CHAPTER FIVE

1639-1640 “SCORN NOT THE SONNET”

[These] excellent and sweetely composed Poems . . .
had not the fortune by Reason of their Infancie in his
death, to have the due accomodatio[n] of proportionable
glory, with the rest of his everliving Workes.

—JOHN BENSON, PREFACE TO 1640
EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE’S Poems

 

 

If the first booklegger of the Sonnets, Thorpe, has recently been redeemed from the “stain” of piracy, at least temporarily, the second so-called booklegger of these poems, John Benson, has continued to be damned for daring to republish them. His 1640 edition of Poems Written by Wil. Shakespeare. Gent, has been called a lot of names, none nice. As temperate a scholar as Hyder Rollins accused Benson of taking “great pains to conceal his piracy,” called his edition “completely devoid of textual authority,” and even sarcastically rebuked Benson for being “so thoughtful and independent” an editor that he somehow managed to omit eight of the Q sonnets.

So perhaps now is a good time to restore some balance to the traditional account of Benson’s book, while presenting the flipside of Stuart book-publishing. In order to understand not just the history of the Sonnets, but of all seventeenth-century editions of Shakespeare, it is important to recognize, as Gary Taylor does in Reinventing Shakespeare, that “copyright was held by . . . a trade cartel of printers and booksellers, who held those rights in perpetuity and could buy or sell them like any piece of real estate.” Which is why the greatest mystery underlying Thorpe’s edition is the lack of documentary evidence that he transferred its copyright at any time between that original 1609 publication and his death in the late 1630s.

Perhaps he did. If he transferred his rights after 1624, when he ceased being a contributor to the Stationers’ Company coffers, it would not necessarily have been recorded in the company registry. It seems unlikely, but perhaps Thorpe did give his blessing to a later edition, for a consideration. One recent writer has suggested that, when the copyright reverted to the company itself on Thorpe’s death, Benson turned to William Aspley, who was then master of the Stationers’ Company, for a copy of the scarce book. Which merely begs the question, Why would Aspley not have just reissued it himself?

It is tempting to see some significance in the publication date of Benson’s redaction of the Poems—as if he, or his copublisher, knew that the only potential counter-claimant had now passed away without issue. We have no record of Thorpe after he entered the Oxfordshire hospital, but it is unlikely that he was still alive in November 1639, when part of Poems was registered with the Stationers’ Company.

By said date, any other party that might have known the “true story of the sonnets”—if, indeed, there was one—had also already passed on. Shakespeare himself had died in April 1616. The Earl of Southampton lived long enough to see the First Folio’s publication, but died the following year, and the Earl of Pembroke lived until his fiftieth birthday (just), in April 1630. Ben Jonson, who made it to sixty-five, passed away in August 1637, not in an alms-house, but in dire straits financially.

One must assume that any scandal concerning Q died with these men—unless, as some have argued, there is a significance to the reorganization and mingling of the sonnets by Benson above and beyond an attempt to—in Rollins’s words—“hoodwink the wardens of the Stationers’ Company.” Massey thought he saw something self-aggrandizing in the preface that Benson wrote (quoted above), which was a way of attesting “to the purity of [the] Sonnets.” “This vindication,” Massey said, “would not have been made unless some contrary charge had been brought against them.”

And perhaps there was still some general stench of scandal attached to Shakespeare’s sonnets per se. But it seems more likely that, knowing only of Q’s existence, Benson set out to make it part of his own collection. The editorial work he apparently undertook would certainly have sufficed to obscure any connection. Yet I have to agree with Dover-Wilson that, however much it may be “commonly assumed . . . it was fear of infringing Thorpe’s copyright that led [Benson] to disguise his wholesale borrowing from that collection, . . . the work Benson put into the preparation of the volume seems in excess of anything such fears demanded.”

Many have assumed that Benson’s avoidance of the word “sonnet” at all times, as well as his attempt to violate the form itself by ganging together several sonnets at a time, reflected a general critical opprobrium that was now attached to the form. At some point, someone certainly turned the 146 [sic] sonnets into somewhere between 72 and 80 poems, putting sonnets together in groupings of between two and six quatorzain stanzas. Said person then gave these newfound poems titles, and apparently made a handful of changes to gender in three of the poems (Q101, 104, and 108).

