First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1590-1790

<p>For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers’ responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets’ first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. <i>First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets</i> reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers’ interests in Shakespeare’s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.</p> <p>The Author to the Reader</p><p>Introduction: ‘The Meaning’ of the Sonnets</p><p>The Sonnets, their texts, and their readers</p><ol> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>The Passionate Pilgrim and Shakespeare’s ‘sugred’ reputation</li> <p>Texts and editions</p> <i> </i><p>Pilgrim as a sonnet sequence</p> <p>Shakespeare’s vendible name and relevant prints</p> <p>Supplementing Shakespeare with the classics</p> <p>Reading and revising the sonnets</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>Reading and Revising <i>Shake-Speare’s Sonnets</i> (1609)</li> <p>Structure, contexts, and paratexts of the 1609 quarto</p> <p>Thorpe and the critics</p> <p>Sonnets and sequences: Revisionist love stories</p> <p>Reading Thorpe’s Sonnet 2</p> <p>Annotating the sonnets</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>The manuscripts of Sonnet 2: Sex, sonnets, and spirituality</li> <p>Extant manuscript copies of Sonnet 2</p> <p>Sexual contexts for Sonnet 2</p> <p>Sonnet 2 in politics and religion</p> <p>Friends and elegies: Reading Sonnet 2 among epitaphs</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>John Benson’s sonnet sequences (<i>Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent</i>.)</li> <p>Benson and Shakespeare</p> <p>Part I: Eternity of beauty</p> <p>Part II: Miscellaneity and duality</p> <p>Part III: A Marriage of perjured minds</p> <p>Part IV: Classics and imputed works</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>Celebrations of Church and King: An early Cambridge reader</li> <p>Reading habits and approaches</p> <p>Cambridge origins</p> <p>Poems in praise of God</p> <p>Poems to honour the King</p> <p>Contextualizing women</p> <p>For the love of God, not woman</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>Restoration revisions: Musical, dramatic, and miscellany readings</li> <p>Mountebanks and martyrs: Lawes’ musical setting</p> <p>Gender, duplicity, and eternal passion: Suckling’s <i>Brennoralt</i></p> <p>Manuscript variants and textual fluidity: Reading and sharing</p> <p>Extracts, miscellanies, and new contexts: Adapting the sonnets in the late seventeenth century</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>Supplementing Shakespeare and creating the canon</li> <p>Critical predilections: The autobiographical Shakespeare</p> <p>Life after Benson: Supplements and supplementarity</p> <i> </i><p>Notes and Various Readings: The ultimate supplement</p> <p>Capell’s cento and Shakespeare’s language</p> <p>Collecting Shakespeare: Complete and incomplete canons</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>Edmond Malone: Plotting the Sonnets</li> <p>The Search for authorial authenticity</p> <p>Poems and plays</p> <p>The Editor and his characters</p> <b> </b><p> </p> <li>Reading the Sonnets after Malone: Independent responses</li> </ol><p>Debating the poems: Critical annotations</p><p>Sonnet <i>sententiae</i></p><p>Reading and editing the eighteenth century</p><p>Beyond Malone: The New debate</p><p>Sonnet Futures</p>