Breaking the Book Known as Q

Abstract

This essay considers a series of questions about the relations between material presentation and poetic meaning that emerge from a simple but under-acknowledged fact about the 1609Shake-speares Sonnetsquarto: unlike nearly every other sonnet sequence from the period, Q's poems are broken by a series of nonuniform, seemingly arbitrary page breaks. Arguing that these breaks have profound implications for the interpretation and reception of Shakespeare's poems, the essay suggests thatnotreading page breaks is itself a reading practice-a historically specific, socially determined act in which certain elements of materiality are granted attention and authority while others are not. Espousing instead an approach to the materiality ofShake-speares Sonnetsthat would take seriously the matter of Q's page breaks, this essay understands the page and the page break to be units of meaning with particularly urgent implications for the recognition of poetic form and for the interrelations between a history of the book and the idea of literature. (CH)