XVIII, and the twelve-lined lyric numbered CXXVI, which some critics have interpreted as intended by Shakespeare to form the envoy to the sonnets addressed to the man. It is difficult to account for the exclusion of these two poems, and six others (Nos. XIX, XLIII, LVI, LXXV, LXXVI, and XCVI), except on the assumption that Benson’s compiler had not discovered them.
Eighteenth-century editions of the sonnets.
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