A literary historical point could be made: although we are unlikely to 
know definitively what Shakespeare's role was in putting the sonnets 
into the shape they now have, we do know that Thorpe's 1609 quarto is 
the book that entered literary history and has, for all these years, 
been assimilated by it.  With that I venture a formal argument that Q is 
a very good book, that the poems are clearly ordered in a way that 
yields narrative, that "The Lover's Complaint" makes good sense where it 
is (as Duncan-Jones and others have argued) and that the sonnets--as we 
might read them in Q--track very nicely with preoccupations we find in 
the plays (e. g. 20 and Twelfth Night, 94 and Measure for Measure, 138 
and just about every everything he ever writ.)  So, even, if we were to 
add, "as compiled by J. Thorpe" to the author line, we'd still have a book.

Marshall Grossman
Professor
Department of English
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20895

301-405-9651
[log in to unmask]



[log in to unmask] wrote:
> I don't disagree--although I do like editions that give one choices, even
> perplexities. Luckily with Shakespeare we have a range. And then there's
> EEBO, even though that, as has been said--and by Spenserians--isn't all
> that solid. That is why I'm happy, even if it does seem a bit
> intellectually wimpish, to have "The Dolefull Lay" in both Spenser's
> shorter poems ed. Oram and Mary Sidney's poems ec. Hannay et al. But
> Colin's warning certainly makes sense. Anne.
>
>
>   
>> A brief PS: there are a couple of things on this (possibly more than this,
>> but these are what fall to hand): A. Kent Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, E. A.
>> Nicholson, 'Shakespeare's Rare Words: "Lover's Complaint", Cymbeline, and
>> Sonnets', NQ 232 (1987), 219-24; MacD. P. Jackson, 'Echoes of Spenser's
>> Prothalamion as evidence against an Early Date for Shakespeare's A Lover's
>> Complaint', NQ 235 (1990), 180-2.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm also on the whole happier to make a fetish of a book than an author.
>> But
>> they might be two perversions which are most healthily indulged together,
>> in
>> a mildly antithetical relationship. That is, if you find yourself thinking
>> that the 1609 volume physically is a book which looks like and follows the
>> shape of Daniel's Delia and resembles the Amoretti and so on; and if you
>> go
>> on to think well then why not read it like that, as a kind of
>> bibliographical testament to the Delian/Spenserian sequence, then I think
>> you're in danger of neglecting the sheer messiness of the world. (Sorry,
>> Anne; I don't mean you by those pronouns). Which is why it might be quite
>> a
>> good thing to wonder who might have made it like that, and to wonder
>> whether
>> Shakespeare went back to Spenser at around the same time he was
>> experimenting with dramatising Lodge and Greene's prose; and that might
>> lead
>> you to think, well if he didn't write A Lover's Complaint, should we be
>> quite so spellbound by the engagingly material presence of the poem in the
>> book? Isn't that a way of cutting short rather than solving a problem? I
>> suppose I like it best when my fetishes fight and create perplexity (don't
>> tell my wife; she thinks I'm quite normal).
>>
>>
>>
>> Colin Burrow
>>
>> Senior Research Fellow
>>
>> All Souls College
>>
>> High Street
>>
>> Oxford OX1 4AL
>>
>> 01865 279341 (direct) 01865 279379 (Lodge)
>>
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>>   _____
>>
>> From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> On Behalf Of anne prescott
>> Sent: 07 June 2007 16:03
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Amoretti and Sonnets
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm swamped by SCSC business at the moment and don't have time to check
>> this, but I recall something by Kent Hieatt on verbal overlaps between the
>> Lover's Complaint and Sonnets? In any case, two quick thoughts: first,
>> questions of authorship aside, for those of us interested in the material
>> history of the book (and with at least a touch of the postmodern
>> skepticism
>> about capital A authorship) it's interesting to see 1609 *Sonnets* follow
>> the pattern you find in Lodge, Spenser, Fletcher, Daniel and others in
>> which
>> you get a sonnet sequence, often something fluffy--anacreontics, final
>> sonnets about Cupid, whatever--and then a long poem. It's for that reason
>> that I prefer editions that include the Complaint. If I were any more
>> postmodern I'd say something about fetishizing authorship, but that
>> wouldn't
>> be, um, me.
>>
>>      Second, and back to Spenser and sensuality, I do recommend Roger
>> Kuin's
>> book *Chamber Music* in this regard--unusual in form, even to the point of
>> including "Will" as a character in one chapter, but/and wise on the matter
>> of desire and sonnets.  Anne P.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jun 6, 2007, at 6:56 PM, Colin Burrow wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Well yes and no. There's also a growing body of work which suggests that
>> Katherine Duncan-Jones may present rather too positive a view of Thorpe's
>> career, and that the 1609 volume gives off a variety of bibliographical
>> cues, not all of which suggest that it was 'authorized'. And if one gave
>> credence to Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint', and John
>> Davies of Hereford(Cambridge, 2007) then one might end up wondering how
>> that
>> strange and strangely Spenserian (off topic, me?) poem came to be printed
>> along with the Sonnets. The RSC editors take his arguments seriously
>> enough
>> to leave A Lover's Complaint out of their printed volume. Where does that
>> leave our sense of the 1609 volume, or for that matter the relationship
>> between Spenser and Shakespeare, I wonder?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Colin Burrow
>>
>> Senior Research Fellow
>>
>> All Souls College
>>
>> High Street
>>
>> Oxford OX1 4AL
>>
>> 01865 279341 (direct) 01865 279379 (Lodge)
>>
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>>   _____
>>
>> From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> On Behalf Of Peter C. Herman
>> Sent: 06 June 2007 17:35
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Amoretti and Sonnets
>>
>>
>>
>> since we have no knowledge of how far Shakespeare planned or approved the
>> form in which his poems found their way into print.
>>
>>
>> This oint was mentioned earlier, but given Charlie's statement above, I
>> thought it might bear repeating: there's now a substantial body of
>> scholarship arguing that Shakespeare was much more involved with the
>> publication of the Sonnets than previously assumed, and there is a
>> corollary
>> point: that Shakespeare wrote, or revised, the Sonnets close to their
>> publication, and not earlier in his career. See, for example, these two
>> articles:
>>
>> Duncan-Jones, Katherine. "Was the 1609 Shake-Speares Sonnets Really
>> Unauthorized?"
>> Review of English Studies n.s. 34 (1983): 151-71.
>>
>> Hieatt, A. Kent, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott." "When did
>> Shakespeare
>> Write Sonnets 1609?" Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 69-109.
>>
>> For the Sonnets generally, see also James Schiffer's 2000 anthology,
>> Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays.
>>
>> pch
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> At level of the sequence, the appearance of realism may therefore be
>> partly
>> accidental - with the messiness (for want of a better word) of real
>> subjective experience being 'imitated' not through any authorial intention
>> but rather as a consequence of the real-word messiness of the
>> circumstances
>> of publication.
>>
>> Charlie
>>
>> --
>> Website:  <http://www.charlesbutler.co.uk> www.charlesbutler.co.uk
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>