Abstract
From the moment stationer Thomas Thorpe introduced Shakespeare’s Sonnets with a dedication to “THE. ONLY. BEGETTER … Mr. W.H.,” readers have been encouraged to read these lyrics as the fruit of a monogamous reproductive relationship between the poet and a more powerful patron. Yet when we turn to John Donne’s contemporaneous manuscript sonnets to young men (verse letters rarely paired with Shakespeare’s printed poems), we find a series of queer lyrics that hail a “begetter” while also practicing more promiscuous modes of collaborative lyric making. Placing Donne’s and Shakespeare’s male-addressed sonnets alongside one another, this essay proposes that the framework of poet and “begetter” offers a cover for a range of alternate poetic partnerships. To glimpse these sensuous communal relations at work is to see the Sonnets as less exclusive, and more invested in shared modes of composition and circulation, than we have presumed.
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