William Shakespeare, Sonnets

Roy Booth (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Ed. by J A Roe, University of York
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.03: English Writing and Culture: Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean periods) , 1485-1625.
Vol. editors: William M. Hamlin (Washington State University), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University), Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1609

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection
Sonnet

Resources

“Simple truth suppressed”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Let’s start with a thought experiment: imagine that we live in a world where the thirteen surviving copies of the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s sonnets just didn’t make it. We only know from the Stationers’ Register entry by Thomas Thorpe on May 20^th 1609 (“a Booke called SHAKESPEARES sonnettes”) that such a book apparently once existed, and also know from Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Meres that our playwright wrote “sugared Sonnets among his private friends”. Naturally, we speculate about our loss, and we try to imagine what the sonnets might have been like from our knowledge of the plays.

Here’s some surmise about …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

4599 words

Citation: Booth, Roy. "Sonnets". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 September 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1943, accessed 21 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here