William Shakespeare | Poems, 1640, contemporary calf, the earliest obtainable edition of the Sonnets

William Shakespeare.

Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. London: Printed by Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by John Benson, dwelling in St. Dunstans Churchyard, 1640

8vo (143 x 95mm), letterpress title with woodcut printer's device (McKerrow 283), contemporary calf with gilt frame and floral centrepiece, lacking engraved portrait by William Marshall and second letterpress title (A1), paper imperfection at margin of I3 (not affecting text), burn-hole to K6 with loss of one word, neatly rebacked

Benson’s edition is the earliest obtainable edition of the Sonnets (only 13 copies of the first edition of 1609 are known to survive, and all are in institutional libraries) and the first collected edition of Shakespeare's shorter non-dramatic poetry. Benson's edition brings together all but eight of the sonnets, "A Lover's Complaint," "The Passionate Pilgrim" (mostly not by Shakespeare), "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (attributed to Shakespeare), elegies and other poems honouring Shakespeare by Jonson, Milton, Digges, Herrick, Strode, Carew, and others. The volume concludes with “An Addition of some Excellent Poems, to those precedent, of Renowned Shakespeare, by other Gentlemen” that take up the final 21 pages.

Benson's edition corrected some obvious errors in the 1609 Sonnets but also made considerable changes to the text. He rearranged the order of the sonnets, grouped them together to form longer poems, and gave the resulting poems new titles. Notoriously, he made some attempt to disguise the sonnets' homoerotic content, both in his choice of titles and most strikingly in his changes to Sonnet 101 ("O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends"), which he runs together with Sonnet 100 under the title "An Invocation to his Muse" while also switching the gender of the pronouns to feminise the love-object. Benson’s main purpose was probably to make the poems more attractive to the Cavalier Poet generation, for whom the sonnet was an antiquated form, and the book is a fascinating early example of the continuing reshaping of Shakespeare’s texts.

PROVENANCE:

Janet Ann Ross (1842-1927), traveller and author, of Poggio Gherardo, near Florence (bookplate); purchased by Arthur Barwick Lloyd-Baker (1888-1979); thence by descent

LITERATURE:

STC 22344; ESTC S106377; Bartlett 27; Grolier/Langland to Wither 84; Hayward 30; Pforzheimer 880