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
- The Passionate Pilgrim and Shakespeare’s ‘sugred’ reputation
- Reading and Revising Shake-Speare’s Sonnets (1609)
- The manuscripts of Sonnet 2: Sex, sonnets, and spirituality
- John Benson’s sonnet sequences (Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent.)
- Celebrations of Church and King: An early Cambridge reader
- Restoration revisions: Musical, dramatic, and miscellany readings
- Supplementing Shakespeare and creating the canon
- Edmond Malone: Plotting the Sonnets
- Reading the Sonnets after Malone: Independent responses
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The Search for authorial authenticity
Poems and plays
The Editor and his characters
Debating the poems: Critical annotations
Sonnet sententiae
Reading and editing the eighteenth century
Beyond Malone: The New debate
Sonnet Futures
Biography
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.
