Shakespeare’s Lyric Poetry

Shakespeare, Poet, and His Early Reception: An Edition of Poetry Misattributed to and Recycled from Shakespeare

An edition by Lukas Erne, Charlotte Potter, and Andy Reilly, in preparation.

William Shakespeare was an exceptionally popular poet in the early modern period. The corpus of poetry books attributed to Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594), The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and the Sonnets (1609) – is small compared to the forty-odd plays he wrote or to which he contributed, and yet editions of the poems account for forty per cent of Shakespeare editions up to 1623. As early as 1598, the clergyman Francis Meres singled out Shakespeare’s poems, writing that the ‘sweete wittie soul’ of Ovid lives on in ‘hony tongued Shakespeare’, and praising his ‘sugred Sonnets’. Apart from the many reprints of and references to Shakespeare’s poetry in the early modern period, this popularity had two important consequences. Firstly, poems that are not by Shakespeare were misattributed to him, partly because his name helped to stir interest and sell books. Secondly, poems and poetic passages by Shakespeare were singled out in print for textual recycling of various kinds: they were adapted and repurposed, typographically highlighted for commonplacing, and extracted from their original context and inserted in commonplace books and poetic miscellanies. The present edition is the first to editorially recover these two groups of poems and poetic passages which bear witness to Shakespeare’s early popularity as a poet. Jointly, they will provide a broad foundation for the study of poetry attributed to and recycled from Shakespeare in the early modern period and enable a better understanding of the early reception of Shakespeare, the poet, than we have had so far.