{"id":"01KG6S6RTH4VVWJH3M1RVY2A7M","cid":"bafkreihpoumtvjvwzhuiin4ajoshvwmfdzxu2kusmoiybqxot2tcsbeudy","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":9918,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:48.293Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 8","source_file":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","start_line":9891,"text":"¹ Charles Gildon, the editor of the supplementary volume of 1710, whose work was freely appropriated by Dr. Sewell, the editor of the supplementary volume of 1725, denied that any of Shakespeare’s poems were sent to press before 1640, and refuted doubts of their authenticity on internal evidence only. Of the sonnets or ‘Epigrams’, as he calls them, he remarks: ‘There is a wonderful smoothness in many of them that makes the Blood dance to its numbers’ (p. 463).\n\nH 2\n\n<!-- [Page 471](arke:01KG6QHPTS4QA2121YARCG9EHV) -->\n60\nSONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE\n\nsonnets was that ‘the consideration’ that they made their appearance with Shakespeare’s name, and in his lifetime, ‘seemed to be no slender proof of their authenticity’. Of their literary value, Steevens announced shortly afterwards a very low opinion. He excluded them from his revision of Johnson’s edition of the plays which came out in 1778.\n\nMalone produced the first critical edition of the sonnets in 1780, in his ‘Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays published in 1778’, vol. i. This revision of Thorpe’s text proved of the highest value. Steevens supplied some notes and criticisms, and in the annotations on *Sonnet CXXVII*, Malone and he engaged in a warm controversy, which occupied nearly six pages of small type, regarding the general value of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A year before Steevens borrowed of Malone a volume containing first editions of the *Sonnets* and *Lucrece*. On returning it to its owner, he pasted on a blank leaf a rough sketch in which Shakespeare is seen to be addressing William Atkinson, Malone’s medical attendant, in these words:—\n\n&gt; If thou couldst, Doctor, cast\n&gt; The water of my sonnets, find their disease,\n&gt; Or purge my editor, till he understood them,\n&gt; I would applaud thee, &amp;c.\n\nSteevens now insisted that ‘quaintness obscurity and tautology’ were inherent ‘in this exotik species of com-\n\n1 The volume containing this drawing is in the Malone collection in the Bodleian Library (Mal. 34). It contains the following note in Malone’s handwriting:—‘Mr. Steevens borrowed this volume from me in 1779 to peruse *The Rape of Lucrece* in the original edition, of which he was not possessed. When he returned it, he made this drawing. I was then confined by a sore throat, and was attended by Mr. Atkinson, the Apothecary, of whom the above figure, whom Shakespeare addresses, is a caricature.—E. M.’\n\n<!-- [Page 472](arke:01KG6QHPVKT410SN2FZZ4J79MH) -->\nSONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 61\n\nposition. Malone, in reply, confessed no enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s sonnets, but claimed for their ‘beautiful lines’ a rare capacity for illustrating the language of the plays. He agreed that their ardent expressions of esteem could alone, with propriety, be addressed to a woman.\n\nAbout the same date, Capell, who gave Malone some assistance, carefully revised in manuscript Thorpe’s text, as it appeared in Lintott’s edition of 1710. But his revised text remains unpublished in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Steevens was to the end irreconcilable, and in an Advertisement prefixed to his last edition of Shakespeare, 1793, he justified his continued exclusion of the sonnets from Shakespeare’s works on the ground that the ‘strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service’.¹ The sonnets figured in Thorpe’s text, revised by Malone, in the latter’s edition of Shakespeare’s works of 1790, in the Variorum of 1803, and in all the leading editions of Shakespeare’s works that have been published since.\n","title":"Chunk 8"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6S4GWST5P4AR5FHFSAMC3Y","peer_type":"chapter","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG6NWQ2H2K4PGG7H4ZHYCZ3Y","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6S6RTFPGF0JBX8CNSMSSEF","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"},{"peer":"01KG6S6RTH4BEJZJ8KJFWVN23A","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:48.977Z","ts":"2026-01-30T06:24:59.302Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}