First readers of Shakespeare's sonnets, 1590-1790 / Faith D. Acker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Acker, Faith D., author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Series:

Routledge studies in Shakespeare

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Sonnets.

Shakespeare, William.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation--History.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 246 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Routledge, 2021.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

0367501368

9780367501365

OCLC:

1150971213