The Importance of Compositorial Error and Variation to the Emendation of Shakespeare’s Texts: A Bibliographic Analysis of Benson’s 1640 Text of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

In 1640, John Benson published an octavo volume with the misleading title, "Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent."¹ The text is based on William Jaggard's third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim (1612), Thomas Thorpe's 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lovers Complaint (hereinafter referred to as the Quarto), and The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601). Benson's text prints the entire contents of The Passionate Pilgrim (which itself borrowed heavily from Thomas Heywood's Troia Brittanica, arousing considerable indignation from that author), including the versions of Sonnets 138 and 144 contained therein, and 144 of the remaining sonnets from the Quarto, omitting eight. It also includes an additional verse omitted from poem 19 of The Passionate Pilgim, which occurs in the longer version contained in England's Helicon (1600), as well as a number of poems by other authors, not all identified.²

Although some groups of sonnets occur successively in both texts, the order of the sonnets in Benson differs greatly from that in the Quarto, and poems from The Passionate Pilgrim are interspersed throughout them. Benson also adds titles to groups of sonnets, or sometimes individual ones, often with little relation to the subject matter. Groups of sonnets under one title are printed without separation. Although the couplets are consistently indented, the layout of the text gives the appearance that such groups comprise single poems, despite the fact that the sense usually does not allow them to be read as such. Benson's titles sometimes use the female gender where none is specified in the ensuing sonnets, and male pronouns are altered to female pronouns in a few sonnets (see below). Many commentators assume that Benson was trying to hide the presumably indelicate fact that most of the sonnets appear to be written to a male addressee.³ However, friendship is prominent in Benson's titles, and many male pronouns are allowed to stand. The disarrangement of the text suggests a different motive. Benson needed to hide both the fact that his text was pirated and that the majority of the poems were part of a sonnet sequence. By 1609, sonnet sequences were already out of vogue, and only one edition of the Quarto was printed.⁴The Passionate Pilgrim, on the other hand, had three editions, a fact not likely to be overlooked by an enterprising printer.

Benson's text is important for two reasons. First, it was the basis for later editions of Shakespeare's Sonnets from Charles Gildon's in 1710 to Thomas Evans's in 1775 (excluding Bernard Lintott's in 1711). Edmond Malone, in 1780, was the first editor to return to the Quarto as the authentic text of the Sonnets.⁵ Second, knowing the copy-texts on which it is based allows us to examine in detail the extent to which the compositor affected the transmission of the text, from which we may make some cautious generalizations about early-seventeenth-century composition. I will restrict my comments to a comparison between the Quarto and the 144 sonnets in Benson taken therefrom.⁶ The Appendix lists all of the 759 variants between the two texts, excluding the changes in typographical convention whereby the use of "i" for "j," initial "v" for "u," and medial "u" for "v" in the Quarto are not followed in Benson (the compositor maintains these conventions for capital letters but is otherwise faithful in this regard, with the exception of the word "prou'd" in Sonnet 110 and "proue" in the third poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, where he fails to change the "u" to a "v").⁷

Benson's compositor recognized and corrected almost all of the twenty-seven obvious misprints contained in the 144 sonnets copied from the Quarto.⁸ Thus, the single-letter substitutions in Sonnets 6, 47 (two instances), 90, 91, and 152, the single dropped letters in Sonnets 13, 22, 50, 68, and 88, the dittography in Sonnets 46 and 122, and the...