The groupings and the emasculated titles that Benson gave many of the sonnets—if he was the textual editor of Poems—seems on the face of it to suggest an attempt to sanitize the sonnets’ thematic concerns. And so, in Poems, the “master-mistresse” sonnet (Q26) becomes, hilariously, “A Dutifull Message,” and the sonnet that so offended a correspondent to Fraser’s Magazine (Q42) becomes “Losse and Gaine.” The infamous pairing where the poet offers his obeisance, Q57 and 58, have been combined into a single poem, entitled “The Force of Love.” Which is one way of putting it.

However, the practice of putting names to untitled sonnets was hardly uncommon in this time period. We already know that someone gave Q2 the title “Spes Altera,” and that the title stuck. Likewise, a contemporary copy of Q8 found in a manuscript commonplace book in the British Museum has a Latin heading found nowhere else, “In laudem musice et opprobrium contemptorii eiusdem.” The facile titles found in Benson’s book share common ground with other collections from the period.

This could be because Benson sought consistency, even as he laid the poems published by Thorpe and Jaggard side by side, in an order that has defied any subsequent attempt to discover his logic. And, aside from the use of titles often tenuously related, and generic to the point of in-consequence, Benson also adopted one of Jaggard’s little tricks: He pads out his collection with a smattering of non-Shakespearean offerings that he had registered to himself on November 4, 1639.

In fact, if one didn’t know better, one might suppose that both the Poems and The Passionate Pilgrim were drawn from the same kind of source-document—the single-poet manuscript miscellany—and that the publishers simply took unreliable attributions, titles, and orders at face value when they had no means of restoring the “right” ones. Arthur Marotti asserts that “Benson did what other English publisher-editors did back to the time of Richard Tottel’s famous miscellany: he took the verse that originally had specific social coordinates and handled it as conventional lyrical utterances within the context of the usual literary depiction of amorous experience.” And he could well have done so in ignorance of its “specific social coordinates,” not in contempt thereof.

Jaggard’s original 1599 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim was almost certainly compiled from one or two such miscellanies—which, I suspect, is why he failed to acquire more than just a handful of the privately circulated “sugred sonnets,” and gave it the title he did. Benson’s collection also resembles a miscellany, albeit a more ambitious one, centered around the poems of William Shakespeare, and one that has been heavily edited and organized by someone, whether for purely private or ostensibly commercial reasons.

We should remember that “in a system of manuscript circulation of literature, those into whose hands texts came could, in a real sense, ‘own’ them: they could collect, alter and transmit them” [AM]. The “reorganization” of Q given in Poems makes no real sense in terms of any commercial imperative—Benson had little to fear and no one to fool by such an act—but as a private document that someone has collected, altered, and then transmitted, it is hardly at odds with other “single-author” miscellanies of the period.

If a compiler of a manuscript miscellany had already done the work for Benson—combining the Sonnets, The Passionate Pilgrim, “A Lover’s Complaint,” The Phoenix the Turtle &c. into a handy “private” compendium of works otherwise unavailable to devotees of the dramatist—it suggests that such material was already scarce. Yet Benson seems to have known that the material had been previously published, which explains why he registered only the “additional” poems in November 1639.

He also doubtless knew something of the history of The Passionate Pilgrim. His chosen printer certainly knew not only that William Jaggard had died (in 1623, with the First Folio barely off the press), but also that his son and heir, Issac, had died just four years later, leaving his wife Dorothy to sell all the copyrights the Jaggards owned in the works of William to another stationer. That stationer was none other than Thomas Cotes, the man responsible for printing Benson’s Poems. And Cotes was, as Lee points out, “the printer who was . . . the most experienced of any in the trade in the production of Shakespearean literature.” J. W. Bennett goes further: “The fact that Cotes did the printing makes it highly improbable that there was anything surreptitious about the 1640 Poems.”

