University Place

Repackaging Shakespeare's Sonnets

[Sarah Marty, Program Director, Madison Early Music Festival, University of Wisconsin Arts Institute]

Welcome to the Madison Early Music Festival and our July 15th lecture. This is our 17th year here in Madison and we’re so excited to have you here tonight with us for our pre-concert lecture, Repackaging Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

I’m Sarah Marty, the program director of the Madison Early Music Festival, a program of the U.W. Arts Institute. It is my pleasure to introduce Professor Joshua Calhoun from the English Department here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches Shakespeare, 16th and 17th century poetry, and also works in the environmental humanities. He has a very broad background, which you’ll see shortly in this presentation. Recent projects include some work as a novice hand paper maker and doing some D.N.A. testing in special collections here in UW-Madison Libraries as part of an international project with the London Cell Project, The Center for Editing Lives and Letters.

Before we get started, I have a few brief Thank yous. The first is to Teresa Kelly and Thomas Baliss for their support of this lecture and also to U.W.-Madison Libraries for making us part of their Shakespeare in Wisconsin Initiative. With no further ado, I’d like to introduce Joshua Calhoun.

Thank you.

[applause]

[Joshua Calhoun, Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

I promised to talk today about this question of, Is there a right way to read Shakespeare’s sonnets? And this lecture is going to explore how the sonnets have been printed and reprinted, praised and scorned, clustered and reorganized throughout the –

[slide titled – Re-Packaging Shake-speares Sonnets – with the title slide and contact info for Professor Calhoun in the style of one of the editions of Shakespeares sonnets]

– last four centuries.

Here on the screen, you’re looking at a, well, slightly doctored version of the – the first page of the 1609 printing of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

[the slide animates off the title screen and animates on a photograph of two book editions of Shakespeares Sonnets from 1640]

But today I’m gonna focus on a very particular repackaging of Shakespeare’s sonnets and that’s this edition printed in 1640. 31 years after that first 1609 edition had appeared. I wanna focus on this volume partly because the way, I love the way it represents the sonnets. It literally represents these sonnets and also partly because –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– the volume we have here is – pictured on the screen is available here on campus and it’s in our special collections and some of you have had a chance to – to engage with that.

[new slide titled – Holding History – featuring five photographs of a group gathering in the special collections section of the U.W. library, four of various groups perusing the special collections and one of a pair of hands holding open one of the books in the collection]

Just earlier in the week, we – we had a – a group up in our special collections looking at a number of volumes, including that 1640 edition and this was part of our – our Holding History event, which if those of – those of you who didn’t get a chance to do that –

[the slide animates to a new slide with four more photos from the Holding History event]

– you hopefully will be able to come and – and spend a session, an evening session with us sometime in – in our Holding History program, engaging with a – a number of really amazing volumes that we have. I like to say that we, you know, we have some of the world’s amazing students –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– showing some of the world’s most amazing books through our Holding History program and I’d be excited to welcome any of you to that program at a future date. We’re always having those events, but there’s a reason that I end up having students really excited about being in – in our special collections and showing these books to others –

[return to the previous slide with the four photos from the Holding History event]

– and that’s because I – I take every single class that I teach to our special collections, our rare books archive and I’ve not yet taught a class here at the university that I – I have not taken to our special collections. And there’s a reason for that because a place like special collections where 16th century books –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– on handmade paper and 14th century scrolls and some really old stuff, like some – some Greek writings on papyrus are housed, this is a place, these special collections, a place where I can teach students something about technology and ideas and about art that they just can’t fully grasp anywhere else. And – and I like to – to say that the great minds that have gone before us, the thinkers, the writers, the musicians, historians, those who’ve worked through these important ideas that – that have really become the – the basis of the way we think about what – what we think of as culture, they all – they’ve all been interested in different kinds of problems. Euclid was interested in something different than Shakespeare. So, but they’ve all shared one fundamental concern, Once I have my big idea –

[new slide that animates in the phrase – Hold in my hands & share with others]

– how do I convert my ideas into something I can hold in my hands and share with others?

In a rare books library like special collections –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– we can see a thousand years of how civilizations have solved that problem or attempted to solve that problem. And if we want to, we can, as my students often do, take out our smartphones and snap some pictures and post them to social media, holding in our hands and sharing with others in new and exciting ways.

[slide featuring a photo of Joseph Fiennes playing Shakespeare in the movie from 1998, Shakespeare in Love]

Now we’ll talk about the great minds, but I really end up focusing mostly on poets. So, if you’re a poet and you want to write a beautiful poem about a beautiful person, you confront a real and deeply moving set of questions and they have as much to do with loss and death as with love and life. These questions –

[new slide that animates on the phrases – How can I save you? And, How can I capture who you are?]

– are, How can I save you? How can I capture who you are? These are these questions these poets ask. How – how will I preserve you into the future?

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– How can I turn the idea of you into something I can hold in my hands and share with others?

Now Shakespeare is not the first to ask these questions. He’s not the last to ask these questions, but culturally he’s an important voice in that procession of people who have been asking that – that question. And so, I wanna focus today on the sonnets, but I give you that overview to help you think about how I think about these books, how I think about our engagement with these texts and how for me it’s really deepened by engaging with something like a copy of the 1640 sonnets, the 1640 poems of Shakespeare, but I’ve got a little bit of bad news about that 1640 edition and I’ll explain that to you in – in terms of explaining my strategy for – for the next few minutes here.

So, here’s what we’re gonna do. I wanna first tell you about a love story that we find in the first 18 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This might be a familiar love story for you, okay? After I tell you about that love story, I wanna tell you about how that love story was supposedly ruined by that little volume that we saw a few moments ago on the screen. And then finally I wanna try, like Puck at the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream, to make amends and to bring it together and to show – show and by showing you that the supposedly ruined love story is quite a lot like a well-loved landscape. This is where I wanna touch on the environmental humanities at the very end. So –

[return to the title slide for this lecture described above]

– right, you got it? We’re gonna go from love –

[new slide that animates on the outline of a red heart]

– to heartbreak.

[the slide animates on a red heart falling from the top of the slide to hit the bottom of the slide whereupon it breaks down the middle, kicking up dust as it hits]

[laughter]

[the slide animates on an illustration of a black and white tree with a small child hugging the tree at the bottom]

To tree-hugging.

[laughter]

We’ll see if we get there. Oh, by the way, we have 30 minutes to do this, so please make sure –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– your seats are in their full and upright positions and let’s go.

Let’s start with the love story.

[slide featuring the cover page of the 1609 edition of Shakespeares sonnets with the outline of a red heart superimposed over it]

Here’s an image of the first, the opening of Shakespeare’s sonnets. They were printed in 1609. It’s the version of the sonnets that most of us are familiar with. It begins with sonnet number one, From fairest creatures we desire increase, and it ends with, well, not so –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– memorable sonnet number 154 about the careless napping habits of the little love god, Cupid.

[laughter]

Some are more memorable than others. Some – some preserve better.

[slide that animates on the first page of Shakespeares sonnets from 1609 on the left-hand side of the slide]

Now the first 17 sonnets are often called the procreation sonnets and Shakespeare in these first sonnets talks to a young man; a young man he thinks is beautiful and worthy of being preserved.

[the slide animates out the opening lines of Sonnet #1 – From fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beautys Rose might never die]

This opens with these famous lines. From fairest creatures we desire increase that thereby beauty’s Rose might never die. And he tells the young men that –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– because media is not capable of making a perfect copy of the beauty, he needs to procreate. This young man needs to procreate. He needs to have a son to carry forth his image or his likeness. “The likeness I can make with my poetry “just won’t do it,” he claims.

[return to the previous slide with the opening lines of Sonnet #1 described above]

In sonnet two he writes –

[the slide animates out the opening lines of Sonnet #2 from the photo of the page – When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauties field]

– When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field. 40 years of age, right? Of changing the young man, diminishing his beauty, and giving him wrinkles.

