The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, By Jane Kingsley-Smith

Abstract

In the thriving field of Shakespeare reception studies there has been remarkably little attention paid to his poetry, and particularly, the Sonnets—the subject of Jane Kingsley-Smith’s brilliant and entirely welcome new book. This omission replicates something of a gap in the afterlife of the texts themselves, which have been read somewhat unevenly but—as Kingsley-Smith conclusively shows—more continually since their initial 1609 publication than has previously been recognized. Theoretical work by Emma Smith and Laurie Maguire that reads source texts as traumatic memories, having certain moments of recurrence through time, is usefully invoked early in the study and provides a helpful model for rethinking the Sonnets’ reception (82). Kingsley-Smith reveals how certain historical moments previously thought to have had little interest in reading the Sonnets are in fact crucial to shaping their reception; the mid- and late seventeenth century, for instance, mark not periods of neglect, but an important engagement with...