The Scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets | Margareta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania
Margareta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania
Of all the many defences against the scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets—Platonism, for example, or the Renaissance ideal of friendship—John Benson's is undoubtedly the most radical. In order to cover up the fact that the first 126 of the Sonnets were written to a male, Benson in his 1640 Poems: Written by Wil Shakespeare. Gent. changed masculine pronouns to feminine and introduced titles which directed sonnets to the young man to a mistress. By these simple editorial interventions, he succeeded in converting a shameful homosexual love to an acceptable heterosexual one, a conversion reproduced in the numerous reprintings of the 1640 Poems up through the eighteenth century. The source for this account is Hyder E. Rollins's authoritative 1944 variorum Sonnets, the first edition to detail Benson's pronominal changes and titular insertions.1 Subsequent editions have reproduced his...
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