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The Sonnets of Shakespeare have a place beside the play of Handel in contention for the doubtful honor of being the cause of more perplexity and controversy than any other literary work in theE nglish tongue More persons, otherwise seemingly normal members of society, have thought that they were the first to understand one or the other of these works, or have professed to make illuminating discoveries regarding them, than could be computed as critics of any writing since the I liad. If the present editor can come to the end of his task with any feeling of complacency, it is because he has spent some years with theS onnets and still finds himself without a revelation. In other words, his complacency must be due only to the existence of some evidence that he is still sane a poor substitute, no doubt, for the enthusiasm of the seer. It is the purpose of this volume, then, not to present a new theory of theS onnets, but to bring together a body of critical material illustrative of them, sufficient for all the purposes of the less ambitious reader, and adequate to set the most tireless student on the track of what he wishes to know. The Bibliography is intended to serve as a convenient outline of the history of the text and its interpretation; but it may be well to say something here of the general course of this history. Though seemingly among the fairly popular lyrical collections of the seventeenth century, theS onnets largely dropped out of sight toward the end of that century and through the greater part of the eighteenth century. The age, therefore, of the building of the modern text of Shakespeare splays saw no similar work accomplished for theS onnets, which were not even included in any edition of theW orks of Shakespeare (save in occasional supplementary volumes) untilE wings Dublin edition of 1771, and not again till Malone sof 1790. It is toM alone th
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)