indicate that many readers found the address to a
young man particularly problematic. The inability to
identify the speaker conclusively as Shakespeare him-
self complicates these reactions and readings that
derive from them. Following their publication, how-
ever, the sonnets were mostly ignored until 1790,
when Edmond Malone reprinted the 1609 Quarto edi-
tion of the sonnets. As they thus gained critical atten-
tion, interpreters tempered both their regard for
Shakespeare and their critical stances.
Some interpreters, including the Romantic poets
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth,
sought to diminish or to explain the fact that some of
the sonnets written by Shakespeare clearly address a
man. Some critics simply avoided the issue, focusing
on the sonnets as an expression of Shakespeare’s cre-
ativity. Late 19th- and early 20th-century writers such
as Oscar Wilde and W. H. Auden, while recognizing
the homoerotic implications of the sonnets, did not
publicly discuss their opinions, believing that the pub-
lic would not accept such a reading. Many earlier read-
ers who ignored this homoerotic potential explained
the eroticism by suggesting that expressions of friend-
ship in the early modern era differed considerably from
expressions of friendship now, and that readers can
hear Shakespeare’s erotic language simply as verbaliz-
ing feelings of friendship for the young man rather
than expressions of homoerotic affection.
The clear, strong affection that the speaker feels for
the young man, however, continued to present prob-
lems for later critics who were unable to escape the
sense that these sonnets, written by a man, expressed a
degree of affection that surpassed friendship. With the
New Critics (1950s), scholars began to treat the poems
with regard to form and word choice without regard to
the author who wrote the texts. By studying the son-
nets as the speech of a person who is a creation of the
writer and not Shakespeare himself, these critics
avoided the question of personal address altogether
and examined the sonnets exclusively as poetry. In the
late 20th century, critics became more willing to recog-
nize publicly the multiple meanings present in Shake-
speare’s language. Some critics now examine the ways
in which the sonnets illuminate class, race, and gender
as perceived by Shakespeare’s era. Psychoanalytic crit-
ics investigate the way in which the sonnets treat sub-
jectivity, the human mind, and human emotion. Still
other critics explore the homoerotic and bisexual
implications of the sonnets more fully. In the future,
more religiously focused criticism is expected to
emerge, as critics examine the entrenched tensions
between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in gen-
eral and Puritanism in particular.
FURTHER READING
Alexander, Catherine M. S., and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare
and Sexuality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001.
Blakemore Evans, G. The Sonnets. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969.
———, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1977.
Dubrow, Heather. Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative
Poems and Sonnets. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1987.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Playing Fields or Killing Fields:
Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets.” SQ 54, no. 2 (2003):
127–141.
———. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Arden, 1997.
Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of
Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986.
Hammond, Gerald. The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man
Sonnets. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.
Herrnstein, Barbara, ed. Discussions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Boston: Heath, 1964.
Hubler, Edward. “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Commen-
tators.” In The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1–21. New
York: Basic Books, 1962.
Kay, Dennis. William Shakespeare: Sonnets and Poems. New
York: Twayne, 1998.
Pequigney, Joseph. Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Rosenblum, Joseph. The Greenwood Companion to Shake-
speare. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Schiffer, James, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays.
New York: Garland, 1999.
Traub, Valerie. “The Sonnets: Sequence, Sexuality, and
Shakespeare’s Two Loves.” In A Companion to Shakespeare,
Vol. 4, The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, edited bySHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS 359