Notes that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the bulk of the rights to Shakespeare had been consolidated into the hands of the Tonson publishing firm. The Tonsons – oftentimes in concert with a cartel of other London publishers – served as the primary publishers of Shakespeare for the greater part of the eighteenth century. The chapter registers a number of innovations introduced by the Tonson group: the recruitment of well-known writers to serve as editors and the prominent advertising of this fact on edition title pages; the publication of the first illustrated edition of Shakespeare; experimentation with different multivolume formats, breaking with the tradition of single-volume folio publication. The textual strategies of the different editors employed by the Tonsons are explored, with the 'aesthetic' approach of an editor such as Alexander Pope being contrasted with the more scholarly approach of Lewis Theobald. The appearance of the first extended sketch of Shakespeare's life in Nicholas Rowe's edition is also noted.

Shakespeare’s status as a dramatist underwent a remarkable transformation in the eighteenth century, but the Sonnets seem to have no place in this narrative. This is usually blamed on the difficulty of getting hold of the Quarto, as opposed to the accessibility of Benson’s Poems. However, this chapter argues that what reputation the Sonnets had in the eighteenth century is largely thanks to Benson. It examines the places where we might expect to find the Sonnets but don’t - in anthologies, the novel and the sentimental sonnet - and tries to explain what the Sonnets seemed to be lacking to an eighteenth century reader. It also re-examines Edmond Malone’s reprinting of the Quarto in 1780, which has been hailed as rescuing the Sonnets from oblivion, but whose insistence on a biographical reading, and on a division between male and female addressees, would have damaging consequences for the Sonnets individually. The chapter ends with the controversy surrounding Sonnet 2, and the struggles of George Chalmers and Coleridge to deal with Malone’s legacy and preserve their ideal of Shakespeare.

The Introduction argues that the absence of any extensive study of the Sonnets’ afterlife has led to various critical misapprehensions. They have by no means always been admired or loved, but at the same time they have an extensive and unbroken reception history which precedes Edmond Malone’s reprinting of the Quarto in 1780. The Introduction explores the implications of Malone’s bipartite division into Sonnets for a Fair Youth and those for a Dark Lady, and argues that this has had a detrimental effect on modern understandings of the Sonnets, as well as alienating us from centuries of readers, poets and critics who did not hold to this division. Finally, the Introduction demonstrates how the ‘canon’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets has changed radically over four hundred years, encouraging us to consider the contingency of their reputation as individual lyrics.