[laughter]

And on it goes and sonnet three continues and then onto sonnet five. I’m gonna jump over what many of you may be familiar with this narrative. We’ll jump through, but it’s really these –

[new slide that animates on a photo of the pages that contain Sonnets #5 on the left-hand side of the slide]

– first 17 sonnets, these procreation sonnets. And here in sonnet –

[the slide animates out from the page a part of Sonnet #5 – But flowers distilled though they with winter meet, Lease but their show, their substance still lives sweet.]

– five we see that he talks about distilling this loved one as though it were perfume, But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet, Lease but their show, their substance still lives – lives sweet.

[the slide animates out from the page a part of Sonnet #6 – Then let not winters ragged hand deface, In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled]

Then in sonnet six, Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface, In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled. And hes – he’s laying it on thick.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

He wants this young man to procreate, to make a baby, to put his image out there and to – to copy his image out into the world.

Sonnet after sonnet, trying to convince this young man, cajoling him into this strategy.

By sonnet 15, we’ve skipped from six to 15 and the same thing is still happening. There’s a hint that the poet realizes that the young man is not going to be convinced to procreate –

[slide featuring a photo of the pages from the 1609 manuscript that contain Sonnets 15 and 16 on the left-hand side of the slide]

– so, these poems that he’s writing will just have to suffice. He imagines himself battling with time –

[a segment of Sonnet 15 animates out from the manuscript with the following passage – And all in war with Time for love of you, As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.]

– and he writes, And all in war with Time for love of you, As he – time – takes from you, I ingraft you new. And you hear that pun, ingraft, right? Were – see, I’m already setting up the trees at the end. Ingraft, but also you hear the word, that graph, like – like calligraphy, right? And anything that has the graphic arts, anything about writing, so there’s a pun there with ingrafting.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

So, after he – he decides that this is gonna be a battle, he’s gonna take on with time, again, he kind of –

[return to the previous slide described above with the quote from Sonnet 15 highlighted]

– he – he gets a little scared of this strategy. Again, he says –

[another section of Sonnet 15 animates out from the copy of the page on the left-hand side of the slide – But wherefore do not you a mightier way, Make war upon this bloody tyrant time?]

– but okay, that might work, But wherefore do you not a mightier way, make war upon the bloody tyrant time?

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

There’s a better way to do this. I’ve been trying to tell you; you’re not listening to me. By sonnet 17 –

[slide featuring a copy of the page of the 1609 manuscript that contains Sonnet 17 on the left-hand side]

– we see the poet finally resigning himself to the strategy – to the strategy that then becomes what we know of as Shakespeare’s sonnets where he’s going to try to record, he’s going to try to save and capture this young man’s beauty –

[a section of Sonnet 17 animates out from the copy on the left-hand side – If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say this Poet lies, Such heavenly touches neer touched earthly faces, So should my papers (yellowed with their age), Be scorned like old men of less truth than tongue.]

– in a number of poems and he says here, and these are some of my favorite lines I think in all of the sonnets. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, this poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces. So should my papers (yellowed with their age), Be scorned like old men of less truth than tongue?

You –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– see a dual strategy there. Even at this moment, he’s realizing that the importance of writing these poems. You see he’s still trying to hold on to the idea, Okay, tell you what, I’ll make the backup copy.

[laughter]

Right?

And then we get to sonnet 18, how many of you know sonnet 18? I’m not gonna ask you to quote it, but so many of you, you – you are familiar with the sonnet. It’s probably the most famous of Shakespeare’s sonnets and he’s finally –

[slide featuring a photo of Sonnet 17 in the 1609 manuscript on the right-hand side of the slide]

-this is where the poet finally rely – resigns himself to his role –

[a section of Sonnet 17 animates out from the manuscript photo – But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice in it, and in my rhyme.]

