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- About the same date, Capell, who gave Malone some assistance, carefully revised in manuscript Thorpe’s text, as it appeared in Lintott’s edition of 1710. But his revised text remains unpublished in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Steevens was to the end irreconcilable, and in an Advertisement prefixed to his last edition of Shakespeare, 1793, he justified his continued exclusion of the sonnets from Shakespeare’s works on the ground that the ‘strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service’.¹ The sonnets figured in Thorpe’s text, revised by Malone, in the latter’s edition of Shakespeare’s works of 1790, in the Variorum of 1803, and in all the leading editions of Shakespeare’s works that have been published since.
The reasoned and erudite appreciation, which distinguished eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespearean drama gives historic interest to its perverse depreciations or grudging commendations of the Sonnets. Not till the nineteenth century was reached, did the tones of apology or denunciation cease. Nineteenth-century critics of eminence with a single exception soon reached a common understanding in regard to the transcendent merit of the poetry. Hazlitt, alone of Nineteenth-century criticism.
¹ Steevens added: ‘These miscellaneous poems have derived every possible advantage from the literature and judgement of their only intelligent editor, Mr. Malone, whose implements of criticism, like the ivory rake and golden spade in Prudentius, are on this occasion disgraced by the objects of their culture. Had Shakespeare produced no other works than these, his name would have reached us with as little celebrity as time has conferred on that of Thomas Watson, an older and much more elegant sonneteer.’
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62 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
the great Shakespearean critics of the past century, declined to commit himself without damaging reserves to the strain of eulogy. At the same time differences have continued to prevail as to the precise significance of the poems, even amongst those whose poetic insight entitle their opinion to the most respectful hearing. Coleridge and Robert Browning refused to accept the autobiographic interpretation which commended itself to Wordsworth and Shelley. Great weight was attached to Hallam’s censure of the literal theory: ‘There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets.’ The controversy is not yet ended. But the problem, in the present writer’s opinion, involves in only a secondary degree vexed questions of psychology or aesthetics. The discussion must primarily resolve itself into an historical inquiry respecting the conditions and conventions which moulded the literary expression of sentiment and passion in Elizabethan England.
## VI
Census of copies.
Copies of the 1609 edition of the *Sonnets* are now very scarce. A somewhat wide study of sale catalogues of the past 150 years reveals the presence in the book market of barely a dozen during that period. Many years have passed since a copy was sold at public auction, and the only recent evidence of the selling value of the book is the fact that the copy No. IX, *infra*, which was sold by public auction in 1864 for £225 15s. o.d., was acquired privately, a quarter of a century later, by a collector of New York for a thousand pounds. Of the eleven traceable copies which are enumerated below, one lacks the title-page,
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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 63
# SHIKE-SPEARES
# SONNETS
Never before Imprinted.
AT LONDON
By G. Eld for T. T. and are
a. be false by a bawweth dwelling
a. Chief Church gate
1698
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64 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
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