Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Genevan Marginalia

The 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's sonnets presents them to the reading public in a form which fosters the privacy that printing violates.¹ Foremost among the bibliographic features which locate the sonnets on the axis between the public and private is 'T.T.'s cryptic dedication to 'Mr W.H'. The initials appear to invite the reader into a charmed circle of private knowledge, and yet through their conventional anonymity they remain inscrutable. Modern readers have been fascinated by the mystery of 'Mr W.H.', and early modern readers were likewise intrigued by such dedicatory initials. The prefatory matter to Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), for example, bristles with inviting initials (including a certain 'Master H.W.'). The epistle proclaims that the volume contains 'the adventures passed by master F.J. whome the reader may name Freeman Jones', and in the Bodleian copy a seventeenth century reader, Mary Wood, underlined 'Freeman Jones' when she read this passage. Her son Anthony likewise acceded to the invitation and wrote 'Freeman Jones' beside the title 'A discourse of the adventures passed by Master F.J.'.²

The speculation encouraged by the suggestive layout, enigmatic dedication and the absence of names in Shakespeare's sonnets is compounded by the fact that the 1609 quarto has no marginal annotations. Sonnets, in common with most lyric poetry and plays of the period, ignored the trend for increased printed marginalia. Compared to the busy margins of devotional works, sermons, pamphlets and histories, the sonnets' borders of pure white space would have created an unusual reading experience for the early modern reader – one which encouraged them to form their own interpretations. Some early readers of Shakespeare's sonnets recorded their responses in these inviting margins: 'What a heap of wretched Infidel Stuff' was jotted at the end of Sonnet 154 by an early owner of the Rosenbach copy. A rather more sympathetic response is suggested by the woman who drafted a love-letter on the fly-leaf of Benson's 1640 edition of the sonnets.³

The trend for increased marginalia in the Elizabethan period is exemplified by one of its most heavily annotated texts: the Geneva Bible. The marginalia of the original 1560 edition was supplemented throughout the period, first by the extensive notation of the 1576 Tomson New Testament, with notes translated from Theodore Beza, and then by the stridently anti-Catholic gloss of Franciscus Junius for the book of Revelation which was added to some editions in 1602. As Elizabeth's reign drew to a close the Geneva Bible became enclosed in a more and more theologically conservative apparatus, hedged in with notes which guided access and closed down interpretation.

It has long been recognised that Shakespeare read and borrowed from the Geneva translation of the Bible.⁴ There appears, however, to be a special relationship between the Geneva version and a part of Shakespeare's oeuvre which was intended solely for a reading public. The Geneva Bible as a whole was intended for private use, but the annotations remained peculiarly so: they were never read out in church, quoted in sermons or formed into proverbial phrases. The Genevan annotations (unlike the text itself, from which Shakespeare borrows liberally in his plays) had no part in the communal church service and formed instead part of the private experience of the reading individual.⁵ It is in keeping with the readerly nature of Shakespeare's sonnets that it is in them that some of his clearest allusions to the Genevan annotations are found: the careful reading demanded by Shakespeare's sonnets resonates with the fact that these allusions themselves originated in attentive reading.

The Geneva Bible, unlike the Bishops' Bible (1568) which was read out during church services and printed in lavish folio, was printed mainly in the quarto, octavo and duodecimo formats which made it cheap and accessible for private use. The Geneva also came with an extensive apparatus which was designed to ease personal access to the Bible, to explain unclear words and map out unknown places, but which was also intended to impede independent interpretation...