First Readers of Shakespeares Sonnets, 1590-1790 - 9780367501372

Taylor & Francis

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers\u2019 responses to Shakespeare\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretatio.