Manuscript Precedents for Editorial Practices in John Benson's Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-Speare. Gent.

Recent scholarship has done much to restore the reputation of John Benson, who published the 1640 Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-Speare. Gent., a readable but revised collection of Shakespeare's shorter poems. Initially disparaged by Edmond Malone, a handful of Malone's contemporaries, and many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars, Benson has been more recently contextualized by Sasha Roberts, Cathy Shrank, Megan Heffernan, and Jean-Christophe Mayer, who have situated Benson's approaches alongside the editorial practices used by Richard Tottel, John Marriot, and other trendsetting stationers of early modern England.¹ These scholars have provided essential background for Benson's methods and have considered the most marketable features of his edition in relation to contemporaneous printing practices. In this essay, I consider Benson's methods in light of the well-established overlap between print and manuscript cultures of early modern England. Benson's familiarity with contemporaneous textual practices in print and manuscript reveals that early modern manuscript techniques played a far greater role in the publishing traditions of mid-seventeenth-century England than has previously been thought. Recognizing the parallel treatments of shakespeare's poems in early manuscripts and in Benson's edition allows modern scholars both to reevaluate the extent to which manuscript practices influenced printing techniques in the decades after Tottel, Jonson, and Donne, and to consider more fully the ways in which this connection benefits other studies of early modern readership.

As a publisher who occasionally printed from manuscript copy texts, Benson would have been familiar with the editorial techniques practiced by early modern manuscript compilers, and he incorporated more of these techniques in Poems than his colleagues typically applied to their own publications. Studying Benson's edition allows modern scholars to understand additional implications of the familiar overlap between print and manuscript in the Renaissance. Shakespeare's earliest editors were, first and foremost, readers themselves—readers with specific insights into the literary trends and cultural preferences of their own local communities and of a broader, more diverse array of Renaissance readers. In an increasingly literate society, Benson and his colleagues bridged a gap between popular public literature and the elite, personalized manuscripts compiled by university-educated scholars and wits. Benson's practices highlight common literary approaches used not only to edit Shakespeare's poems in one 1640 edition, but also to conceptualize and structure Renaissance poetry in many other seventeenth-century texts, both print and manuscript.

I. Structure, Contents, and Critical Reception of Poems

Poems:by Wil. Shake-Speare. Gent., a small octavo, imitates the structure of several contemporaneous print texts and, as Patrick cheney notes, emphasizes Shakespeare's rising prowess as a great English poet by emulating textual strategies introduced in the two folio editions of Shakespeare's plays.² In most extant copies, the title page—with its emphasis on Shakespeare's gentrified status—precedes a two-page address to the reader, adapted from a poem by Thomas May but signed by John Benson himself. Two poems praising Shakespeare and attributed to Leonard Digges and John Warren follow.³ After a second title page, the Shakespearean poetry begins with a conflated text of forty-two lines (three sonnets) titled "The glory of beautie." Except for proper names, the poems are printed in Roman type, while titles and the running headers of the volume use larger italics. Overall, the volume contains 146 of Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets (compressed into seventy-four poems of various lengths); the long A Lover's Complaint first published in Thomas Thorpe's 1609 edition of the Sonnets; twenty-eight poems attributed to Shakespeare in the third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim (1612); two songs from Shakespeare's plays;two poems from Robert Chester's Love's Martyr (1611); one extract from England's Helicon (1614);five poems in praise of Shakespeare (the two aforementioned at the beginning and three more toward the end); and fifteen non-Shakespearean poems that Benson attributed to "other Gentlemen."⁴ The Shakespearean sonnets in Benson's text appear in...