Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There has perhaps never been a better time, since their publication almost four hundred years ago, to read Shakespeare's sonnets. Subjects that were formerly the source of scandal – the articulation of a fervent same-sex love, for example, or the clinical exploration of the harmful effects of love, imagined as the ultimate sexually transmitted disease – are now sites of intense scholarly interest. Similarly, issues to which earlier readers and cultures were largely deaf – the implicit racism inherent in a hierarchy of light and dark, the myriad ways that social class can distort human interaction, and the subjugation of women in an economy of erotic energy – have been the subject of rigorous critical scrutiny for at least thirty years. With the privilege, and the inconvenience, of some historical distance, we are now better able to apprehend the hidden injuries and byzantine delicacies of the class structure in early modern England. The purpose of this collection is to exploit this opportunity; it intends to celebrate the achievement of the sonnets, to investigate what they have to say to us at this moment in our critical history, and to exemplify the remarkable range and intelligence of current engagements with the sonnets.By including in this collection of essays the text of the 1609 quarto volume entitled Shake-speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted., I hope to make available ... log in or subscribe to read full text