Talk:Sonnet 19

Fleets

I've copied the following note from my user talk:

I only just saw that you undid an edit I made on Sonnet 19. In line 5 you have "fleets", as I realise does your source text. I'm afraid your source text, which is an edition that is more than 100 years old, is wrong. The Quarto has "fleet'st", which John Kerrigan for Penguin renders as "fleet'st" and Wells for Oxford also renders as "fleet'st". Grammatically, only "fleet'st" or "fleetest" or "fleetst" makes sense, as the verb is conjugated in the second person singular. I fleet, thou fleetest, he fleets. Unfortunately printing errors like these have a tendency to percolate, so you see it replicated on several – though fortunately by no means all – websites, but I don't think that is a good reason for perpetuating them. All the very best and many thanks
— User:Sogngion 23:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

@Sogngion: I think there's very little to disagree with in your statement, but what there is, I find decisive. So I'd better explain. The state of the 154 Sonnet texts, as presented in their Wikipedia articles before and after my work in 2016, is detailed in my notes at Sonnet Uniformity Act §Text. TL;DR is: "All Wikipedia's Sonnet texts now (March 2016) come from one cited public domain modernized scholarly critical edition." Is Pooler the best text of the Sonnets? Absolutely not. Is it the best text for the purposes to which I've put it in Wikipedia? Yeah, I think it's the best source that checked all those italicized boxes. So that is the reason I chose, and wish to preserve, this particular text.

Furthermore, your characterization of "fleets" as a "printing error" is not correct. Kerrigan himself says, "Editors often emend [fleet'st], the Q reading, to "fleets", for the sake of a rhyme with sweets." (Kerrigan 1995: 198) Clearly, he disagrees with this choice, but acknowledges it as an editorial decision, not a printing error. Indeed, Pooler explicitly defends "fleets" as "not ungrammatical" and gives analogues from the First Folio. (Pooler 1918: 22)

That there are scholarly disagreements over the best readings will often be good reason for including a discussion of variants in the articles, but for the reasons I've given above, I don't think it's sufficient reason to discard Pooler (until, that is, a better edition falls into the public domain and some poor drudge has the energy to replace all 154 Wikipedia Sonnet texts), and it certainly wouldn't justify the alteration of a cited quotation. Cheers. Phil wink (talk) 23:07, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply and explain in such thoughtful detail. That all sounds fair enough, and I do appreciate the care you are taking and trouble you are going to. All the very best, Sogngion. Sogngion (talk) 19:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)