John Benson (publisher) - Shakespeare's Poems, 1640

Shakespeare's Poems, 1640

Benson entered his edition of Shakespeare's poems in the Stationers' Register on 4 November 1639. (Since Thomas Thorpe, the original publisher of the Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, had died c. 1635, his copyright to the material was likely considered lapsed.) The volume was published in 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's portrait of Shakespeare — a reduced and reversed version of Martin Droeshout's engraving from 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 corrupt 1612 edition), plus A Lover's Complaint, The Phoenix and the Turtle, Milton's poem to Shakespeare from the Second Folio, poems by Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Robert Herrick and others, and miscellaneous pieces.

Thomas Cotes, Benson's printer for the Poems, also printed the Shakespeare Second Folio (1632), and the first quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen (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."