The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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Sonnets

Sonnets
Despite his contemporaries' preference for Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, the Sonnets have long been regarded as Shakespeare's most important and distinctive contributions to lyric poetry, as well as the most profoundly enigmatic works in the canon. In certain select circles Shakespeare already had a reputation as a sonneteer by 1598, when Francis Meres wrote of ‘his sugared sonnets among his private friends’, but although two of his sonnets reached print the following year (in The Passionate Pilgrim) his whole sequence only appeared in 1609, with A Lover's Complaint as its coda. (A Stationers' Register entry of 1600 for a book called Amours by I.D., ‘with certain other sonnets by W.S’., could conceivably refer to some of Shakespeare's sonnets, but the issue is clouded by the existence of another sonneteering W.S., William Smith, who had published a sequence of his own in 1596). The title page of the...

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