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While Shakespeare's sonnets are generally celebrated in modern times, they were in fact long ignored, denounced, and even despised. In her introduction to the work, Katherine Duncan-Jones contrasts the sonnets' reception to those experienced by Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, Shakespeare's more successful poetic publications, both of which eventually saw numerous quarto runs. Referring to the sonnet quarto as ''Q,'' as do many commentators, Duncan-Jones remarks, ''Whereas the early narrative poems were received with immediate enthusiasm, prompting dozens of early allusions, citations and imitations, the 1609 Q seems to have been greeted largely in silence--a silence the more surprising given Shakespeare's literary celebrity in 1609, in contrast to his relative obscurity in 1593-1594.'' Duncan-Jones notes that the public may very well have been disappointed and even upset by the sonnets, likely because of the nature of the material. She posits that the contemporary author Ben Jonson, for one, may have found Shakespeare's narrator's devotion to a young man to be ''morally compromising''; in turn, many readers may have found repugnant the fairly explicit, if colloquial, references to sexual activity in the ''dark lady'' sonnets. Thus, the verses may not have been publicly discussed simply for propriety's sake. One anonymous reader annotated the end of a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets with the remark, ''What a heap of wretched Infidel Stuff.''

In fact, Shakespeare gained critical exposure when a pirated copy of the Sonnets was produced in 1640 by John Benson, who changed the pronouns in the references to the young man, such that the poems' addressee became a woman. Benson also reordered the sonnets and interspersed them with other works, but his publication was largely accepted as accurate for over a century. Regardless, critical opinions remained generally unfavorable; the sonnet itself became fairly unfashionable, and Shakespeare's sonnets in particular rarely garnered attention. In 1793, George Steevens displayed great disdain for the sonnets in excluding them from a copy of Shakespeare's collected plays and declaring that not even an act of Parliament could compel readers to find them favorable. Kenneth Muir notes that the renowned English poet William Wordsworth once offered a particularly negative view of the ''dark lady'' sonnets, calling them ''abominably harsh, obscure and worthless'' and describing them as characterized by ''sameness, tediousness, quaintness, and elaborate obscurity.''

Critical inattention or rejection continued through the nineteenth century, often on the grounds that Shakespeare was essentially promoting homosexuality. Muir notes that in 1839 the scholar Henry Hallam, making reference to the sonnets--and undoubtedly alluding to the narrator's devotion to the young man--declared, ''There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and mis-placed affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound.'' Duncan-Jones points out that Oscar Wilde demonstrated particular interest in Shakespeare's sonnets, approvedly theorizing in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889) that the ''begetter'' of Shakespeare's sonnets was the boy actor Willie Hughes. In that Wilde was later jailed for two years for homosexual acts, his affiliation with Shakespeare certainly did not soften attitudes toward the ambiguously erotic Sonnets. Duncan-Jones points out that critical attitudes finally, if slowly, grew more sympathetic and approving once the British Parliament made homosexual activity legal for consenting adults in 1967 (making Steevens's aforementioned comment somewhat ironic).

In general, modern commentators have managed to appreciate the poetry of Shakespeare's Sonnets irrespective of the supposed moral worth or biographical relevance of their contents. In distinguishing the appeal of Shakespeare's collection from that of other such sequences published during the same era, R. J. C. Wait asserts that some of Shakespeare's sonnets ''are generally thought to be among the finest poetry in the English or any other language.'' Echoing that sentiment almost exactly, Stanley Wells remarks, ''Shakespeare's sonnets include some of the greatest individual love poems in the English language.'' Wait also aptly verbalizes the notion that the sequence as a whole bears a certain unique historical value: ''If some or all of its contents do indeed reflect personal experiences and emotions they represent practically the only personal statement which has been left to us by one of the greatest figures of the world's literature.'' Indeed, Shakespeare has somewhat tantalizingly left behind a collection of poetry that begs for interpretation in light of his personal life, even though any given line or word may have entirely fictional connotations. Wait concludes, ''The immortality which their author claimed for the Sonnets, and about which the modern reader also holds no doubts, is due, not to any key which they may or may not contain to the secrets of Shakespeare's heart, but simply to their quality as poetry.'' Wells likewise focuses on the quality of the poetry itself, finding the challenging nature of the Sonnets to be especially redeeming. He notes that reading the verses in order is a difficult endeavor in that the final couplets limit the overall flow, no narrative sequence is provided, and the poet's mood changes so abruptly; further, the poet's emotions are at times quite dark, as characterized by disillusionment, self-abasement, and self-contempt. Wells admiringly concludes, ''The single poem which is Shakespeare's Sonnets will never have the popularity of some of its parts, but, in its rapid shifts of mood, its intense exploration of the 'heaven' and the 'hell' of being in love, it is far greater than the sum of those parts.''

