Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: John Benson and the 1640 Poems

Abstract

This essay reviews critics’ generally hostile responses to John Benson's 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems, in which he reorders the sonnets and groups many into longer poems. It argues that Benson's treatment of the 1609 Sonnets is a response to the literary tastes of his time (for example, his promotion of the text as a collection of “Poems” rather than sonnets, and his emphasis on Shakespeare's status as a gentleman). It also suggests that we should see Benson's edition as a critical, and often sensitive, reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which reacts to an ambiguity in the 1609 quarto, as to whether it is a sonnet sequence or a miscellany.