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.

The conclusion focuses on Sonnet 18 and compares its significance in Shakespeare in Love (the film) and Shakespeare in Love (the play). It argues that this Sonnet has transcended the sequence, and has come to signify the Sonnets as a whole. Whilst this can be a reactionary decision, which ignores the overt homoeroticism of the sequence, it can also be a means of making the Sonnets more accessible by offering multiple different appropriations, emphasising the polyvocality of the individual Sonnet.