Proem Shakespeare’s “Plaies and Poems”

In 1640, the publisher John Benson presents to his English reading public a Shakespeare who is now largely lost to us: the national author of poems and plays. By printing his modest octavo edition of the Poems: Written By Wil. Shake-speare. Gent., Benson curiously aims to complement the 1623 printing venture of Shakespeare’s theatre colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who had presented Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies in their monumental First Folio. Thus, in his own Dedicatory Epistle “To the Reader,” Benson remarks that he presents “some excellent and sweetly composed Poems,” which “had not the fortune by reason of their Infancie in his death, to have the due accommodation of proportionable glory, with the rest of his everliving Workes” (^∗2^r). Indeed, as recent scholarship demonstrates, Benson boldly prints his octavo Poems on the model of Heminge and Condell’s Folio Plays.¹

   Not simply does Benson’s volume share its printer, Thomas Cotes, with the 1632 Folio, but both editions begin with an identical format: an engraved portrait of the author; a dedicatory epistle “To the Reader”; and a set of commendatory verses, with Leonard Digges contributing an important celebratory poem to both volumes. Benson’s engraving by William Marshall even derives from the famous Martin Droeshout engraving in the First Folio, and six of the eight lines beneath Benson’s engraving are borrowed from Ben Jonson’s famed memorial poem to Shakespeare in that volume. Accordingly, Benson takes his publishing goal from Heminge and Condell. They aim to “keepe the memory of such worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive” (Dedicatory Epistle to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, reprinted in Riverside, 94), while he aims “to be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved Author” (“To the Reader,” ^∗2^v). In effect, what Heminge and Condell had done for the plays, Benson does for the poems. But the purpose of his edition is more comprehensive: to preserve William Shakespeare, Gentleman, to posterity as a national poet-playwright.²

   This book begins with Benson because it argues that he, not Heminge and Condell, most accurately imprints Shakespeare as an early modern author. In fact, while Benson is careful to print the poems within the remembrance of the plays, Heminge and Condell forget the poems altogether. Nowhere is this paradigm of memory and forgetting clearer than in the two commendatory verses by Digges. In Benson’s edition, Digges presents Shakespeare as the author of “Plaies and Poems” (^∗3^v), but in Heminge and Condell’s volume he presents Shakespeare as the author from the “Stage” who wrote such plays as Romeo and Juliet.³ By carefully matching his volume with the First Folio, Benson completes the historical preservation of Shakespearean authorship that Heminge and Condell had left incomplete, and that in large part because of their monumental success would become effaced during the ensuing centuries. The story of Shakespeare’s original practice as an English and European author of poems and plays in print, and then the gradual erasure of this practice, forms the primary subject of this book.

   Paradoxically, Benson had something to do with this erasure, for he badly botches the job. Measured beside the monumental folio of the plays, how could his slender octavo of the poems hold a plea? But his failure is not merely one of textual scale; it includes failures of completion and the editorial principles of printing content. For starters, Benson does not print all of the poems; he excludes Shakespeare’s most popular works during the period, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. But he also disrupts the original publications of the poems he does print. Most infamously, he rearranges the sonnets from the 1609 quarto; he supplies titles to some of the poems in the young-man sequence so that they address a mistress; and he splices in the twenty-nine poems from the 1612 edition of William Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim, which spuriously includes Shakespeare’s name on one version of its title page while including poems by other authors. Thus the Poems: Written By Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. is really a volume by more than one gentleman-poet. Not merely in size, but in authenticity the octavo Poems cannot compete with the folio Plays.

