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By Root 19909 0

poems ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’—were published with his sanction and co-operation. These poems were the first specimens of his work to appear in print, and they passed in his lifetime through a greater number of editions than any of his plays. At the time of his death in 1616 there had been printed in quarto seven editions of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ (1593, 1594, 1596, 1599, 1600, and two in 1602), and five editions of his ‘Lucrece’ (1594, 1598, 1600, 1607, 1616). There was only one lifetime edition of the ‘Sonnets,’ Thorpe’s surreptitious venture of 1609; but three editions were issued of the piratical ‘Passionate Pilgrim,’ which was fraudulently assigned to Shakespeare by the publisher William Jaggard, although it contained only a few occasional poems by him (1599, 1600 no copy known, and 1612).

Posthumous quartos of the poems.

Of posthumous editions in quarto of the two narrative poems in the seventeenth century, there were two of ‘Lucrece’—viz. in 1624 (‘the sixth edition’) and in 1655 (with John Quarles’s ‘Banishment of Tarquin’)—and there were as many as six editions of ‘Venus’ (1617, 1620, 1627, two in 1630, and 1636), making thirteen editions in all in forty-three years. No later editions of these two poems were issued in the seventeenth century. They were next reprinted together with ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ in 1707, and thenceforth they usually figured, with the addition of the ‘Sonnets,’ in collected editions of Shakespeare’s works.

The ‘Poems’ of 1640.

A so-called first collected edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ in 1640 (London, by T. Cotes for I. Benson) was mainly a reissue of the ‘Sonnets,’ but it omitted six (Nos. xviii., xix., xliii., lvi., lxxv., and lxxvi.) and it included the twenty poems of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim,’ with some other pieces by other authors. Marshall’s copy of the Droeshout engraving of 1623 formed the frontispiece. There were prefatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, as well as an address ‘to the reader’ signed with the initials of the publisher. There Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ were described as ‘serene, clear, and elegantly plain; such gentle strains as shall re-create and not perplex your brain. No intricate or cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect. Such as will raise your admiration to his praise.’ A chief point of interest in the volume of ‘Poems’ of 1640 is the fact that the ‘Sonnets’ were printed then in a different order from that which was followed in the volume of 1609. Thus the poem numbered lxvii. in the original edition opens the reissue, and what has been regarded as the crucial poem, beginning

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

which was in 1609 numbered cxliv., takes the thirty-second place in 1640. In most cases a more or less fanciful general title is placed in the second edition at the head of each sonnet, but in a few instances a single title serves for short sequences of two or three sonnets which are printed as independent poems continuously without spacing. The poems drawn from ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ are intermingled with the ‘Sonnets,’ together with extracts from Thomas Heywood’s ‘General History of Women,’ although no hint is given that they are not Shakespeare’s work. The edition concludes with three epitaphs on Shakespeare and a short section entitled ‘an addition of some excellent poems to those precedent by other Gentlemen.’ The volume is of great rarity. An exact reprint was published in 1885.

Quartos of the plays in the poet’s lifetime.

Of Shakespeare’s plays there were in print in 1616 only sixteen (all in quarto), or eighteen if we include the ‘Contention,’ the first draft of ‘2 Henry VI’ (1594 and 1600), and ‘The True Tragedy,’ the first draft of ‘3 Henry VI’ (1595 and 1600). These sixteen quartos were publishers’ ventures, and were undertaken without the co-operation of the author.

Two of the plays, published thus, reached five editions before 1616, viz. ‘Richard III’ (1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612) and ‘1 Henry IV’ (1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1615).

Three reached four editions, viz. ‘Richard II’ (1597, 1598, 1608 supplying the deposition