Shakespeare's sugred Sonnets among his private friends.

Back yet again plowing through the vast literature relating to the sonnets of Shakespeare I am introduced to a fine (relatively) new paper “Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare's Sonnets” by Gary Taylor. “Alone among Shakespeare's works,” he informs us,

the sonnets were not intended for immediate publication or public performance, but for private circulation. In 1598 Francis Meres praised Shakespeare's "sugred sonnets among his priuate friends". Consequently, we know that some sonnets circulated in manuscript at least eleven years before the Quarto edition of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS was published in 1609. No autograph manuscripts have yet been found, but a number of transcripts from the first half of the seventeenth century survive.¹

His Meres quote comes from the pamphlet Palladis Tamia.²

As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.

Taylor's observation leads me back to an old and interesting question. One I have not heard mentioned much — or not at all.

It is also the data provided by Taylor that gives us our first bit of context.

ignoring temporarily the texts of [Sonnet 2], only three sonnets survive in manuscripts which are not demonstrably derivative of the printed texts: Sonnets 8 (B.L. Add. MS. 15226), 106 (Pierpont Morgan MA 1057 and Rosenbach 1083116) and 128 (Bodleian, Rawl. poet. 152). In total, then, [counting the 13 texts of Sonnet 2] we possess 16 texts of individual sonnets which may be independent of the printed tradition, and these 16 texts occur in 16 different miscellanies. This pattern of distribution would be difficult to explain if the sonnets had circulated in manuscript as a sequence; it strongly suggests, instead, that they circulated as individual poems.³

Those who have read my studies on the subject know that I do not recognize the 1609 sonnets as a sequence at all. They were collected together (likely by the “begetter”) and arranged into topic groupings by the “begetter” or the publisher.

None of this revives my old question, though. That question is “Why are there no surviving manuscript copies before the early years of the 17^th century?” If they circulated among his private friends, how is it that none of the apparently numerous manuscript pages inferred by Meres seem to have survived? I do not mean to imply anything suspicious by the question.

I do not understand Meres' information to have been anything more than literary gossip that he heard at third-hand and passed along. Person or persons, then, told Meres, no later than 1598 (and likely earlier), that manuscript copies of Shakespeare's sonnets were shared among his private friends. We are not aware that any of the copies survive. All that do survive are dated after Meres' PT.

As was always the case in manuscript copies, each surviving copy is at least slightly different than the others. Each provides us a variant. Those variants are among the finest clues a literary detective might have. No such clues have been found from before Meres' informed us of their existence.

Now, we do not know that any of Meres' referenced sonnets appeared some 11 years later in the 1609 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. But it is difficult to believe that somehow, from all of (1) the 1609 sonnets, (2) the sonnets embedded in the plays, and (3) those pirated into The Passionate Pilgrim (1598) only those had been passed around that are extant in 17^th century private collections. It is equally difficult to believe that some “begetter” managed to collect all of the Shakespeare sonnets that existed in all the private manuscript collections in England.

What does seem safe to say is that the sonnets of 1609 came from the final drafts held by Edward de Vere/Shakespeare upon his death and/or were gathered by polling his friends for copies of whatever of his sonnets they might possess. The manuscript sonnets extant in 17^th century private collections fall under one or both of two categories. (1) They are later copies taken from earlier drafts of the sonnets that appeared in the 1609 publication; and/or (2) they are imperfect copies that include transcription errors.

Notably, the manuscript drafts extant in 17^th century private collections include titles. We do not know whether the Vere / Shakespeare copies included titles. It seems unlikely that the majority did. The titles of the Sonnet 2 manuscripts, however, show a definite pattern. The possessors understood the poem to have been written to encourage an unnamed noble woman to bring forth an heir.

The reader may be aware that I have identified Edward de Vere, in my Shakespeare in 1573⁴, as the young courtier who wrote the poems (many Shakespearean sonnets) under the moniker Fortunatus Infoelix (F.I.) in the 1573 anthology An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers. The anthology contains numerous references to its poems having been passed around among the courtiers and gathered into a manuscript book prior to publication. The poems generally have simple descriptive titles such as an editor might supply. I am not aware that any of the manuscript versions of any of the poems or plays has survived either.

In my Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet⁵ I have identified three more in the anthology section of Syr P.S. His Astrophel and Stella. Wherein the excellence of sweete poesie is concluded. To the end of which are added, sundry other rare sonnets of divers noble men and gentlemen (1591). Here the clear implication is that Thomas Nashe, who wrote the introduction to the book, published without permission quite a number of the manuscript poems he possessed from exchanges with his drinking buddies Samuel Daniel, Edward de Vere and others, some which were attributed elsewhere to Vere and some which were anonymous Shakespearean sonnets exactly matching the traits of Shakespeare and work then underway on Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis. None of the poems has a title.

Primarily, the canonical sonnets of Shakespeare will provide our text in the essays ahead. The poems of F.I., and the anonymous sonneteer will come into play from time to time as appropriate.

1 Taylor Gary. “Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare's Sonnets”. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. Volume 68: Issue 1 (1985). 210- 245.

2 Meres, Francis. Palladis Tamia. Elizabethan Critical Essays (Gregory Smith ed., 1904). 308-324@317.

3 Taylor, 225.

4 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14

5 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet (or three, actually)(2015). https://www.amazon.com/Discovered-Shakespeare-Sonnet-three-actually/dp/1514750406/

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
• Robert Greene and the Construction Shakespeare Never Used. August 9, 2022. 'Our first foray “staring intently into” the texts of Robert Greene has noted that his work utilized far fewer feminine endings than Shakespeare’s.'

• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.