Title: Textual Transmission and the Transformation of Desire: The Sonnets, A Lover’s Complaint and The Passionate Pilgrim
Abstract: In the context of early modern responses to Shakespeare’s poems the Sonnets have received a disproportionate amount of critical attention. In early modern England Shakespeare’s Sonnets achieved nothing like the renown of his narrative poems; now they have become the centrepiece of the Shakespearean poetic canon. Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence was published only twice in the seventeenth century, in Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 quarto and (heavily revised) in John Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems. By contrast Venus and Adonis had been issued a remarkable fifteen times by 1636, Lucrece had run to nine editions by 1655, and The Passionate Pilgrim reached its third edition in 1612. And while the Sonnets have spawned a staggering array of critical readings — a quicksand of commentary in which it is all too easy to lose your footing — early modern commentary on the Sonnets is notable by its absence, especially by comparison to the copious allusions to Shakespeare’s narrative poems in the period.
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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