John Benson (publisher)
Encyclopedia
Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. All but two of the poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. Sonnets 138 and 144...
and miscellaneous poems of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
in 1640.
John Benson began his career as a stationer
Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers is one of the Livery Companies of the City of London. The Stationers' Company was founded in 1403; it received a Royal Charter in 1557...
in 1635; he maintained shops in Chancery Lane
Chancery Lane
Chancery Lane is the street which has been the western boundary of the City of London since 1994 having previously been divided between Westminster and Camden...
(from 1635 on) and St. Dunstan's Churchyard in Fleet Street
Fleet Street
Fleet Street is a street in central London, United Kingdom, named after the River Fleet, a stream that now flows underground. It was the home of the British press until the 1980s...
(1640 and after). In his publishing career, Benson generally concentrated on the lower end of the market for printed matter in his era; he "specialized in the publication of ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
s and broadsides
Broadside (printing)
A broadside is a large sheet of paper printed on one side only. Historically, broadsides were posters, announcing events or proclamations, or simply advertisements...
." Yet he published books too, like Joseph Rutter's The Shepherds' Holy-Day (1635); he issued Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
's Execration Against Vulcan in 1640.
Benson partnered with other stationers for some projects. He joined with fellow stationer John Waterson
John Waterson
John Waterson was a London publisher and bookseller of the Jacobean and Caroline eras; he published significant works in English Renaissance drama, including plays by William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, John Webster, and Philip Massinger.-Beginning:Waterson was the scion of a family of publishers:...
to publish the first quarto of Fletcher
John Fletcher (playwright)
John Fletcher was a Jacobean playwright. Following William Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men, he was among the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day; both during his lifetime and in the early Restoration, his fame rivalled Shakespeare's...
and Massinger's
Philip Massinger
Philip Massinger was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.-Early life:The son of Arthur Massinger or Messenger, he was baptized at St....
The Elder Brother
The Elder Brother
The Elder Brother is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Apparently dating from 1625, it may have been the last play Fletcher worked on before his August 1625 death.-Date:...
(1637). Benson and John Saywell issued Francis Quarles's Hosanna, or Divine poems on the Passion of Christ (1647); in 1651 Benson formed a partnership to print music books with John Playford. Their edition of John Hilton's Catch That Catch Can, a collection of "catches, rounds, and canons", appeared in 1652.
Shakespeare's Poems, 1640
Benson entered his edition of Shakespeare's poems in the Stationers' RegisterStationers' Register
The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England...
on November 4, 1639. (Since Thomas Thorpe
Thomas Thorpe
Thomas Thorpe was an English publisher, most famous for publishing Shakespeare's sonnets and several works by Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. His publication of the sonnets has long been controversial...
, the original publisher of the Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint
A Lover's Complaint
A Lover's Complaint is a narrative poem published as an appendix to the original edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. It is given the title 'A Lover's Complaint' in the book, which was published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609...
, had died c. 1635, his copyright to the material was likely considered lapsed.) The volume was published in octavo
Book size
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...
the following year. The title of the publication reads:
POEMS: VVRITTEN BY WIL. SHAKESSPEARE. Gent. Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by John Benson dwelling in St. Dunstans Church-yard. 1640.
The book opens with engraver William Marshall
William Marshall (illustrator)
William Marshall was a seventeenth century British engraver and illustrator, best known for his print depicting "Charles the Martyr", a symbolic portrayal of King Charles I of England as a Christian martyr.-Early career:...
's portrait of Shakespeare — a reduced and reversed version of Martin Droeshout's engraving
Droeshout portrait
The Droeshout portrait or Droeshout engraving is a portrait of William Shakepeare engraved by Martin Droeshout as the frontispiece for the title page of the First Folio collection of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623. It is one of only two portraits definitively identifiable as a depiction of...
from the First Folio
First Folio
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio....
. This is followed by Benson's preface "to the Reader", commendatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, and then the poems themselves. The edition combined most of Shakespeare's sonnets (numbers 18, 19, 43, 56, 75, and 76 are omitted), mingled with poems from The Passionate Pilgrim
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Passionate Pilgrim is an anthology of 20 poems that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are accepted by present-day scholars as authentically Shakespearean.-Editions:...
(the corrupt 1612 edition), plus A Lover's Complaint, The Phoenix and the Turtle
The Phoenix and the Turtle
The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love by William Shakespeare. It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. It has also been called "the first great published metaphysical poem". The title "The...
, Milton's
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
poem to Shakespeare from the Second Folio
Second Folio
Second Folio is the term applied to the 1632 edition of the works of William Shakespeare, following upon the First Folio of 1623.Much language was updated; there are almost 1,700 changes from the First Folio....
, poems by Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
, Francis Beaumont
Francis Beaumont
Francis Beaumont was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher....
, Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick (poet)
Robert Herrick was a 17th-century English poet.-Early life:Born in Cheapside, London, he was the seventh child and fourth son of Julia Stone and Nicholas Herrick, a prosperous goldsmith....
and others, and miscellaneous pieces.
Thomas Cotes
Thomas Cotes
Thomas Cotes was a London printer of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, best remembered for printing the Second Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1632.-Life and work:...
, Benson's printer for the Poems, also printed the Shakespeare Second Folio (1632), and the first quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy, first published in 1634 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Its plot derives from "The Knight's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales....
(1634).
Benson is notorious for rearranging the order of the sonnets into groups, which he presented as complete poems, for which he invented titles. He also changed the pronouns in several of the sonnets to create the impression that they were written to a woman.
The "derivative and unauthoritative character" of Benson's edition was not recognized until Shakespeare scholar Edmund Malone re-directed critics' attention to the original 1609 edition of the Sonnets; "for almost a century and a half Benson's mangled hodgepodge was an accepted repository of Shakespeare's lyric verse."
Use by Oxfordians
Proponents of Oxfordian theoryOxfordian theory
The Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship proposes that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford , wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. While a large majority of scholars reject all alternative candidates for authorship, popular...
consider it significant that the dedicatory poem by Ben Jonson was printed with question marks instead of exclamation marks, in particular the line "This shadow is renowned Shakespear's?" This is taken to imply a doubt that Shakespeare was the true author, or possibly an intentional hint to the reader. Orthodox scholars assert that question marks were commonly used interchangeably with exclamation marks at this time.