ABSTRACT
The metamorphoses undergone by Ovid’s heroes and heroines sink into insignificance beside those suffered by the Shakespearean sonnets at the hands of the various theorists. Often one and the same sonnet is given three or four different interpretations, all equally good, or equally bad, to make it refer to the diverse circumstances required by the different interpreters; a particular phrase is snatched from another and twisted into two or more completely incompatible meanings to bolster up two or more completely incompatible views; and the whole sequence is rearranged in several various ways in a desperate effort to make it tell the life-story of the several various candidates for the authorship. No other portion of English literature has ever been subjected to such a mad whirl of kaleidoscopic changes as these 154 little poems known as the sonnets of Shakespeare.
