Shakespeare’s Lyric Poetry

Conceptions of Shakespeare’s writings typically start with the plays – bibliographically with the First Folio edition of his collected plays (1623) – and consider the poems, Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594), ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ (1601), and the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (1609), as marginal to his works. There have been attempts to reverse this tendency, to start with the poems and to argue for their centrality, but such attempts run up against the sheer number of plays and the relative scarcity of (collections of) poems compared to them. The present research project proposes a conception of Shakespeare that starts with neither the plays nor the poems, but the poetry, in particular the lyric poetry. His lyric poetry finds its fullest expression in the Sonnets, but it pervades Shakespeare’s works as a whole, including his dramatic works, which contain not only many highly poetic passages but also a considerable number of songs and poems. Lyric poetry, broadly understood, is also central to Shakespeare’s reception in his own time and beyond, as shown by the highlighting, commonplacing, and anthologizing of passages of outstanding poetry from his works. This is a form of reception that was crucial in Shakespeare’s own time and remained important subsequent to it but is often lost sight of today. This research project proposes to recover its centrality and to advance new ways of thinking about Shakespeare which centre on his lyric poetry.