Shakespeare S Sonnets Never Before Interpreted

Excerpt from Shakspeare's Sonnets Never Before Interpreted: His Private Friends Identified; Together With a Recorded Likeness of Himself 'As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends.' Thus wrote Francis Meres, Master of Arts of both Universities, in his work entitled 'Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth,' published in the year 1598. This is the earliest notice we have of Shakspeare's Sonnets, and it supplies us with an important starting-point. From the information given by Meres, we learn that in the year 1598, the sonnets of Shakspeare were sufficiently known and sufficiently numerous to warrant public recognition on the part of a writer, who is remarkable for his compressed brevity; well known enough in certain circles for the critic to class them with Shakspeare's published poems. That the sonnets spoken of by Meres are to a large extent those which have come down to us, cannot be doubted, save, in desperation, by the supporters of an unsound theory. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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.