Any rights attendant upon The Passionate Pilgrim now belonged to Cotes. Even though the book is not specifically named in the transfer of rights from Jaggard’s widow on June 19, 1627, the last two lines of the assignment, “her parte in SHACKSPHEERE playes. / Seven godly sermons upon ‘the temptacon’ &c.” covers a multitude of sins. Jaggard’s copyrights had become Cotes’s, even when—as was the case with The Passionate Pilgrim—the book had never actually been entered in the Stationers’ Register. This, in turn, provides the most likely explanation for why Benson sought out Cotes as a printer, rather than using his usual printer, J. Okes. Buying off a claimant to a copyright by giving him the printing contract was not that apparently uncommon.⁸

So Benson did not register The Passionate Pilgrim because he had Cotes’s word that he had already acquired those rights (and, who knows, maybe the rights for the sonnets, too). A blank page in the register (and there is one for 1610) could suggest a gap in registering, and Cotes had been steadfastly acquiring copyrights to the works of Shakespeare for the past twelve years. Three years after he bought Jaggard’s rights, he purchased those of Thomas Pavier, Jaggard’s old partner in the 1618 “Quartos scam.”

And yet, Cotes did not necessarily display a great deal of discrimination about what he published under that esteemed name. After he printed the so-called Second Folio in 1632, he followed it up with a 1635 reprint of the mangled 1618 quarto of Pericles, published by Pavier; and then put two more plays, The Yorkshire Tragedy and Sir John Oldcastle, back into the world. These were again attributed to Shakespeare, demonstrating that there were already questions-marks about some of the material which even Cotes chose to publish under such a saleable name (both plays were purchased from Master Bird in November 1630, and would reappear again as part of the 1664 Third Folio).

The issue of authenticity was rearing its head barely three years after the dramatist’s death. That situation, confused enough prior to the appearance of the First Folio, was not entirely settled by its appearance. Partly, this was because Heminge and Condell, apparently deliberately, omitted some of the plays Shakespeare coauthored, as well as all of Shakespeare’s poetry, thus leaving this aspect of their friend’s art wholly uncataloged. Their example led “many later editors to treat the Poems as if they were not an integral part of the Works of Shakespeare” [SB].

In an era when the works of William Shakespeare remained caught betwixt Apocrypha and Authentick, one should be wary of assuming that any publisher, let alone a relative novice like Benson, knew precisely the parameters of his poetic canon. As Benson told his readers in the Preface to Poems, he was not so much concerned with copyright as with getting his readers to recognize these poems as “seren[e], cleere and eligantly plaine” enough to “raise your admiration to his praise.” In this, he might have been unduly optimistic, but was probably, nonetheless, sincere.

The Preface Benson appended to his collection, rather than implying he was skating on thin ice with the Stationers, as has been suggested, seems to strike the tone of someone hoping that the work will be accepted as genuinely Shakespearean: “[These] sweetely composed Poems of Master William Shakespeare, Which in themselves appeare of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then living avouched . . . yet the lines of themselves will afford you a more authentick approbation than my assurance any way can.” In the highly confused climate that succeeded Shakespeare’s fatal shuffle, Benson—“in good faith”—attempted to collect together the “non-narrative” poems, thus producing a compendium of the genuine and the misattributed that would become the standard Shakespeare poetic miscellany for 150 years.

But why did Benson undertake such a venture? It was hardly his forte. It is curious that it should even be Benson, and not Cotes, who was the main force behind the project (and we have to assume this was so, since it is his name on the Preface). Given the freedom to publish by the Stationers’ Company in 1631, Benson had only published half a dozen books before Poems, displaying precious few credentials as a publisher of poetry or literature (though he had “desired leave to print” Sir William Davenant’s The Tragedy of Albovine back in July 1639, then changed his mind). In Henry R. Plomer’s Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, he is described as “chiefly a publisher of ballads and broadsides,” and his most famous legacy, Poems excepted, would be as the printer of John Playford’s The English Dancing Master in 1650-51. (Playford had, in fact, been apprenticed to Benson back in 1640.)

Actually, Benson is not identified as the publisher on the title page of Poems. It simply says, “Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by John Benson,” suggesting more of a joint project. And the only registration in the Stationers’ records is for the additional poems that come at the end of the volume. The registration itself, entered on November 4, 1639, is positively cryptic: “An addicion of some excellent Poems to Shakespeares Poems by other gentlemen.” Were one to endorse Rollins’s premise, that Benson was looking to “hoodwink the wardens of the Stationers’ Company,” why draw attention to the book, and pay a registration fee, when the bulk of its contents infringed extant copyrights anyway?

The registration rather suggests that Benson was reasonably sure they did not. Indeed, his use of the phrase “the Authour himselfe then living avouched” leads me to believe that he knew more of the history of Q than he was telling. Of course, it could just be simple sales-speak, but he did have a connection to another playwright of the period that has gone largely unexplored. This “contact” probably provided the “copy” of “Q” that he utilized, and an examination of their association raises the intriguing possibility that it was a manuscript version.

So what, if any, are the arguments for the text of the Poems deriving not from Q, but from a manuscript copy thereof? That Benson knew of the book’s existence seems indisputable. One, he made no attempt to copyright the sonnets as part of his November 1639 registration. Two, in the Preface he carefully avoids saying that the sonnets had never been published. Rather, he says they lacked the “due accomodatio[n] of proportionable glory, with the rest of his everliving Workes,” strongly implying that copies of Q had already become bloody rare. The total absence of contemporary references to—or manuscript transcriptions from—a collection of sonnets by someone as notable as Shakespeare suggests they had a collectibility of which Benson was only too aware.

Even if the dozen or so copies that have survived the centuries had already acquired the status of secret texts, one would have expected the sonnets to have cropped up in some of the seventeenth-century commonplace books known to exist. As H. R. Woudhuysen observed, in his work on the circulation of literary manuscripts 1558-1640, “The emergence of an apparently print-dominated culture did not result in a movement one way only. As movable type transformed manuscript into print, so print . . . could be transformed back into manuscript. Whole books which were rare or had been suppressed were transcribed, and favourite poems, speeches, or letters would be extracted for private use.”

In manuscript, more likely, omissions would go unobserved. And the most compelling evidence that Benson utilized a manuscript version is the omission of eight Q sonnets (18, 19, 43, 56, 75, 76, 96, 126) from Poems. This alone convinced Sidney Lee, who in his 1905 facsimile edition, “doubted whether Benson depended on Thorpe’s printed volume in his confused impression of the sonnets. . . . He avows no knowledge of Shakespeares Sonnets . . . [and his] text seems based on some amateur collection of pieces of manuscript poetry, which had been in private circulation. . . . It is difficult to [otherwise] account for the exclusion of these [eight sonnets].”

These omissions have been troubling commentators ever since Edmund Malone’s edition in 1780. Many have looked for an explanation in the sonnets themselves. Unfortunately, there is nothing that obviously connects the six groups—taking 18-19 and 75-76 together—either conceptually or thematically. The octet even includes one of the more beautiful, and perhaps the most famous, sonnet of them all, Q18, “Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?”

One can immediately discount the possibility that the absence of the sonnets stems from an incomplete copy of Q, given Benson’s inclusion of other sonnets found on the same pages. And the eight sonnets absent from Benson’s edition are hardly among the more damning, should one be looking for evidence of a poetic pederast. Only one of them can be said to represent that small number of sonnets which are unambiguously directed to a male (Q126, “O thou my lovely Boy who in thy power”). Likewise, if the editor’s changes to three closely grouped sonnets—which seem designed to modify the message, turning “him” and “he” into “her” and “she” in Q101, and “friend” and “boy” to “love” in Q104 and 108—were part of a plan to mislead readers as to the nature of this infatuation, these would not have been the sonnets with which I, or any modern bowdlerizer, would have started.

And, as Margreta de Grazia points out in her 1997 essay, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” “Of the seventy-five titles Benson assigned to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, only three of them direct sonnets from the first group . . . (Q1-126) to a woman . . . [while] the very first fourteen lines printed in the 1640 Poems contain eleven male pronouns, more than any other sonnet.” Hardly the act of a scandalized scribe. So, all in all, these omissions cannot be easily explained away as demonstrating evidence of deliberate design.

Nor did the reorganization and entitling of the volume, whatever their purpose, suffice to fool the one careful contemporary reader who left his thoughts behind. A seventeenth-century copy of Benson’s book, which now resides in the Folger Library, has someone starting to mark up his copy, changing the poem titles to more appropriate ones and correcting obvious typos. Among his emendations is a new title for Q20, “The Mistress Masculine” (from “The Exchange”); while for the first three sonnets, bundled together by Benson, he has written “Motives to procreation as the way to outlive Time”—a title of which even Shakespeare might have approved.

