Page:Shakespeare's Sonnets (1923) Yale.djvu/101



The first mention of Shakespeare's sonnets occurs in a little book by Francis Meres entitled Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury, published in 1598: 'the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends.' 'Among his private friends' means not only that the sonnets were unpublished, but that they were composed for persons with whom he was in intimate relations. The obscurity of many of these poems certainly arises from the fact that they were written for friendly eyes; and accordingly they contain many allusions to persons and events which would be plain enough to Shakespeare's circle, but which would mean little or nothing to outsiders, even in the poet's day.

In The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, were published the first two of Shakespeare's sonnets to appear in print. They were Nos. 138 and 144. Their text differs in several lines from that printed in the first edition of the whole sonnet collection. This first edition, which the present volume follows, was a quarto published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. It contains a large number of obvious mistakes that ruin the sense; in several cases sonnets that plainly should follow each other are separated; and it is impossible to believe that Shakespeare prepared the text for publication.

This first quarto made no such impression as did Sidney's posthumous sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, published in 1591, and it was not until 1640 that a second edition of Shakespeare's sonnets appeared. This was published by John Benson under the title 'Poems written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent.';