‘No cloudy stuff to puzzle the brain’

This chapter focuses on the long-maligned 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by John Benson. The small octavo entitled Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. has long been considered as little better than a pirated edition of the Thomas Thorpe 1609 edition. It has been described by Colin Burrow, among others, as a ‘partly bowdlerized’ edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1998, 18). ¹ As is well known, Benson (or his editor) ² changed the sonnets’ order, omitting eight, and organised them into loose thematic sections with titles reminiscent of the miscellanies popular in the period (‘cruel deceit’, ‘faithful concord’, etc.)—titles which Peter Holland has described as ‘jejune’ and ‘trivial’ (2004). The editor’s most decisive interventions concern, apart from the addition of titles, the merging of individual sonnets into larger poems (only thirty-one sonnets are retained as independent fourteen-line poems), and the inclusion of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, as well as poems from The Passionate Pilgrime (1599)—some of which not by Shakespeare, although most were believed to be his at the time. Benson also allegedly (and infamously) corrected the gender of the persona’s addressee in ‘some’ of the sonnets to the ‘fair youth’ (Schoenfeldt 2007, 53)—two, in fact— which, although critics differ in terms of the exact significance of the revisions, is still interpreted as a sign of active censorship. ³ Finally, Benson’s collection includes at the end of the volume a selection of poems from early printed miscellanies such as Englands Helicon (1600, 1614) and Chester’s Loves Martyr (1601), from Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britanica (1609), and finally three elegies to Shakespeare (including John Milton’s) borrowed from the Second Folio. The poems from Troia Britanica had already featured in the 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrime , which is the edition Benson probably used. In a final section entitled ‘An Addition of some Excellent Poems’—advertised as a bonus of hitherto unpublished pieces—Benson includes fifteen pieces by Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, William Strode, Robert Herrick and Thomas Carew (among others), which gave a topical spin to the volume (Shrank 2009, 19). This attractive octavo constitutes an 178excellent case study to interrogate the fine line between what constitutes ‘fair editing’ and censorship in the early modern period. When can an early modern editor be said to exercise a ‘legitimate prerogative’, and when does he/she overstep his/her right to intervene on a text? More fundamentally, to what extent do editorial choices (as an interpretive act) become akin to subtle (or less subtle) forms of censorship? In the absence of clearly defined, objective standards of editing, the line between censoring (i.e., imposing a personal or ideological spin or filter onto a text) and editing is a fine one to tread. But to establish what constitutes a ‘legitimate’ editorial prerogative, it is first necessary to contextualise the edition under scrutiny against historical standards of editing at the time of publication, and this can only be done by looking at other contemporary endeavours. As this chapter shows, Benson’s much-maligned edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets might seem biased to us (with our very modern standards) for reasons which we need to question, and perhaps simply because it was at variance with the Thorpe edition which is now taken to be the authoritative copy-text. Yet when seen from the perspective of a seventeenth-century stationer, his enterprise looks very different: it needs to be taken seriously as a piece of ‘fair’ editing—even though Marotti might describe it as ‘aggressive’ (1990, 160). If several very recent studies have done much, ⁴ in fact, to nuance our understanding of Benson’s agency, the misapprehension is still going strong. It is the story of this fascinating misunderstanding that the following essay intends to retrace because it poses interesting questions about what critics call ‘censorship’ of early printed texts and should encourage us to caution: when editorial choices are carefully gauged and historicised against contemporary practices, the issue of censorship can become elusive.