As to whether such amendments would have fooled the wardens of the company—which Rollins claims to have been Benson’s main intention—one is obliged to point out that the wardens did not go out of their way to challenge their members’ copyrights. They relied on other members, if their copyrights had been infringed, to raise such matters. And, as we’ve already noted, there was no one around who was likely to do so (or would even know the history of Q).

What is also clear, from the other contents in the collection, is that Benson intended for his edition to be the “complete” poems—save for the two well-known narrative poems, Venus and Lucrece, whose copyright he could not obtain, and dare not infringe. Not only does he include “A Lover’s Complaint,” but he also incorporates The Phoenix the Turtle, taken from either the 1601 or 1611 edition of Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr, or Rosalin’s Complaint (where it is explicitly attributed to Shakespeare), plus the entire 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim (Heywood’s incursions included). There are even two songs from the plays, the first of which, “Take, O take these lippes away,” has two stanzas, when only one appears in Measure for Measure. The second, from As You Like It, also looks like it came from a manuscript copy.⁹ Evidently, “the compiler used everything . . . which he found attributed to Shakespeare in print” [JWB].

In this light, Benson’s protestation that he had been “somewhat solicit [o]us to bring this [book] forth to the perfect view of all men” has as much claim to our credulity as Heminge and Condell’s assertion that they rescued play texts that had been “maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes [of] injurious imposters.” Marotti is surely right to suggest that Benson was offering “his volume as the completion of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, as it were.”

And yet, the publisher managed to omit eight sonnets from Q. The only tenable explanations are that either the printer was incompetent—an accusation not generally leveled at Cotes—or that the papers from which Poems was compiled and/or printed were incomplete, and that no one directly responsible for its publication knew any better.

Even if the printer had accidentally omitted these sonnets at the outset, Benson would have been able to restore them in any subsequent reprint. And, as Lee points out in the 1905 facsimile edition, there was a catalog of books for sale at a shop “at the Prince’s Armes” in 1654 that included an edition of Poems “printed for Humphrey Moseley.”

All of which suggests that the full edition was unavailable personally to Benson, though he remained aware of Q’s existence. At what stage these sonnets became detached is pure guesswork, of course, but there are a couple of clues that it was after the material was reorganized. The fact that these eight sonnets should include two sets of consecutive sonnets—which, as a random happenstance, would be around a one in 5,000 shot—is unlikely to be accidental. We know that many of the sonnets were paired together in the “reorganizing” process.

Given the sheer cost of paper in Caroline England, the likelihood of four other, disconnected sonnets being on single sheets that had become individually detached also seems remote (the scene in Shakespeare in Love where the young William scrunches up sheets in dissatisfaction at what he has written would never have happened). The eight missing sonnets probably made up a single unit that became detached after they were grouped together. If they were in a single sheaf, without the numbering system found in Q, it would have been all too easy for them to go astray in their passage from private hands to publisher to printer.

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that Benson’s text provides an alternate source for Q, just that it was a copy—and a good one at that—probably directly derived from Thorpe’s edition. We can be fairly sure that the organizer was working from an actual copy of Q because, as Rollins notes, “In the case of italicized words—the item least likely to be dependent on ms. copy—there is not a single instance of divergence.” But if that collator was Benson—or the printer Cotes—one would expect them to have referred back to Q before going to press, and not just some scribal copy—let us get all synoptic and call it Q/2. Likewise, one would have expected Cotes and/or Benson to have compared the versions of Q138 and 144 with the versions included in The Passionate Pilgrim. But they simply used the P.P. variants verbatim—as did the transcriber of Q/2.

Maybe Benson just didn’t give a damn. Except, we know he did care about the textual quality and appearance of what he published. The supplement to Poems contains a frontispiece facing the title page, presenting a carefully elaborated cut of the Droeshout engraving of the First Folio by the highly regarded William Marshall, hardly a demonstration of cost- or corner-cutting. We also know that Benson dramatically reworked another book when it was already at the press, a mere three months after he registered Poems, and that the book in question could well have come from the same source as Q/2. That work was a previously unpublished masque by Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, and it was registered to Benson, under the title The Masque of the Gypsies, on February 20, 1640.

What Benson had here acquired, as W. W. Greg notes in his introduction to the 1952 variorum edition, was already “a good manuscript, possibly one prepared for presentation on the occasion of the first performance.” “But before the book was issued,” Greg writes, “Benson . . . somehow acquired a manuscript of the fuller composite version, and though this was in fact a rather inferior copy, he decided to amplify the already printed text in accordance with it. To do this he cancelled the leaves D6-10 and E5-11 and replaced them by two newly printed quires.”

