Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the History of Sexuality: a Reception History

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1 Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the History of Sexuality: A Reception History Bruce R. Smith Most readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets today first encounter the poems in the form of a paperback book. Even a moderately well stocked bookstore is likely to offer a choice. Some of these editions are staid academic affairs. Others, however, package the sonnets as ageless testimonials to the power of love. A particularly striking example is Shakespeare in Love: The Love Poetry of William Shakespeare, published by Hyperion Press in 1998. The title says it all. The book was published as a tie-in to Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s film of the same name, also released in 1998. There on the cover is Joseph Fiennes passionately kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. Other photographs from the film illuminate scenes and speeches from selected plays, along with the texts of sixteen of the 154 sonnets first published as Shakespeare’s in 1609. These sixteen sonnets, presented to the unwary buyer as “the love poems of William Shakespeare,” have been carefully chosen and cunningly ordered. The first two selections, sonnets 104 (“To me, fair friend, you never can be old”) and 106 (“When in the chronicles of wasted time / I see descriptions of fairest wights”), give to the whole affair an antique patina. Next comes that poem of ten thousand weddings, sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”). Two sonnets explicitly referring to a woman, 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) and 138 (“When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her”), then establish a thoroughly heterosexual, if not altogether conventional, context for the eleven sonnets that follow (18, 23, 24, 29, 40, 46, 49, 57, 71, 86, 98), even though all eleven of these poems in the 1609 Quarto form part of a sequence that seems to be addressed to a fair young man.
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