Properties
- end_line
- 9894
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T06:24:48.293Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 9875
- text
- 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.
Whatever may have been the source of Benson’s text, his edition of them, although it was not reprinted till 1710, practically superseded Thorpe’s effort for more than a hundred years.¹ The sonnets were ignored altogether in the great editions of Shakespeare which appeared in the early years of the eighteenth century. Neither Nicholas Rowe, nor Pope, nor Theobald, nor Hanmer, nor Warburton, nor Capell, nor Dr. Johnson, included them in their respective collections of Shakespeare’s plays. None of these editors, save Capell, showed any sign of acquaintance with them. In collections of ‘Shakespeare’s Poems’ forming supplementary volumes to Rowe’s and Pope’s edition of the plays,
¹ In 1654 there was issued a catalogue of books *printed for Humphrey Moseley* and are to be sold at his Shop at the Prince’s Armes in St. Paule’s Churchyard’. Among the books noticed is ‘Poems written by Mr. William Shakespeare Gent.’ The entry suggests that Moseley caused to be printed and published a new issue of Shakespeare’s poems, but there is no trace of any such edition.
<!-- [Page 470](arke:01KG6QHPT4PE6AD13H0Y0APXCW) -->
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).
H 2
- title
- Chunk 7