– as record keeper, right? Taking – giving – giving up this role and moving into –

[new slide featuring a photo of Sonnet 18 in the 1609 manuscript on the right-hand side of the slide]

– Shall I compare thee – what –

[a quote from Sonnet 18 animates out from the manuscript – Shall I compare the to a Summers day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate,]

– to a summer’s day? It’s a beautiful narrative, isn’t it? And I love to teach this story from the sonnets. I love looking at how sonnets one to 17 culminate with sonnet 18, ending in a promise to immortalize –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– his beloved in eternal lines. Of course, it worked. Here we are today reading –

[slide titled – Sonnet 18 – featuring a photo of the manuscript page from the 1609 manuscript that contains Sonnet 18 on the right-hand side of the slide]

– something like –

[the following quotation from Sonnet 18 animates out from the photo of the manuscript page – So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,]

– So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this and this gives life to thee.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

Now it’s a beautiful story and we’re reading it now, but one of the glitches in this story, in –

[slide featuring the title page of Shakespeares Sonnets in the 1609 edition]

– the story of preservation is that when it was printed, nobody really read it.

When Shakespeare’s poems were printed in 1609, this narrative, well, there’s really no way to put it delicately, they flopped.

[the slide animates on the logo for Oprahs Book Club and then animates a red X over the top of the logo]

[laughter]

They failed on the book market, and I don’t have time to get into –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– why tonight, but here’s what I can tell you. These sonnets, supposedly eternal lines disappear. The next time we find the sonnets reprinted in this way is over a century later and the first time they’d be formally included in the canon of Shakespeare’s works is 171 years later in 1780. Now just for a little bit of perspective –

[slide titled – 171 Years in Perspective – featuring an illustrated outline of the State of Wisconsin in the middle of the slide and a timeline that starts at 1609 at the top of the slide (with 1609 indicated by a dot). This timeline animates to the next dot on the line labelled 1780]

– 171 years ago –

[the slide animates on another timeline to the right of the first timeline with the first dot being labelled with the year 1845 and animating a line to the right ending in another dot labelled with the year 2016]

– Wisconsin was not a state.

[laughter]

[the slide animates in a the title page for the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, American Slave to the left of the illustration of the State of Wisconsin and a woodcut illustration from an early edition of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (with a raven flying in through an open window above the narrator) to the right of the illustration of Wisconsin]

And Frederick Douglass had just written the – the – his – his narrative, as well as Edgar Allan Poe had just published The Raven. Imagine these two important works of literature just now being sort of brought into the canon.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

Hey, we should pay attention to this. This is an interesting little thing that Frederick Douglass wrote. We should read that some – at some point, right? Many of you, you know, there’s so many editions of this. I remember memorizing sections of that for a – a history class when I was about my daughter’s age whos sitting here.

So, we’re talking about this gap of 171 years and in this time, something does –

[slide titled – John Benson, Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-Spear, Gent, (1640)]

– happen to preserve the lines –

[the slide animates on the cover pages from this 1640 edition featuring an illustrated portrait of Shakespeare on the left page and the title of the work on the right page]

– because when I say it wasn’t – it wasnt reprinted in that format, I’m – Im splitting hairs a little bit. The sonnets were not reprinted in their original format until the 18th century, but they are reprinted in a different format in 1640. 1640, John Benson, not to be confused with another famous Renaissance playwright, Ben Johnson.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

[laughter]

Not this guy, John Benson.

He published a small volume called Shakespeare’s Poems. Now if you look through this volume, you will never find the word sonnets, but it is the second printing of Shakespeare’s sonnet in disguise. Now Benson’s version is really more of a hodgepodge. In it you’ll find most but not all of the 154 sonnets. You’ll also find other poems by Shakespeare, poems found in The Passionate Pilgrim and even a really bad poem written by Orlando in As You Like It. Remember when he runs around writing bad poetry and sticking them into trees and he gets made fun of? That appears, parts of that poem appear in here. There’s also poems by Christopher Marlowe, John Fletcher, and even John Milton –

[return to the previous slide titled – John Benson – described above]

– included in this volume. Now it’s worth noticing that Benson was aware that he had to repackage this volume –

[new slide featuring a photo of the To the Reader section of John Bensons collection of Shakespeares Sonnets]

– and he writes, this is his –

[the slide animate out a quote from the To the Reader section of the manuscript – I here presume (under favor) to present to your view some excellent and sweetly composed poems, of Master William Shakespeare]

– To the Reader at the beginning. I here presume (under favor) to present to your view some excellent and sweetly composed poems of Master William Shakespeare. Now here’s the kicker, okay?

[new slide featuring a photo of the second page of John Bensons To the Reader section of his manuscript that animates out the following quote from the photo of the manuscript – in your perusal you shall find them serene, clear, and elegantly plain]

In your perusal, you shall find them serene, clear, and elegantly plain.

Do you remember when you studied the sonnets –

[laughter]

– in some required class? I have never had a student say, My, these are so serene and clear and –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– elegantly plain.

[laughter]

That, the line I read earlier from sonnet 17, And in fresh numbers, number all your graces, that’s – thats just the beginning of the kind of – of convoluted wordplay we see throughout the sonnets.

Now one way Benson makes the sonnets more clear and simple and serene is by replacing the numbers with descriptive titles, such as An Inconstant Lover. So, instead of having this numerical title, sonnet one, you would have a different title. So, his titles include things like An Inconstant Lover or The Benefit of Friendship, right? This helps you and in fact helps when – when – when I do teach it with students, it helps them say, Oh right, this is a sonnet about friendship. And – and it helps you into it, right?

So, the best way to – to see what he’s doing is really just take a look at what we’ve got here, so here’s an opening that shows my favorite sonnet, which is sonnet 29. Now if you’re trying to find sonnet 29 on the page, you already know you’re not gonna find the number because he doesn’t give them the – the numbers. There’s no individual –

[slide titled – Sonnet 29? – featuring a photo of the page in John Bensons manuscript that contains said Sonnet but is not labelled in the manuscript as such]

– sonnet though when you look at this page. When you look at what’s on the left and the top of the right page there, you see what appears to be a 42-line poem titled A Disconsolation and Benson replaces these numbers with titles –

[on the left-hand side of the photo two carrots animate on to show that Benson has merged Sonnet 27 (which is the first half of A Disconsolation) and Sonnet 28 (which is the second half of A Disconsolation]

– and he merges the sonnets as well.

[audience groans]

Okay?

[the slide animates out the title – A Disconsolation from the photo of the manuscript page]

So, in this sonnet, this – this A dense consolation is followed by a poem called A Cruel Deceit. It’s a poem about Venus and Adonis and Venus and Adonis was by the way, it was far and away Shakespeare’s bestseller. It went through 16 editions during his lifetime. His – his most popular play went through seven editions –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– and it wasn’t Hamlet, it was Henry IV, Part One. Hamlet was a close second, but this poem about –

[return to the previous slide titled – Sonnet 29? – described above]

– Venus and Adonis that we see here –

[the slide animates out the title A Cruel Deceit from the photo of the Benson manuscript]

– this Cruel Deceit, it – it’s not by Shakespeare. It’s by that other equally famous Renaissance poet, Bartholomew Griffin?

[laughter]

You remember him, right?

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

Now for as much as we learn about Renaissance writing and reading and printing practices from this 1640 volume, we don’t learn anything about that love story we were interested in at the beginning. We don’t get any closer to finding out who Shakespeare, the man, the myth, the legend, was comparing to a summer’s day. In fact, to add perhaps insult to injury, sonnet 18, the most famous sonnet of all is one of eight poems, one of eight sonnets that John Benson excludes from this volume. He only cuts eight and sonnet eight – 18 is one of them.

[slide featuring a quote from William Wordsworth – Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare worked his heart. – William Wordsworth Scorn Not The Sonnet (1827)]

Here we see William Wordsworth, in this – in this line here, we’re gonna jump forward and think about, then why – why do we come back to the idea of the sonnets? What are we looking for when we look to the sonnets? We don’t – we dont wanna learn about Barth-Bartholomew Griffin. We don’t wanna read necessarily his Venus and Adonis. By the time we get to the 19th century, we wanna know about Shakespeare. As Wordsworth writes, Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honors; with this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

We realize immediately that two things are happening in this line. First, Wordsworth feels the need to defend Shakespeare’s sonnets. You don’t say, Scorn not the sonnet if everybody loves them, right? And secondly, you find in this – this comment a – a not so compelling defense, right? If – if you think about this as maybe a poetry workshop moment –

[slide featuring a caricature of William Shakespeare in the upper-right hand side of the slide and a caricature of William Wordsworth on the lower-left hand side of the slide with a speech bubble coming out of Wordsworths mouth that says the following – Wowwow! This is a great draft, Bill. What I love is how much your PERSONALITY comes through, you know? Its like, Hey, I totally get this guy.]

