Though some curious views about the printing of the two narrative poems have been held, and may be studied in H. E. Rollins's New Variorum edition (1938), pp. 369–74 and 406–8, little serious disagreement is now possible. Both poems were printed by Shakespeare's fellow-townsman Richard Field, and it is clear that this very competent printer took pains to produce an accurate text. The variations in spelling, contrary to what Sidney Lee supposed, are perfectly normal for the period, and the degree of normalization that Field habitually introduced can be studied by comparison of manuscript and printed texts of Harington's Orlando Furioso (1591), discussed by Sir Walter Greg in The Library, 4 ser. IV (1923–4), 102–18, who notes that Field's spelling is ‘more consistently modern than that of most printers of the time’ (p. 114).

It has been customary to talk of Shakespeare ‘seeing’ the poems ‘through the press’, and it is easy to believe that he took an interest in the progress of the first heir of his invention, and of its more ambitious successor. But to argue from the fewness of misprints to his having personally corrected the proofs is perhaps to exaggerate his probable proficiency in this specialized skill. For Lucrece, there is positive evidence against authorial proof-correction; see below. But whatever the reasons, the task of the textual editor is easier here than any where else in the corpus.

THE CAVE AND THE SUN

Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote the most human short life of William Shakespeare that we possess, began his section on the Sonnets as follows: ‘There are many footprints around the cave of this mystery, none of them pointing in the outward direction. No one has ever attempted a solution of the problem without leaving a book behind him; and the shrine of Shakespeare is thickly hung with these votive offerings, all withered and dusty.’ Raleigh's cave of mystery calls another to mind, Plato's cave of illusion, in which the human race sit chained with their backs to the sun without, and are condemned to accept the passing shadows on the wall before them for the truth–the real truth being only revealed to the few who are able to break their bonds and turn to face the light of day. Absorbed in our own attempts to solve the biographical puzzles that the individual sonnets offer us, we remain blind to the sun that casts these shadows but gives meaning to the whole. Begin by seeing that meaning and recognizing the whole as the greatest love-poem in the language, and the mystery of the detail becomes so unimportant as to fade away.

That this is the right approach to an understanding, apparently so obvious and so natural, has in point of fact only quite recently been realized; and realized independently and almost simultaneously by two critics, both driven by a wide study of the love-poetry of the Renaissance to admit the uniqueness of Shakespeare's.