Browse Items (78 total)

Preface: Cibber’s Preface discusses his method of distinguishing his work from Shakespeare’s, allowing us to see the mix of writers at a glance.
Page 1: The first act of Cibber’s adaptation concerns Henry VI – already murdered in Shakespeare’s…

Advertisement

Excerpt from Act 5, Scenes 5-6. The italics indicate that this material was not part of the performance. They produce a reading experience focused on performance as the purpose of the text even as the text includes additional materials – perhaps like…

In reprinting sonnet 108, Benson changes the text of the poem, replacing the poem’s address to the beloved as “sweet boy” with address to a “sweet-love,” removing the reference to a male beloved.

“Selfe flattery of her beautie”: Benson’s headings sometimes imply that the poem’s object of desire is female, when generally scholars assume that the bulk of the sonnets are addressed to a male beloved. Here Benson combines sonnets 115-117 under…

By 1880, photolithography was able to convey the feel of the original pages of the book, while adding features that frame a reader’s interpretive encounter with the text, such as the line numbering here.

Following Malone’s interpretation, the 19th century was eager to read the Sonnets for evidence of Shakespeare’s intimate personal life. The introduction to the facsimile volume assumes that the “Dark Lady,” as the sonnet mistress became known, was a…

"The Picture of True Love" : Benson rearranged the order of the poems in the 1609 Sonnets volume, arranging sonnets under thematic headings that presented them as a general lyric description of love and inhibited readings integrating the poems as a…

"A Request to his Scornefull Love" : Benson’s headers were always in the third person. Here Benson groups Sonnets 88-91 into a single unbroken lyric.

Pages 236-237: Ophelia’s new friend at court, Thyra, reveals her attraction to and misunderstanding of the same lord who seduced and abandoned Jutha. Cowden Clark represents the unreliability and danger of male attention in Ophelia’s world.