This does not sound like someone who, upon realizing he had omitted eight sonnets from the collected poetic works of William Shakespeare, would have simply shrugged his shoulders. The work involved in resetting the Jonson masque was considerable, and furthermore, had no obvious bearing on its salability. In all likelihood, no one would ever have known. We only know what happened because a single printed copy survived in which three of the canceled leaves were “scored through,” but not removed by the binder.¹⁰

These two versions of a single Jonson masque also tell us that Benson had recently chanced upon a supply(er) of literary manuscripts, ostensibly from the pen of Ben Jonson. And the timeline of these Jonsonian acquisitions aligns exactly with his registration of Poems. In a period of just over three months from November 1639 through February 1640, Benson registered the “additional poems” for his Shakespearean anthology (November 4), and then, in rapid succession, three works by Jonson: Execration against Vulcan with Other His Smaller Epigrams (December 16); The Art of Poetry, a translation by Jonson of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (February 8); and The Masque of the Gypsies (February 20).

The clincher? Among the “additional poems” registered on November 4, 1639, were two of Jonson’s own, “His Mistress Drawne” and “Her Minde,” both of which appeared in the 1640 Poems, as does an eight-line testament to Shakespeare from Jonson. The first six lines of this testament may be “drawn at haphazard from Ben Jonson’s eulogy in the First Folio” [SL], but the concluding couplet—“For ever live thy fame, the world to tell / Thy like no age shall ever parallel.”—appears to have been original. Did it appear this way in one of Jonson’s papers—some of which Benson, and a fellow stationer, had recently acquired? If so, among them was also probably a three-page riposte by Leonard Digges to Jonson’s tribute in the First Folio, in which Digges is “taunting Johnson with the lack of popularity of his plays and the great drawing power of Shakespeare’s” [JWB]. This, too, Benson published in Poems. Where did this material come from?

One tantalizing suggestion, made first by Keith Whitlock in a 1999 Folk Music Journal article, is that the papers were obtained from Richard Brome, who for many years had been “an Ingenious Servant, and Imitator of his Master, that famously Renowned Poet, Ben Jonson.” Brome had worked for Jonson since at least 1614, and possibly since 1609,¹¹ his duties apparently including transcribing parts for dramatic entertainments. By the time Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629, Brome had developed into something of a playwright himself. In that year he wrote two highly successful productions for Shakespeare’s old troupe, the King’s Men: The Lovesick Maid and The Northern Lasse, the latter of which appeared in print in 1632 with commendatory verses by Jonson himself.

But Brome was dogged by the same problem as his mentor, Jonson. Without a direct financial stake in one of the acting companies, he was a scribe for hire, surviving from play to play on the advances doled out by the companies. Even after a huge success at the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1635, with The Sparagus Garden, which Brome estimated earned the company concerned over a thousand pounds, he was still essentially “on retainer.” On a salary of fifteen shillings a week (plus one day’s profit per delivered play), he was signed to a three-year contract by the manager of the Salisbury Court, Richard Heton. Required to write some three plays per annum, a daunting regime even for a prolific playwright, he almost immediately buckled under the strain.

When, as a result, his stipend dried up, he turned to Christopher Beeston, actor, self-styled impresario, and owner of the Cockpit Theatre and the Red Bull. In August 1636, Beeston “loaned” Brome £6, in return for a commitment to write a play for him. But another outbreak of the plague closed the theaters. They stayed shut until October 1637, by which time Brome was living from hand to mouth and Jonson was already dead.

Despite these difficulties, Brome remained in demand, and in August 1638 he was offered a new contract by Heton. This one was for seven years at a pound a week, but also required him to supply the plays he still owed from their previous agreement. It was a recipe for disaster, and Brome and Heton were soon at loggerheads. In April 1639, Brome finally walked out on the Salisbury Court players for good and went to the Cockpit. His former employer immediately commenced a legal action for breach of contract, leaving Brome fearing for his financial future. While working on a new play, The Court Beggar, Brome—short of funds again—revived The Northern Lass. He also arranged for his two most notable Salisbury Court plays—The Sparagus Garden and The Antipodes—to be published.