   It is true that “For almost 150 years, the matching formats coupled together the folio and octavo volumes, the drama and the poetry, to comprise Shakespeare’s complete works” (De Grazia, Verbatim, 168). Nonetheless, in the emergent conversation about Shakespeare as the “national poet,” his poems lose their voice by the latter half of the seventeenth century, as readers, authors, and critics turn to the plays – and turn the plays into what John Dryden memorably calls “Dramatick Poesie” (reprinted in B. Vickers, ed. Critical Heritage, 1: 136), as if in mourning over an unnamed loss that Benson for one seems rightly to have discerned. As The Shakspere Allusion-Book makes clear, for the next century-and-a-half readers leave little record of their interest in Shakespeare’s “poems” as Benson preserves them.⁴ Not simply Nicholas Rowe’s pioneering edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1709, which first includes Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece along with the plays, but up to the end of the eighteenth century, when Edmund Malone inherits the project, editions rely on Benson’s 1640 version of the poems.⁵ In his 1780 supplement to the Johnson–Steevens edition of 1778, Malone returns to the original 1609 quarto of Shake-speares Sonnets for both the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, and then in his own 1790 Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare he includes the quarto version in his final volume (see Figure 1). Even so, in his disciplined attempt to print an author he believes authentic, Malone takes considerable license with The Passionate Pilgrim in particular (chapter 5), and even more importantly, he monumentalizes an editorial practice that prevails today: the burying of the “Poems” at the back of an edition of the “Works” (chapter 2). In other words, Benson’s attempt to make Shakespeare a national poet-playwright is paradoxically instrumental in the un-making of this very author.

   Yet by taking the cue of Benson’s intent (rather than his execution), the present book returns to the years when “Shakespeare” was active in print as both a poet and a playwright, 1593–1612, to discover as accurately as possible the conditions under which he composes both his poems and his plays and in which his poems and (some of his) plays are in turn printed by others. The book concentrates on the poems, but unlike previous studies of this topic, it discusses all of the poems as a corpus in its own right, and does so not by severing the poems from the plays, but precisely by embedding them within Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, actor, and shareholder in a theatre company.⁶ The effect, I hope, is to form a more complex, accurate, and complete view of Shakespearean authorship than recent criticism allows.

   Such a view does not reduce Shakespeare’s production of poetry to an “interlude” in his theatrical career. To the contrary, it counters this model by trying to explain the strange and curious mixture of poems and plays throughout his career, from the early 1590s into the second decade of the seventeenth century. It does so by recalling a neglected historical fact: an author’s combination of these two literary forms within a single career is fundamentally a sixteenth-century phenomenon (chapter 1). Shakespeare participates in this phenomenon, and changes the institution of authorship forever.

   Furthermore, Shakespeare’s intertwined authorship of poems and plays, throughout his career, is not static but dynamic. His authorship of poems (like that of his plays) changes over time, and in three print installments. The first occurs near the beginning of his career, during the early 1590s, when he publishes his first poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), complete with signed dedicatory epistles from author to patron, the earl of Southampton. The second installment occurs during the mid-point of his career, when others publish volumes of poems in collaboration with poems by Shakespeare: Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim (1599, 1st and 2nd editions), which includes Shakespeare’s name on the title page but which prints only five poems known to be by him, leaving fifteen thought to be by other hands; and Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr, which prints “The Phoenix and Turtle” as a commissioned poem, along with poems by Jonson, John Marston, George Chapman, the anonymous “Ignoto,” and Chester himself. And the third installment occurs toward the end of Shakespeare’s career, when the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint appear together in the 1609 quarto – whether authorized by the author or not, we are still debating.

Figure 1. Benson to Malone. The publication of Shakespeare’s poems and plays. The figure shows the complex evolution of the printing of Shakespeare’s poems alongside his plays. (For the purpose of economy, the lists of plays are not included.) The right-hand column charts the distinction between the printing of Benson’s poems, especially the Sonnets, and the printing of Shakespeare’s poems from the earliest editions, especially the 1609 Sonnets. Most importantly, perhaps, the figure charts the way in which the printing solely of Shakespeare’s plays recurrently produced a response volume on the poems, with Benson responding to Heminge and Condell, both Lintott and Curll-Gildon to Rowe, Sewell to Pope, and perhaps Evans to Capell, until Steevens, Bell, and Malone individually began to combine plays and poems in a single edition (boldface).

   While the first part of the book introduces the historical and critical contexts for viewing Shakespeare as England’s great national poet-playwright, the remaining three parts trace the dynamics of this tripartite printing of Shakespeare as an author of poems within his theatrical career. Part on Venus and Lucrece shows Shakespeare as a self-conscious print poet presenting himself as such, competing with colleagues like Spenser (and Marlowe) for readership and for national authority. Part shows a quite different author, as both Jaggard in The Passionate Pilgrim and Chester in Love’s Martyr print Shakespeare in mutually appropriating ways yet for quite different purposes. Part looks at the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint to show how the 1609 quarto imprints the very divide between the self-conscious print poet and the manuscript poet who is brought into print by others. Shakespeare’s poems are thus an anomaly; his career as a poet, a genuine mystery. That makes it hard to capture; yet the effort is necessary, if we are to understand his authorship more fully within the available evidence.

   Formalizing this dynamic view of Shakespeare as an author of poems, the book suggests that he himself represents a struggle over authorship throughout his career. Past criticism tends to understand this struggle as one between print and manuscript, but I concentrate on a slightly different opposition, neglected in modern criticism: Shakespeare also labors between a literary career in printed poetry and a professional career in staged theatre.⁷ Not merely is Shakespeare originally a national poet-playwright, but his works sustain a deep reflection on the historical predicament of performing such a new role for the English author. He does so both in his poems and in his plays, from the beginning of his career to the end.

   A full analysis of this topic requires more than a single monograph, so the present book is the first of two (planned) volumes. The first volume, presented here, introduces the general argument and specifies it primarily through the poems. The second will summarize the argument and specify it primarily through the plays. Even so, the first volume seeks to place the poems within the specific context of Shakespeare’s work in the theatre, and it stands as a full argument. Thus, chapters 1 and 2, which aim to outline that argument, foreground the plays, while the “Play Scenes” introducing Parts two, three, and four join the Epilogue in recalling the plays Shakespeare was working on during the phases of his print career as a poet and during the final phase, after 1609 and before he retires. To take just a single example: the play scene to Part situates The Rape of Lucrece within the context of another 1594 publication, Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, which refers several times to the historical (legendary) story of Lucrece and the foundation of the Roman Republic, while also sharing with the poem a fixation on Philomela, the arch-Ovidian myth of the raped woman who is also an author. Moreover, the commentaries on the poems in each of chapters 3–8 formalize this procedure by emphasizing the very compound of poetry and theatre in the discourse of the poems themselves – the first study to do so. Such a strategy allows for a comprehensive examination of the collected corpus of Shakespeare’s poems but embeds it securely within Shakespeare’s work for the stage.⁸

   Shakespeare processes his self-reflection on the problem of being a new English poet-playwright by representing a dialogue between two oppositional aesthetics, which are arguably the two dominant aesthetics of the day. The first I call Spenserian, because it so closely models the aesthetics of the leading Elizabethan print poet, Edmund Spenser, who advertised himself as England’s Virgil (and was advertised as such by others). The second I call Marlovian, because it so closely models the aesthetics of England’s first major poet-playwright, Christopher Marlowe, who vigorously counters Spenser’s Virgilian program of pastoral and epic with his own Ovidian cursus of amorous poems, poems in the epic register, and stage tragedy.⁹ Long after Marlowe and Spenser are dead (1593 and 1599, respectively), Shakespeare is haunted by their ghostly inventions. Not simply does he carry on a dialogue with the two leading authors of his day, even boldly bringing the mighty opposites face to face: powerfully, he forges his unique version of early modern authorship out of the ashes of their titanic collision.¹⁰ As such, the book attempts to place Shakespeare’s poems and plays within a historical literary context. In addition to Marlowe and Spenser, this context foregrounds Ovid and Virgil, Lucan and Petrarch, but it also attempts to lend interest to such authors as Dante and Chaucer, Tasso and Cervantes, Daniel and Jonson.

