University of Virginia Library

"The 1640 Text of Shakespeare's Sonnets," Modern Philology, XIV (1916), 17-30; and see The Sonnets, New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. H. E. Rollins (1944), II, 18-28.

The Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. R. M. Alden (1916), p. 422.

Ibid., II, 22. See also his edition of The Poems, New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (1938), p. 607.

The Sonnets, The New Shakespeare (1966), p. xxii.

H. E. Rollins, in The Poems, pp. 604-609; and The Sonnets, II, 19-28. He is mistaken, curiously enough, in saying that the poems in The Passionate Pilgrime "all had titles in the 1612 edition." He himself edited the facsimile where they do not. The titles are all Benson's.

These are nos. 18, 19, 43, 56, 75, 76, 96, and 126. The last two may have been thought defective because 96 repeats the couplet of 36, and 126 has two pair of empty brackets instead of a final couplet. The other two pairs and two odd sonnets could have been simply missed. A group of miscellaneous sonnets at the end of Benson's rearrangement, nos. 107, 108, 78, 79, 73 and 77, may indicate that six more were caught at the last moment.

Reproduced in facsimile with an introduction by H. E. Rollins (1940). Two earlier editions, both apparently published in 1599, have been edited in facsimile, one by Sidney Lee (1905), and the other by J. Q. Adams (1939). There is no reason to suppose that Benson knew anything about Heywood's protest at the false attribution of his poems and Jaggard's substitution of a new title page without Shakespeare's name in part of this edition. Rollins, The Poems, pp. 533-538 gives the details.

Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London: 1554-1640, (1877), IV, 487.

W. A. Jackson, ed., Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company 1602 to 1640 (1957), p. 194. For various states of the imprint see W. B. Todd, "The Issues and States of the Second Folio and Milton's Epitaph on Shakespeare," Studies in Bibliography, V (1952), 81-108.

W. W. Greg, "The Copyright of Hero and Leander," The Library, 4th Ser., XXIV (1944), 169 and note, comments that a claimant to copyright was not uncommonly "bought off" by giving him the printing contract; and see his The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford, 1955), pp. 32-36.

This is the usual assumption, see Rollins, Sonnets, II, 3 ff., and most recently Dover Wilson, Sonnets, pp. xxxv-xlii. I quote Edwin E. Willoughby, A Printer of Shakespeare (1934), p. 16.

W. W. Greg, Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650 (1956), p. 16, citing Arber II, 43-44. See also his First Folio, pp. 32-33; Arber III, 248, 249, and IV, 147.

Leona Rostenberg, "Thomas Thorpe, Publisher of 'Shake-spares Sonnets'," PBSA, LIV (1960), 16-37.

M. A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476-1622 (1929), pp. 270-271, lists 14 news items published by Thorpe between 1603 and 1618. These were not likely to need reprinting. Thorpe's name is connected with some 40 publishing ventures between 1600 and 1625, but only three times did he publish a second edition. Usually there is record of his transfer of copyright, but in several cases no transfer is recorded, yet the book was reprinted by another publisher.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. Charles I, (1865), VIII, 527. He was admitted on the death of the previous occupant of the room, but there is no record of his successor.

Founded in 1437 by William de la Pole, and completed after his death by his wife Alice (Chaucer); R. M. Clay, The Mediœval Hospitals of England (1909), p. 80. The Honor and Manor of Ewelme were part of the royal estates, and in Queen Elizabeth's time were governed by the same appointee as was the hospital; Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I, III (1960), nos. 2651 and 1476.

Jackson, p. 245 n.2, and see index, "Poor" and "Pension(s) and Aid"; W. W. Greg and E. Boswell, eds., Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company 1576-1602 (1930), xlviii-li, and index, "Pensions" and "Poor."

(1963), p. 50, citing an Inquisition Post Mortem in the Bodleian Library, Eng. Hist. B, 172 f., 1-2.

