For this reason, we begin with an account of the quarto volume itself. Ronald Bond in his generous review of the first RET volume asked why the series should turn to Shakespeare's sonnets, one of the first publicly available literary texts on-line. Our reason was to find out whether computer editing could uncover something interesting about one of the most familiar books in English literature. Our introduction thus moves into a discussion of some useful applications of computer-based text analysis. Orthography has some bearing on the establishment of a good text, and on Shakespeare's own spelling at this time.
Word frequencies help understand content and style.
Although it would truly be folly to argue that the meaning of the sonnets depends on reconstructing what went on in G. Eld's shop when the Sonnets was being produced, many scholars before and since Chambers have paid attention to the details of how this quarto was printed. MacD. P. Jackson found that two compositors worked on the quarto in Eld's shop. Jackson associated them with the two men who composed his edition of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida . Hyder Rollins by then had identified half a dozen variant readings among the thirteen copies. Randall McLeod employed his own invention, a collating device, to detect the kinds of changes in the titlepage when the name of John Wright replaced William Aspley as the stated bookseller of the quarto.