CRITICISM

Burrow, Colin. Introduction to The Complete Sonnets and Poems, by William Shakespeare, edited by Colin Burrow, pp. 1-158. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Discusses the date of composition and order of the sonnets, reviews their structural influences, and argues that they are a miscellaneous collection of themes and thoughts rather than an ordered sequence about particular relationships.

Freinkel, Lisa. “Willful Abuse: The Canker and the Rose.” In Reading Shakespeare's Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets, pp. 159-236. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Studies Shakespeare's use of catachresis—mixed, excessive metaphors—throughout the sonnets, and assesses the influence of Luther on Shakespeare's sonnets.

MacInnes, Ian. “Cheerful Girls and Willing Boys: Old and Young Bodies in Shakespeare's Sonnets.” Early Modern Literary Studies 6, no. 2 (September 2000): 1-26.

Examines the sonnets within the context of the Renaissance obsession with both age and physical passion. The critic focuses in particular on the characters of the young man, the dark lady, and the older poet-persona, arguing that these three figures appear repeatedly in early modern medical and psychological investigations into longevity and the passions.

Roessner, Jane. “Double Exposure: Shakespeare's Sonnets 100-114.” ELH 46, no. 3 (autumn 1979): 357-78.

Explores Shakespeare's use of patterning in sonnets 100 through 114, contending that sonnets 100 through 108 reveal how the poet makes the young man appear to be true and beautiful, and sonnets 109 through 114 show how the poet secures the young man's love.

Samuels, Robert. “The Cycle of Prejudice in Shakespeare's Miscegenating Sonnets.” In Writing Prejudices: The Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy of Discrimination from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison, pp. 31-51. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Claims that the sonnets depict unconscious fears and desires that generate various forms of prejudice, and demonstrates the ways in which the sonnets are structured by a discourse that is homosocial, homophobic, sexist, and racist in nature.