W. W. Greg, "The Copyright of Hero and Leander," pp. 165-174.

Jackson, Records, xiv-xvi, and index, "Press(es)" for those destroyed or the bars taken down; Greg, Some Aspects, pp. 6-20; Greg makes the point that both printer and publisher were fined for illegal printing; and see Arber, IV, 528-536.

His name appears among the publishers in both the first and second Folios; see Todd, op. cit., note 9 above.

Arber, IV, 516. Jackson, pp. 217-339, lists those present at each meeting of the Court. Aspley was also a renter warden, acted as arbitrator many times, and was involved in other administrative affairs; see index, "Aspley."

Half of the surviving copies of the 1609 Quarto are marked, "At London By G. Eld for T. T. and are to be solde by Iohn Wright dwelling at Christ Church gate." The other half "are to be solde by William Aspley." Wright was just beginning to do business in 1609. His activities can be traced in Arber, and in Jackson more fully than in H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers . . . 1641-1667 (1907).

Smethwick like Aspley took up his freedom in 1597, and like Aspley was a member of the Court of Assistants 1630-1640, like Aspley he was one of the publishers of both the first and second Folio. Both men were keepers of the English stock in 1637; Jackson, p. 291. Both paid 20 nobles to avoid being upper, or senior warden in 1637, both were among the auditors in 1638; Jackson, p. 298, p. 320. Smethwick was elected Master in July, 1639.

Jackson, p. 254. He had agreed to pay "to the house for the use of the Poore (according as usually hath byn . . . .) And he hath promised upon the finishing of the Booke to pay the same accordingly."

Jackson, p. 325. Greg, First Folio, p. 33, note 1, reports that Albovine, in the original edition was advertised for sale by Humphrey Moseley in 1653-60, and suggests that Benson did not print it because he learned that the old stock was still unsold.

Shortly after Jonson's death Digby wrote to Bryan Duppa, the editor of Jonsonus Virbius, that he would "as soon as I can" make the world "share with me" "those excellent pieces (alas that many of them are but pieces!) which he hath left behind him and that I keepe religiously by me to that end." In 1659 (two decades later), Humphrey Moseley apologized for publishing The Last Remains of Sr John Suckling, citing for precedent the publication of Jonson's The Sad Shepherd, "judg'd a Piece of too much worth to be laid aside, by the Learned and Honorable Sir Kenelm Digby, who published that Volume." He had just bought the copyright to the volume from Walkley, so the source of his information is clear. Neither Digby nor Moseley mention editing, and the state of Walkley's text seems proof that no editing was done; Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Vol. IX (1950), 102-103; and see J. C. Reed, "Humphrey Moseley, Publisher," Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings and Papers, II, 1927-1930 (1930), p. 100.

The sole document in this affair is Thomas Walkley's petition to the Court of Chancery, sworn and filed January 20, 1640, printed by Frank Marcham, "Thomas Walkley and the Ben Jonson 'Works' of 1640," The Library, 4th Ser., IX (1930), 225-229. Under the same title W. W. Greg interpreted this document in the same volume, pp. 461-465. The account in Ben Jonson, IX, 88-128, is slightly inaccurate and very hostile to Benson, accepting Walkley's plea as the whole truth.

Arber, IV, 500. The editors of Ben Jonson are mistaken on IX, 126, when they attribute to Benson the entry of March 20 of The Masque of Augurs, Time Vindicated, Neptune's Triumph, Pan's Anniversary, with sundry Elegies and other Poems. This entry was to Andrew Crooke and Richard Seirger, as they report correctly on p. 97.

Benson first published the Exercration against Vulcan: with diverse Epigrams, including "His Mistresse Drawne," and "Her Minde" already printed in the Poems. This is a thin Quarto. Then he published in duodecimo Q. Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry. With other Workes of the Author, never printed before. This volume contains not only the Masque of the Gypsies, but also all of the pieces in the first volume. It is dedicated to the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Windsore by Benson who acknowledges "The Extension of your Noble Favours" which "commands" the presentation, and has also some commendatory verses by Sir Edward Herbert, Barton Holyday, Zouch Townley, and an "Ode. To Ben Jonson upon his Ode to himself," signed "I. C." Obviously, this was not a hasty and surreptitious volume, as the trouble taken with the text of the Masque also testifies.

