The text of Shakespeare’s sonnets generally considered to be definitive is that of the 1609 edition, which was published by Thomas Thorpe, a publisher having less than a professional reputation. Thorpe’s edition, titled Shake-speare’s Sonnets: Never Before Imprinted, is referred to today as the “Quarto,” and is the basis for all modern texts of the sonnets.
The Quarto would have lapsed into obscurity for the remainder of the seventeenth century had it not been for the publication of a second edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, brought out by John Benson in 1640. A pirated edition of the sonnets, Benson’s version was not a carefully edited, duplicate copy of the Quarto. Because Benson took several liberties with Shakespeare’s text, his volume has been of interest chiefly as the beginning of a long campaign to sanitize Shakespeare. Among other things, Benson rearranged the sonnets into so-called “poems” — groups varying from one to five sonnets in length and to which he added descriptive and unusually inept titles. Still worse, he changed Shakespeare’s pronouns: “He’s” became “she’s” in some sonnets addressed to the young man so as to make the poet speak lovingly to a woman — not to a man.
Benson also interspersed Shakespeare’s sonnets with poems written by other people, as well as with other non-sonnet poems written by Shakespeare. This led to much of the subsequent confusion about Shakespeare’s order of preference for his sonnets, which appear to tell the story, first, of his adulation of a young man and, later, of his adoration of his “dark lady.”
The belief that the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a man and that the rest are addressed to a woman has become the prevailing contemporary view. In addition, a majority of modern critics remain sufficiently satisfied with Thorpe’s 1609 ordering of those sonnets addressed to the young man, but most of them have serious reservations about the second group addressed to the woman.
