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First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590-1790

By (author) Faith D. Acker

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For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readersâ€™ responses to Shakespeareâ€™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 sonnetsâ€™ 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 Shakespeareâ€™s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeareâ€™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 readersâ€™ interests in Shakespeareâ€™s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.