[laughter]

– it becomes this moment of, like, really your personality is really shining through here, Will. I like what you’re doing, I really feel the love, but you know, this is not really about the quality of the sonnets. And for many years this was not read as, the sonnets were not read for their quality and in fact for many years, they were also a – a – a –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– number of poets and writers avoided them, carefully avoided talking about them because they were written to a young man and there was the fear of having the – the idea that they – they would then, those who talked about, those who praised the sonnets would be seen in some way as supporting views that were outlawed at the time. So, and Oscar Wilde ran into some of this problem as you probably know. So, you know, caricatures aside –

[slide featuring an illustrated portrait of William Shakespeare]

– what I’m trying to emphasize is that when readers finally showed an interest in Shakespeare’s sonnets as they were originally published, they were interested in them because they were interested in Shakespeare.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

In the plays, Shakespeare reveals little about himself, but in the sonnets, we find first person narratives that tempt us to read the eye of the sonnets. For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that then I, Shakespeare, scorned to change my state with kings. It leaves us eager to know, who’s sweet love is being remembered? Now if you need the narrative of the sonnets to gain access to Shakespeare’s love life, then you have very little appreciation for someone like John Benson, who goes around messing it all up.

And this has been the critical view of them for many years.

[slide titled – Bensons edition is variously described [by critics] as – and the following phrase animates onto the slide – mutilated, corrupt, and deformed – Cathy Shrank, Reading Shakespeares Sonnets]

In a really terrific essay on Benson’s volume, Cathy Shrank observes that Benson’s edition –

[ the statement – and its editor is castigated for committing – a series of unforgivable injuries upon the text. – also animates onto the slide]

– is variously mutilated, is variously described by critics as mutilated, corrupt, and deformed and its editor is castigated for committing a series of unforgivable injuries upon the text.

[laughter]

And – and I would just draw your –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– attention to how – how – how forceful this criticism is. How caught up with the idea of – of – of perhaps sin, right? Corruption and – and – and deformation.

One of the most amazing critics of – of – of the sonnets, one of the most amazing readers of the sonnets is Katherine Duncan-Jones who has produced the Arden Edition and she is just a – a – a really fantastic reader of the sonnets –

[slide featuring the following quote from Katherine Duncan-Jones in The Sonnets (Arden Edition which animates onto the slide – For well over a century, [John] Benson succeeded in muddying the textual waters It was [Bensons] edition that was read and edited almost exclusively until the superb work of Malone in 1780 Bensons disintegration of Q [the 1609 first edition] did lasting damage.]

– but also, someone who is deeply invested in the idea that – that – that –

[the word Disintegration appears on the slide in black and animates larger and larger]

– Shakespeare’s, that the numbers that we see in – in the sonnets, that that order is from Shakespeare and so we wanna preserve that and she says, For well over a century, John Benson succeeded in muddying the textual waters. It was Benson’s edition that was read and edited and almost – almost exclusively until the superb work of Malone in 1780. Benson’s disintegration of Q, of the 1609 first edition, did lasting damage.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

We might say, I wanna bring the – the sort of bring the conversation together around this idea of disintegration and then make this last turn in – in our talk today. Duncan-Jones means disintegration in a pejorative way in – in this statement obviously, but what if we grab onto that word?

[slide titled – Dis-Integration – featuring the definition of disintegrate – v.to separate into its component parts (OED Online) and the following statements also animate onto the slide – To read well is to Dis-integrate. To write well is to Re-integrate.]

We might say that Benson does disintegrate the sonnets, but then he reintegrates them in interesting ways in – that create fresh and insightful narratives.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

Now we don’t get the procreation narrative that we discussed earlier. We lose the love story, but we might say that, and this is I think Shakespeare, Shake-Shakespeare’s plays especially prove this, that to read well is to dis-integrate. To write well is to re-integrate. And it’s when Benson puts these titles on top of the poems, he’s following a tradition, a commonplace tradition of grabbing and giving – sorting ideas into titles and – and ideas and taking really, they think of themselves as honeybees, right? The honeybee goes out and gathers nectar and that’s the reading. Brings it back to the hive, that’s copying down something you really like and then makes honey, making honey is the writing, it’s reintegrating. Disintegrating and reintegrating and moving it around. And so, certainly something that I think Shakespeare would have appreciated.