Crooke had secured the right to reprint the contents of the 1616 Folio of Jonson's Works, and this volume appeared as Volume I of the edition of 1640, "by Richard Bishop, and are to be sold by Andrew Crooke in St Paules Churchyard." Crooke, who specialized in plays, also had publishing rights to two of the three of Jonson's plays printed by John Beale in 1631 for Robert Allot. This edition was never completed, and probably Crooke acquired the unsold sheets when Allot died in 1635; see Ben Jonson, IX, 85.

Plomer, Dictionary, "Parker, John," reports that he had a large interest in the Latin stock of the Company. In 1620 he held the copyright to Venus and Adonis and published an edition. In his will he left a ring to Andrew Crooke.

Jackson, pp. 204-208. Aspley submitted in 1628, but Parker not until January, 1630; Jackson, p. 223.

Walkley failed to enter STC nos. 1399, 1400, 6779 (in 1636), 11074, 11057 (Brittain's Ida by G. Fletcher, the Younger, which Walkley falsely attributed to E. Spenser), 12026 (perhaps pirated), 11095 (in 1635), 6306 (in 1639), 25890 (The Workes of G. Wither, see Percy Simpson, "Walkley's Piracy of Withers Poems in 1620," The Library, 4th Ser. VI (1925), 271-277), two of Jonson's Masques, nos. 14762 and 14776, 14718, 14719, and some other pieces. A study of Walkley's publications and of the probable source of his text of Othello is in preparation.

Ben Jonson, IX, 103-104. Walkley's part consists of four sections, of which the last title in each of the two last sections has the imprint "London, Printed M.DC. XLI." Jonson's editors conjecture that the third and fourth sections were being printed simultaneously and were unfinished when John Parker "swooped down on the printing-office and impounded the stock." Evidently there were fewer of Allot's sheets than of Walkley's for the Folger Library, STC no. 14745a, has a copy which begins with The Divell is an Asse, reprinted and dated 1641. The other two plays of Allot's part are missing. Crooke had copyright to them. Meighen's title page is also missing.

G. E. B. Eyre and C. R. Rivington, A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1640-1708 (1913-1914), II, 196, 206. Here it is designated "Volume III."

Rollins, ibid., says from Fletcher's Bloody Brother, entered Oct. 4, 1639 and published the same year, but collation shows that this is improbable.

Probably also from a manuscript copy. It has one obvious error in common with the Folio text, III, ii, 133-162, and one significant variant.

Edited by A. B. Grosart for the New Shakespeare Society, Series VIII, Miscellanies, no. 2 (1878). See also Rollins, Poems, 323-331, 559-583; F. T. Prince, The Poems, Arden Edition of The Works (1960), pp. xxiii-iv, xxxviii-xlvi; and J.W. Lever, "The Poems" in "Twentieth-Century Studies in Shakespeare's Songs, Sonnets, and Poems," Shakespeare Survey, 15, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (1962), pp. 25-30. The "Poeticall Essaies" were reprinted as The Phoenix & Turtle, Shakespeare Head Quartos, VII (1937), with an introduction by B. H. Newdigate.

See Mrs. Esdale, "William Marshall's Frontispieces," Times (London) Literary Supplement, Jan. 30, 1937, p. 80.

Lines 17-18, 47-48, and 3-4, with slight alterations to give them coherence. The final couplet is original.

See the facsimile of Shakespeare's Poems 1640, published by Alfred Russell Smith (1885); The Shakespeare Allusion Book, ed. with Preface by E. K. Chambers (1932), I, 455-458; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare. Facts and Problems (1930), II, 231-234.

See The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire, (1955), II, 136.

The Poetical Works of William Basse (1602-1653), ed. R. Warwick Bond (1893), pp. 113, 114.