Whether he even had the rights to do so is unclear. It seems unlikely. The company usually owned its plays outright. But the gesture would have served two purposes—it gave Brome a little money, as he continued trying to make ends meet, and it served to annoy his former employer, whose suit continued to be pressed. It also introduced him to new contacts in the world of publishing. Any initial contact between Brome and Benson may have been provided by Benson’s regular printer, and fellow stationer, John Okes, who was simultaneously charged with printing the two plays from Brome’s Salisbury Court days.

Brome, we can assume, would probably have been in a position to access a copy of Q from Jonson, and he would have had the literary interest to do so. He also may have had the inclination, and certainly the aptitude, to reorganize the material in a manner he preferred, transcribing it into a volume of Shakespeare’s poems. If he did indeed take that task upon himself, Brome could have reorganized and transcribed Q at the same time. Or he could have had a scribal transcript made, or acquired one already in existence. (As Woudhuysen observes, such copies were frequently made, with good reason: “A scribal copy . . . provided an insurance against loss or destruction in or outside the printing-house.”) As it happens, we have evidence that the going rate for such work was a penny a sheet. Sir Edward Dering paid 4 shillings, i.e., 48 pence, to “mr Carington for writing oute ye play of K: Henry ye fourth” in February 1623. At this time, the First Folio had not yet appeared, and any old quartos of Henry IV had largely disintegrated.

Benson may even have specifically asked Brome to produce a text of Shakespeare’s poems, and if so, Brome may have taken it upon himself to edit them in the manner of the day. In which case, he may well have provided the publisher with anecdotal information concerning the scarcity of the material, to which Benson appears to be alluding in his preface. After all, Brome had known others who had moved in Shakespeare’s circles, notably Thomas Heywood, with whom Brome had coauthored three plays. To the end, though, he struggled to make ends meet—leaving his posthumous editor, Alexander Brome, to observe, “Poor he came into th’ world and poor went out.” Benson expressed a personal sense of debt toward the man shortly before Brome’s death in 1653, providing a commendatory verse—under the initials J.B.—to the quarto edition of A Joviall Crew, beginning, “Nor [i.e., What] need the Stationer, when all th’ Wits are past.”

Accepting the existence of Q/2 does not, unfortunately, bring us any closer to Q’s source text, fair or otherwise. Poems replicates all of the most problematic errors found in Q. But it does return us to a world where manuscript and print were in a state of constant flux. It also suggests that Q had disappeared real fast, whether through interference, carelessness, or just a general distaste for its style and content (though one might expect some contemporary reference if this final scenario applied). Therefore, when Benson claimed it lacked “due accomodatio[n] of proportionable glory, with the rest of his everliving Workes,” it was probably said with a straight face, and with a keen awareness of the difficulties he had experienced obtaining any text.

However, in the immediate aftermath of its publication, Poems was the least of Benson’s problems. Having obtained miscellaneous “Jonson papers” (in tandem with the unfortunately named Andrew Crooke), presumably from the hapless Brome, both Benson and Crooke found themselves accused by another stationer-publisher, Thomas Walkley, of “having obtayned by some casuall or other indirect meanes false and imperfect Copies of the said workes.” (In fact, Benson’s edition of the Masque of the Gypsies is markedly superior to Walkley’s, which Jonson editors C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson branded as “execrable.”)

Walkley’s financial concerns lay not with Shakespeare’s poems, but with Jonson’s masques, fifteen of which he had obtained from Jonson’s “executor,” Sir Kenelm Digby, who, according to Walkley, “in pursuance of the said truste reposed in him delivered [them to Walkley] to have them published and printed according to the intenc[i]on of the said Benjamin Jonson.” Actually, Digby sold the papers to Walkley for the relatively high sum of £40—a sum that would have far exceeded whatever Benson and Crooke paid Brome for their own set of papers.

Rather than registering the masques with the Stationers’ Company, Walkley simply set about printing his edition, oblivious to the fact that Benson and Crooke had already registered five of these masques (in February-March 1640). When they discovered Walkley’s intentions, Benson and Crooke referred the matter to the Stationers’ Company, and proceedings were obtained against Walkley. This led to the forfeiture of his own stock, along with “goodes and wares . . . of the value of three hundred pounds,” a considerable sum of money back then. (A new decree, passed in July 1637, required “every printer . . . to enter into a bond [of] £300 to print no books but such as are lawfully allowed to him.” Walkley was deemed in breach of this decree.)

