First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590-1790 Routledge Studies in Shakespeare Series

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. First Readers of Shakespeare?s Sonnets 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.

The Author to the Reader

Introduction: ‘The Meaning’ of the Sonnets

The Sonnets, their texts, and their readers

1. The Passionate Pilgrim and Shakespeare’s ‘sugred’ reputation

Texts and editions

Pilgrim as a sonnet sequence

Shakespeare’s vendible name and relevant prints

Supplementing Shakespeare with the classics

Reading and revising the sonnets

2. Reading and Revising Shake-Speare’s Sonnets (1609)

Structure, contexts, and paratexts of the 1609 quarto

Thorpe and the critics

Sonnets and sequences: Revisionist love stories

Reading Thorpe’s Sonnet 2

Annotating the sonnets

3. The manuscripts of Sonnet 2: Sex, sonnets, and spirituality

Extant manuscript copies of Sonnet 2

Sexual contexts for Sonnet 2

Sonnet 2 in politics and religion

Friends and elegies: Reading Sonnet 2 among epitaphs

4. John Benson’s sonnet sequences (Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent.)

Benson and Shakespeare

Part I: Eternity of beauty

Part II: Miscellaneity and duality

Part III: A Marriage of perjured minds

Part IV: Classics and imputed works

5. Celebrations of Church and King: An early Cambridge reader

Reading habits and approaches

Cambridge origins

Poems in praise of God

Poems to honour the King

Contextualizing women

For the love of God, not woman

6. Restoration revisions: Musical, dramatic, and miscellany readings

Mountebanks and martyrs: Lawes’ musical setting

Gender, duplicity, and eternal passion: Suckling’s Brennoralt

Manuscript variants and textual fluidity: Reading and sharing

Extracts, miscellanies, and new contexts: Adapting the sonnets in the late seventeenth century

7. Supplementing Shakespeare and creating the canon

Critical predilections: The autobiographical Shakespeare

Life after Benson: Supplements and supplementarity

Notes and Various Readings: The ultimate supplement

Capell’s cento and Shakespeare’s language

Collecting Shakespeare: Complete and incomplete canons

8. Edmond Malone: Plotting the Sonnets

The Search for authorial authenticity

Poems and plays

The Editor and his characters

9. Reading the Sonnets after Malone: Independent responses

Debating the poems: Critical annotations

Sonnet sententiae

Reading and editing the eighteenth century

Beyond Malone: The New debate

Sonnet Futures

Faith D. Acker received her doctorate in Renaissance Literature from the University of St Andrews. Subsequently, and while writing this book, she has taught at The University of Sheffield, Cornerstone Academy, Pellissippi State Community College, Northern Virginia Community College, Montgomery College, and Signum University. Her additional work on the sonnets’ early readers appears in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640-1740 (eds. Depledge and Kirwan, 2017) and is forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly.