‘This Poet Lies’: Text and Subtext

Abstract

I begin by wondering why Shakespeare’s sonnets should be so unpopular. Despite their being the only collection of poems by our greatest poet, as a sequence they remain almost as unconsidered and unread as they were in his lifetime.¹ Individual sonnets are known and loved, but as exceptions to the general run of a collection of lifeless poems. Even literary critics have treated them with disdain. In the last forty years, apart from scattered forays by a handful of critics (most of them listed in my Introduction), they have been the happy hunting ground of biographical detectives, novelists, or the kind of literary moralist who constructs arguments by welding together lines and quatrains pulled painfully out of their context. And it is significant that, apart from the work of Stephen Booth, even the good critics have concentrated upon individual sonnets or sonnet groups, leaving the sequence as a whole in benign neglect.