[return to the slide that features a photo of the Benson manuscript that has the poems – A Disconsolation and A Cruel Deception.]

What we also see –

[the slide animates out the title – A Disconsolation from the manuscript page that has a readers notations below it that reads – disconsolation, consolated]

– then is that some – somebody like Benson invites readers to engage as well. We don’t have in – in the 1609 editions that – that survive, there are very few marginal notes by contemporary readers, but in the 1640, that’s a little different. Here we have a perfect example. This reader has decided, and I agree with this reader, whoever she or he may be, I agree that, so we have in this – this 27, 28, and 29, we have the first 27 and 28. These are the – the ones about basically –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– I can’t sleep at night because I’m thinking about you and I’m daydreaming all day, right? So – so, at – at night I can’t sleep and – and during the day I’m dreaming, and it’s really messing up my schedule here.

[audience chuckles]

But then 29 –

[return to the previous slide with the title A Disconsolation animated out from the Benson manuscript]

– When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast. And he goes through this sort of this – this moment of self-pity and he says, “But thy – the last couplet – But thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

Disconsolation, consolated, right?

Now this is, Benson’s disintegration encourages other integrations or disintegrations like this, the – the – change – changing up, but it also encourages this disintegration, reintegration, a form of other writers, other writers making honey and perhaps the most stunning disintegration and reintegration of sonnet 29 came centuries later.

[slide featuring a photo of Maya Angelou in the upper-left hand corner and the following quote animates in from her – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love it was Shakespeare who said, When in disgrace with Fortune and mens eyes It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar.]

This is Maya Angelou in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. She writes, During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love, and it was Shakespeare who said, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes. It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar. And she talks about the –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– thy sweet love remembered. That’s her grandmother. This is what she says and – and if you haven’t had a chance to read this book, I really encourage it.

So, when we begin looking at these readerly engagements with the sonnets by Benson, by a 17th century reader, by Maya Angelou, we begin to see how beautifully we can disintegrate the love story we saw in the first 18 sonnets. We see just how movingly we can reintegrate the ideas and read them into our own imperfect narratives because I bet every one of you during, as – as I’ve said a few times, thy sweet love remembered, somebody came to your mind, didn’t it? You reintegrate this into your own narrative. Whose love remembered makes you happy –

[return to the previous Maya Angelou slide described above]

– when skies are gray?

[the red broken heart from earlier in the talk animates over Maya Angelous quote]

Yes, it’s a disintegration, but theres – its – it’s a reintegration of sorts, a way of taking things apart and putting them back together –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– in exciting and new ways.

I wanna conclude by taking one last step and drawing these threads together into a conversation about how what I think Benson is really doing is – is fitting into a strategy that’s very much like ecological conservation. And how that affects, when we think about this book that I showed you – so, in – in the last about three, four minutes, I – I just wanna pull those threads together into this – the tree-hugging that I promised because books are of course natural resources. They’re made from plants and animals, and I was – I was so thrilled to – to take a job here because growing up in the Adirondack Mountains of New York –

[slide featuring a photo of Aldo Leopold sitting on a rock outcropping with a bow and a quiver of arrows]

– I have known about Aldo Leopold for a long time but was – have really enjoyed getting to know more about his – his – his history and his activity here in this area and as a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

And the duration of Leopold is one of conservation, right? Not so much preservation, but conservation. And when we think about, let’s just – just, as – as we think of what conservation is versus preservation and we’ll pull this back to Benson here in a second –

[slide titled – Conservation vs. Preservation – and featuring a quote from the National Parks Service (which animates in) – Put simply CONSERVATION seeks the proper use of nature, while PRESERVATION seeks protection of nature from use.]