   While Shakespeare’s poems and plays both rehearse a professional dialogue between a Spenserian and a Marlovian aesthetics in order to step decisively beyond both, we may note a complicating feature: Shakespeare may have contributed to his own effacement as an early modern poet-playwright. In at least one poem (“The Phoenix and Turtle”) and one play (Titus Andronicus), he rehearses the historic transition from a culture of print poetry to one of staged theatre. Shakespeare is an English poet-playwright who appears willing, as Jonson does not, to privilege theatre over poetry. In other words, Benson’s attempt to preserve the poems conjoined with the plays is both a belated register and a final reversal of Shakespeare’s self-conscious version of the conjunction itself.

   There are, however, further complications. Much of the energy of the book forms to show that Shakespeare’s works sustain a deep interest not merely in theatre but in poetry. Periodically, the author reveals that he also became concerned to rehearse the absolute dependence of theatre on poetry – and not simply early in a play such as Love’s Labor’s Lost but late in a play such as The Tempest.

   Throughout, the book focuses on Shakespeare’s representation of a figure I call the poet-playwright – the so-called governor figure who so often directs the action in a Shakespearean fiction. While most work on this figure emphasizes his or her theatrical direction, I seek to show that more often than not the governor combines “poetical” with “theatrical” direction – the use of both page and stage, book and theatre, song and play, to bring about the denouement – in comedy, tragedy, history, and “romance” alike, even in the narrative poems, the Sonnets, and a lyric such as “The Phoenix and Turtle.”¹¹ Thus, Shakespeare’s poems and plays record a sustained conversation not merely on theatre but also on the art of poetry, and often the works conjoin a discourse of poetry and theatre in engaging and historically important ways. By listening in on this conversation, we can become attuned to a particular Shakespearean language of authorship that we might not have known existed, yet right where we are used to looking.

   By titling the study Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, I wish to alert readers to my primary project: the full, original, and compound form of Shakespearean authorship in a national setting. For such a project, the national setting is manifested by a nascent print culture that allows for individual agency and complicates it. In particular, the word “national” operates in two directions simultaneously: it picks up the major critical term for classifying the construction of Shakespeare as an author in centuries subsequent to his own (he became the “national poet”); and it suggests that he himself self-consciously wrote the nation in both his poems and plays, through a combined discourse of poetry and theatre, and thereby that he participates in his own historical making.

   Underlying the enclosed study of Shakespeare’s poems as a corpus is another paradox: his are fundamentally “scattered poems.” The phrase recalls Petrarch’s scattered rhymes and their printing in the Rime sparse. In turn, this Petrarchism recalls an Ovidian genealogy of authorship, since for Petrarch, as for Shakespeare and other Elizabethans and Jacobeans,

Figure 2. Frontispiece to Poems: Written By Wil. Shake-speare. Gent., edited by John Benson (London, 1640).

Ovid is the great classical author of scattering, dispersal, fluidity, and metamorphosis, epitomized in Ovid’s originary myth of authorship, Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, with her “scattred haire” (line 664).¹² But as mention of this myth implies, the phrase also refers to the unfortunate dismemberment of the Shakespearean poetic corpus in recent criticism, as well as our strange need to detach these worthy limbs from the monumental dramatic corpus. In fact, Petrarch derived his Ovidian title most directly from Dante, who writes at the very end of the Divine Comedy, “In its profundity I saw – ingathered / and bound by love into one single volume– / what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered” (Paradiso, 33.85–87). If for Dante God’s love is scattered unbound throughout the cosmos but finally bound in the volume of the apocalyptic yellow rose of paradise, for Petrarch the term scattering (writes Robert M. Durling, ed., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems) “expresses the intensely self-critical awareness that all integration of selves and texts is relative, temporary, threatened” (26). Finally, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright hopes for a twenty-first century re-collection of the entire Shakespearean body in its original historic shape. Nowhere, perhaps, is this body illustrated more palpably than in Benson’s 1640 rehearsal of the 1623 portrait itself, where Marshall’s once handless Droeshout author of the plays now dramatically holds the collected leaves of the laureate poet (Figure 2).