‘But women will have their own wills,
Alas, why then should I complain?’
[419] Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. Mr. Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an examination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion.
[420] Barnes’s Parthenophil in Arber’s Garner, v. 440.
[421a] After quibbling in Sonnet lxxii. on the resemblance between the graces of his cruel mistress’s face and the Graces of classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own):
Why did rich Nature graces grant to thee,
Since thou art such a niggard of thy grace?
O how can graces in thy body be?
Where neither they nor pity find a place! . . .
Grant me some grace! For thou with grace art wealthy
And kindly may’st afford some gracious thing.
Cf. Lear, IV. vi. 279, ‘O undistinguish’d space of woman’s will;’ i.e. ‘O boundless range of woman’s lust.’
[421c] Professor Dowden says ‘will to boot’ is a reference to the Christian name of Shakespeare’s friend, ‘William [? Mr. W. H.]’ (Sonnets, p. 236); but in my view the poet, in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with no uncommon practice of his. The line ‘And will to boot, and will in over-plus,’ is paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind (cv. 5).
Beyond all date, even to eternity (cxxii. 4).
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night (cxlvii. 14).
In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight intensification.
[422a] Cf. Barnes’s Sonnet lxxiii.: