Bibliographical Principles and George Eld’s Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Progress in literary scholarship is a precarious business. Almost every apparent advance in knowledge is, sooner or later, challenged. The questions that then arise are whether all the evidence sustaining the new conclusion, now contested, has been fully understood and rebutted by the challenger and whether he or she has valid counter-evidence to offer. Here I aim to expose the inadequacy of a recent challenge to an article of my own that was published over forty years ago. That makes me an interested party in the case. The ultimate verdict must rest with the scholarly community at large

In The Library in 1975 I subjected the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, printed by George Eld for Thomas Thorpe, to the first thorough bibliographical analysis and gave reasons for thinking that it had been set by two compositors, who punctuated the poems in different ways.¹ The argument convinced such editors as John Kerrigan (Penguin 1986), G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge 1996; Riverside 1997), Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden 1997), and Colin Burrow (Oxford 2002).² For Evans, this ‘seminal study . . . revolutionised the whole textual approach to the Sonnets and rendered much earlier . . . discussion obsolete’, while for Kerrigan it ‘finally set the textual criticism of these poems on a sensible footing’.³

In his edition of 2007, however, Carl D. Atkins declares: ‘The . . . suggestion that the Quarto was set by two compositors, accounting for some of the variability in punctuation, is not supportable from the bibliographical facts’.⁴ His backing for this statement is a reference to three pages of an article invoking ‘Bibliographical Principles’ that he published in 2003.⁵ In The New Oxford Shakespeare Critical Reference Edition of 2017, Francis X. Connor lists my assignments of pages to compositors Eld A and Eld B, and summarizes Atkins’s arguments against them, but he does not attempt to adjudicate between us.⁶ This may leave readers of a major, not to say monumental, edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works suspecting that Atkins must be right.

Atkins neither describes nor attempts to explain the evidence—some of it put forward by other scholars in corroboration of my own—that Eld’s Quarto was set by two workmen, and he inadvertently affords further support for my original allocation of their stints, as will be shown below. He is primarily motivated by a desire to vindicate his decision to prepare an original-spelling, original-punctuation edition. This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate project. The editor of early-modern poetry, drama, fiction, or non-fictional prose who chooses not to modernize will naturally preserve the foundation text’s spelling and punctuation wherever it is not plainly erroneous by the conventions of its time. Old-spelling editors may reasonably decide to ease comprehension for contemporary readers or actors by departing from the original punctuation when it is likely to mislead, provided these departures are collated. In his old-spelling edition for the Oxford Critical Reference Edition, Connor, like Atkins, quite rightly retains the Eld Quarto’s punctuation ‘so long as the text can be read without torturing the sense’.⁷

Two compositors could well have punctuated the Sonnets in different ways while each operating within his own understanding of prevailing norms. My claim was simply that the compositors could not both have been reproducing with any consistency the punctuation of the manuscript from which they were setting, let alone Shakespeare’s own, because, for instance, on pages assigned to Eld A, fifty-one quatrains ended in colons and six in commas, whereas in pages assigned to Eld B, forty-six quatrains ended in colons and sixty-seven in commas; and the two men’s stopping of quatrains also differed in other ways.⁸ Evans, vastly knowledgeable about Shakespearean quarto and Folio texts, infers that ‘in the Q-copy end-line punctuation was most probably either very light and sporadic or in most cases lacking’, the task of supplying it being largely left to the compositors, as was common in the hand-press period.⁹

My work on George Eld’s Sonnets Quarto...