Shakespeare was primarily a public writer, an entertainer, a teller of tales about people other than himself, two of them – Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece – in narrative verse, but mostly dramas which cast only an oblique light on the mind and emotions of their writer. But he also wrote 154 individual, non-dramatic sonnets, almost all cast in the first person singular, as if they were personal utterances. They are at once some of the most famous, the most personally revealing, and the most badly misunderstood poems ever written.

Like many readers, I got to know some of the sonnets as an adolescent, attracted by their quintessentially romantic reputation – a bit like Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor who, inarticulate at the prospect of wooing Anne Page, wishes he had his ‘book of songs and sonnets here’ (1.1.181–182).

This chapter argues that the early published texts of the Sonnets, including The Passionate Pilgrim and the 1609 Quarto, misrepresented them in such a way as to estrange them from their potential readers. The Sonnets make no inroads into early modern anthologies, and are generally ignored in favour of the narrative poems. They were condemned for licentiousness, whilst also not being sexy enough. The baffling plot, lack of characterisation, and confusing physical layout of the Quarto made them difficult for readers to engage with and affected their appropriation. Admiration for the Sonnets seems to have been confined to their manuscript circulation, particularly among the literary coterie of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who played a pivotal role in the dissemination of Sonnets 116 and 128.