So much is documented. And as Greg makes clear, Walkley was the one who “formally infringed the rights of Benson and Crooke, rights based upon regular entries in the Stationers’ Register.” Nevertheless, by directly appealing to one of the secretaries of state, Walkley was able to get the forfeiture overturned and a warrant issued “prohibiting the sayd Benson and Crooke from further printing or publishing the same workes or any of them.” By now Benson and Crooke were caught up in a far larger spat. Walkley, who had a history of failing to register his publications, as well as out-and-out piracy, “was using the royal authority to defeat the Stationers’ right to grant copyright. . . . This was no bit of private chicanery, but the might of the City guilds against the royal authority on the eve of the Civil War” [JWB].

Not surprisingly, despite an appeal to the Chancery court, Walkley, like his fellow Royalists, was fighting a losing battle. As late as 1648 he was still trying to get a license to publish the “peece[s] of Poetry of Mr Ben Johnsons which cost him £40.” The following year, he had greater concerns. A warrant for his arrest was issued “for dispersing scandalous declarations sent from the King’s son in Jersey.”

Benson, who probably had very little interest in reprinting Jonson’s Masque of the Gypsies, comes across as the injured party throughout. Having acquired the masque in good faith, he registered it properly and had even gone to the trouble of resetting his edition to make his text as complete as possible. And yet, damned as just another booklegger by Malone and the many other editors of Shakespeare’s sonnets who came along in the scholar’s wake, he was summarily judged the guilty party in the Benson-Crooke-Walkley dispute by twentieth-century Jonsonian scholars C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson.

In their authoritative eleven-volume set of Jonson’s collected works (1925-52), Herford accused Benson of obtaining “certainly by dishonest means [my italics], a copy of the fully revised and enlarged text” of the gypsy masque. But Herford had no grounds for making such a claim. In fact, like Walkley, he had no idea what means—legal or illegal—the publisher had used (he certainly should have realized that Walkley emotively claiming Benson had “obtayned [them] by some casuall or other indirect meanes” demonstrated ignorance of the actual circumstance).

If the Jonson masque did come from Richard Brome, any charge of underhandedness holds no water. Even if Digby’s rights to Jonson’s literary papers were marginally stronger than Brome’s, Walkley was the one who acted like a pirate. Herford was convinced that Walkley was “the true owner of the copyright,” though Benson had the a priori claim. Which is why it took Walkley eighteen years to get the Stationers’ Company to “recognize” his copyright, by which time he had been obliged to sell these ill-defined rights to another stationer, Humphrey Moseley.

At least Benson had better luck with Poems, which sold better than Thorpe’s edition—some sixty-plus copies are known to have survived to the present day, and around a dozen examples of the poems therein were transferred to extant Caroline commonplace books (one of which uses twenty-three quotes from the 1640 edition). There is also evidence that the book was still available in 1654, when the same Humphrey Moseley included it in an advertisement for his prodigious wares. And perhaps such an edition did appear, just without the Moseley imprimatur.

Moseley, a one-man publishing industry, may have reached an agreement with Benson, who had all but retired from publishing—he has a single entry after 1654 in the register—to put the book back in print (or to sell unsold stock). There is no evidence that Benson ever surrendered his own copyright to Moseley. But it may be that no “Moseley” edition ever appeared. After all, Moseley was the same publisher who just a few months earlier had registered a play called The History of Cardenio, “by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare,” for publication. There is solid contemporary evidence that such a play once existed, but it singularly failed to appear in print, either from Moseley or any other seventeenth-century publisher. It remains one of the more enticing entries in that remarkable document, the Stationers’ Register.

Either way, by the time of the Restoration, Benson had left his ballads and books behind. The lack of any entry for a transfer of rights in Poems, and the nonappearance of further editions throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, suggests that Benson, like Thorpe, had learned the hard way that these private poems, even when anthologized, struggled to strike a chord with Caroline sensibilities. His one “crime” against their composer—“arranging” the material in such a way as to render any sense of an underlying story moot—probably did the poet a favor. Sparing the sonnets further scandal would allow the first shoots of bardolatry to take root before anyone dared to reconstruct their original sequence.