7 - The Sonnets

Summary

Shake-speares Sonnets have over time proved a remarkably attractive yet profoundly intractable document. Concealing as much as they reveal, and sharing intimacies only in the most detached manner, the Sonnets have frequently functioned as a mirror in which cultures reveal their own critical presuppositions about the nature of poetic creation and the comparative instabilities of gender, race, and class. Entering the world in a publication that may or may not be authorized, the Sonnets are surrounded by veils of inscrutability that have stirred the curiosity of readers since their initial publication. Although the Sonnets have proven particularly amenable to some of the central developments of late twentieth-century modes of criticism - particularly feminism and gender and gay studies - they continue to be richer and more complex than anything that can be said about them. As they approach their 400th birthday, the Sonnets have in fact aged quite well.

Perhaps this chronic inscrutability is why editing has proven to be such a rich area of enquiry for recent scholarly engagement with the Sonnets. Since Stephen Booth's marvellous and prize-winning edition of 1977, the Sonnets have been edited by John Kerrigan (1986), G. B. Evans (1996), Katherine Duncan-Jones (1997), Helen Vendler (1997), and most recently, Colin Burrow (2002). Each of these editions has been a work of criticism and scholarship at least as much as of editing, since the textual problems are for the most part rather straightforward (there is only one early edition, possibly authorized, but no manuscripts, no competing early editions, and relatively few typographical conundrums). The issue in each of these editions has been: how do we read the Sonnets? What is the most significant unit of meaning – the sequence, the individual poem, the quatrain, the sentence, or the word? Do we annotate the poems in order to record all possible meanings and inferences, or do we point to constellations of meaning and coherence?