Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Original-Spelling Text

Paul Hammond, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Original-Spelling Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 504pp. ISBN 978 0 1996 4207 6As editor of the original 1609 edition of Shakespeare's poems, Paul Hammond, a distinguished scholar in the field of early modern studies, tackles head on the crucial question of how to update early modern texts for the twenty-first century reader. Balancing ease of access against fidelity to the original work is a hazardous enterprise, and consonant with the intricacies of translation. Indeed, it could be argued that any current edition of a work published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is in essence a translation. For example, changes in publishing frequently necessitate the modernisation of spelling, standardisation of typography, and amendments to pagination. And that is not including the natural evolution in language that occurs over generations. Thus two editions of the same work, if separated by nearly five centuries, are often radically different when set side by side. A number of issues then arise: does the editor attempt fidelity to form by direct translation, regardless of over-complication and abstruseness? Or do they attempt to project their own interpretation of meaning while ignoring form and structure, key constituents of language in general, and lyrical mediums in particular? Famously, Jorge Luis Borges contrasted such paradoxes with the problems of 'direct writing' observing with typical eloquence that '[n]o problem is as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by translation'.1Borges goes on: 'To assume that a recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draftnine is necessarily inferior to draftH - for there can be only drafts'.2 This warning against qualitative comparison suggests the reader consider not fidelity or 'accuracy' but rather what the new edition or translation does with the original work. And by those standards, Hammond's treatment of Shakespeare's poetry is a triumph of editing, producing an invaluable text both for the first-time reader of these extraordinary poems, and also for the expert. Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text is evidently not a direct reproduction of the book published by Thomas Thorpe, printed by George Eld and sold by William Aspley in the first decade of the seventeenth century. However, containing a vast array of substantial and substantive editorial apparatus, it serves as not only a new edition of the poems, but also an introduction to the world of early seventeenth century English sonnet poetry, Renaissance literary rhetoric and the complex menage a trois of the Bard, his Boy and his Mistresse.An extensive introduction serves initially to contextualize the Sonnets within the readership, reading practices and poetic tradition of the late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth centuries. Thus, Hammond sets out the publishing history of the poems both in Shakespeare's lifetime and after his death, and also discusses some of the key debates around the publication of the 1609 edition. Touching upon the question as to whether Shakespeare participated actively in Thorpe's edition, Hammond convincingly argues that the high status of the printer and publisher suggests publication was not a 'pirated or surreptitious affair' (p. 11), even if the misprints suggest that 'Shakespeare is unlikely to have proofread the volume' (p. 12).In addition to this practical history of the text, the editor also provides some useful literary background, emphasising the relationship of Shakespeare' Sonnets to the developing late sixteenth-century conventions of the sonnet sequence. This tradition, Hammond informs us, found its most accomplished English exponents in the works of Philip Sidney (Astrophil and Stella), Samuel Daniel (Delia), Michael Drayton (Idea) and Edmund Spenser (Amoretti), as the sonnet form, reflecting the influence on Renaissance poetry of Petrach's Canonzieri, represented the 'preferred medium for reflections on love' (p. …