Shakespeare and Elizabethan England in Special Collections: Poems

Published by John Benson in 1640, this edition omits seven of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and arranges them in a different order from the 1609 edition. It also includes the longer poems, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (1609), ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ (1601) and others selected from The Passionate Pilgrim anthology (1599). This edition is controversial because Benson alters many of the poems. For some reason, Benson merged several of the sonnets into longer poems. He also changed masculine pronouns to feminine.