TY - JOUR AU - Mayer, Jean-Christophe PY - 2016/03/09 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Transmission as Appropriation: The Early Reception of John Benson’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640) JF - Journal of Early Modern Studies JA - JEMS VL - 5 IS - SE - Part Two - Case Studies DO - 10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-18098 UR - https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/7069 SP - 409-422 AB - Described by modern critics as a ‘mangled hodgepodge’, John Benson’s much edited and rearranged text of Shakespeare’s <em>Poems</em> was considerably successful throughout the seventeenth century. While Benson’s choices could be considered as attempts to cater for and partly shape the tastes of a new generation of readers, its form also incited a number of them to alter the printed work. The article focuses on the annotations of two seventeenth-century readers of the edition, the main hand in Folger STC 22344 copy 2 and that of the little-known Meisei University MR 1447 – two copies in which readers’ reactions to and appropriation of Benson’s edition are particularly visible. A final section is also devoted to Folger MS. V.a.148, a miscellany in which some of Benson’s <em>Poems</em> are recontextualised. In a culture where, as Joad Raymond has observed, ‘any reader was potentially also a writer, or at least a reviser or commentator’, the early appropriation and transformation of Shakespeare’s text played a central part in its transmission. The practices and examples examined here were part and parcel of these processes.<br /><br /> ER -