ABSTRACT
The programme's director, James Schiffer, is also editor of the new Garland anthology of critical essays on the Sonnets. G. Blakemore Evans's text is generally as close to Q as he feels he can get away with; he even suggests that the uncorrected Q reading of 'proface' at Sonnet 89.11 may be right. Q was among other things a belated response to the piratical appearance of two of Shakespeare's sonnets in William Jaggard's The Passionate Pilgrim in 1598; Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that the entry of 'certain other sonnetes by W. S'. in the Stationer's Register for 1600 is the trace of a quick response that probably never saw print as Shakespeare continued to expand and revise his sequence. Helen Vendler prints the text of each poem twice, in a facsimile from Q and in an edited version in modern spelling, and then offers a critical reading of it in an essay of from two to six pages.