– preservation of course, National Park Service gives this – this definition, but preservation essentially says, Don’t touch it! and conservation says, Handle with care. The risk of preservation is that if you don’t touch it, you have trouble getting to know and falling in love with it. The risk of conservation is you’re gonna make mistakes. You mess things up sometimes. You care about –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– the land and so much that you disagree with somebody else who cares a lot about the land, and we see this happen and conservation is messy.

My students when we read Leopold, they catch on to – to the fact that he never leaves the house without two things. His notepad, which I encourage them to take out with them when they go and – and do some nature writing, but the other thing he never leaves the – the house without is his gun and his dog, the dog and the gun go together, right? So, and that’s – thats a – because he’s a hunter and so there are different ways to think, Okay, we wanna conserve the land and we have different ideas. I think we should hunt here; I think we shouldn’t. I think we should hunt these kinds of animals. I think we shouldn’t. And so, we have these – these messy negotiations that happen with conservation, and you begin to ask sometimes, Is it worth it? Why don’t we just cordon off the land, close it off, and say let it – let it come back to its natural state or – or – and be preserved?

[return to one of the first slides featuring a photo of the 1609 Shakespeare Sonnet collection books lying on a table]

And I don’t think a leap at this moment back to a 1640 volume is such a big leap. I think the conservation that we’ve been, the conversation we’ve been having about conservation is very much in line with what we see in something like Benson’s strategy towards the sonnets. Those who say, This is not the sonnets. This is a muddying of the waters. It’s disintegration, it’s a messing up of the sonnets.

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

They really fall on the side of preservation. Let’s get back to exactly what Shakespeare wanted this to be. Let’s somehow restore that, like the state of nature? The state of Shakespeare? Let’s restore it to its perfect form, even though, you know, it – it – that’s gonna be messy. And those, they may acknowledge that Shakespeare struggled with his media, that he struggled with his pens and his ink and his paper, but they think that once these ideas are – are down on paper, the creativity should cease, and the preservation should begin.

Benson’s model is I would say a lot more like conservation. Consider this, a century and a half of readers may not have known about the sonnets if not for Benson. From 1640 until 1780, Benson’s was the one that was commonly used to reprint the sonnets. And it could be argued that sonnets, that Benson even keeps them on the map so that the later 18th and early 19th century readers are engaging with them in the Shakespearian canon. Conservation is use and it creates wear and tear. It moves things around, and it changes them. To me, it’s more interesting.

So, there are – there are libraries that are certainly more interested in preservation than conservation and here’s where I really wanna land with this to-today.

[new slide still under the title – Conservation vs. Preservation – that animates on the word Preservation along with the phrase – Dont touch it! and then animates on the word Conservation along with the phrase – Handle with Care.]

Lot of libraries have decided that something is too important, Don’t touch it! and it’s probably a good principle that can preserve some really endangered books, but conservation says, Handle it with care and it gives us the chance to fall in love. Conservation –

[Joshua Calhoun, on-camera]

– says Touch it, get to know it. Mess with it and pass it on. And I think when we see, when we really step back and we look at this – this love story, yes, Benson took that love story, and he certainly changed them. He sure took sonnet 18 out, but even the removal of sonnet 18 makes us question where it is, makes us question what that love story’s doing. It allows us to have a conversation about how you can move – the sanctity of Shakespeare’s words and whether you can move things around. I think that the tradition of – of conservation is strong here at the University of Wisconsin, both in the sense of ecological conservation, but also in our special collections of the rare books where we can take students and we can invite the public in to see what we have, to handle it and perhaps to fall in love with it so that maybe sometime you’ll take someone in, some – some that you love, some beloved of yours into the special collections or into a bookstore and show them a volume of – of Shakespeare with a poem that is your favorite.

I really encourage you if – if – if you can take something away from – from the talk to – to walk out of here and think someone that you can share something you’ve written forward with. That’s really the spirit of the sonnets. How do you share this forward with somebody? And I – I love encouraging our students and our community members to get in contact, to be talking to each other. I encourage you to take that forward and pass it on to someone in the spirit of conservation, in the spirit of opening up a con-conversation about what you’re reading and what you’re thinking about.

Thank you.

[applause]