Also perceiving a lack of autobiographical content in the Sonnets, Katharine M. Wilson contends that the sequence as a whole constitutes a grand parody of the sonnet tradition; in analyzing Shakespeare's approach from this angle, her appreciative critical stance is quite distinct from those of many of her fellow scholars. She writes, ''As to method, Shakespeare gets fun out of such things as making play with the imagery or the situation, with exaggerating and mocking, with naive explanations or expressions of surprise that his experience is different, with translating sonnet situations into terms of reality and by treating them seriously showing how absurd they are.'' Wilson goes on to declare that the art of the sonnets is not diminished by their lack of gravity: ''The parody has a sort of greatness, which I should say is sensed chiefly in its music. It mimics in a dance that has its own breadth, dignity and grace.'' She concludes that Shakespeare's sonnets ''have the sound of great poetry'' and ''reveal a new aspect of his genius.''

Overall, critical inquiry into the Sonnets is likely to continue indefinitely, given the many ambiguities surrounding Shakespeare's sequence. Critics may ever theorize with regard to the degree of autobiographical content; the identities of the young man and ''dark lady''; the dates when the individual poems were written; the influence of contemporary authors on Shakespeare's creative imagination; and, of course, the meanings inherent in the poems themselves. Duncan-Jones notes that women were responsible for many of the most insightful readings of the late twentieth century; she conjectures that women may be generally better tuned to the ''predominantly reflective, introspective subject matter'' of the Sonnets while also perhaps being ''able to remain at once calmly observant of, yet emotionally receptive to, the masculine homoerotic thrust of 1-126 that has caused such upset to generations of male readers.''

In offering what he unabashedly frames as his own subjective reading of the Sonnets, David K.Weiser compares the multiplicity of meanings to be found therein with the countless combinations of moves that can be carried out in a game of chess. He writes, ''Standard gambits and strategies do exist, but gifted players still devise endless variations. . . . There are 154 sonnets, most of them packed with enough complexity to inspire a dissertation. And there are infinite ways of combining them into meaningful patterns.'' Duncan-Jones echoes the thought that the Sonnets should be especially prized for their complexity, as possible ''semantic readings,'' she asserts, ''are, in truth, inexhaustible.'' She satisfactorily concludes, ''Here, even more than in the rest of Shakespeare's work, it is open to each and every reader to arrive at an individual and original response. The notorious truism that no two people ever concur in interpreting Sonnets is not cause for despair, but for rejoicing.''

Bibliography:

Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ''Introduction,'' in Shakespeare's Sonnets, by William Shakespeare, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997, pp. 1-105.

Edwards, Philip, ''The Sonnets to the Dark Woman,'' in Shakespeare and the Confines of Art, Methuen, 1968, pp. 17-31.

Ferry, Anne, ''Shakespeare,'' in All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell, Harvard University Press, 1975, pp. 3-63.

Giroux, Robert, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Atheneum, 1982.

Muir, Kenneth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Allen & Unwin, 1979, pp. 55-149.

Wait, R. J. C., The Background to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Schocken Books, 1972, pp. 1-8.

Weiser, David K., Mind in Character: Shakespeare's Speaker in the Sonnets, University of Missouri Press, 1987.

Wells, Stanley, ''Introduction,'' in Shakespeare's Sonnets, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 1-11.

Wilson, Katharine M., Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets, Allen & Unwin, 1974, pp. 26, 80-3, 149, 320-21.

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