ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609; beyond that, however, we know little of their transmission from manuscript to print.1 They may have been written between 1592 and 1599, that is, from about the time when Venus and Adonis was being written until that when The Passionate Pilgrim was published. On the other hand, there is no shortage of alternative suggestions. It has been proposed, for example, that most of the Sonnets were written by 1589, that they were pro bably all written between 1591 and 1595 or 1593 and 1597, or that they were begun in the 1590s but completed thereafter.2 Because of a remark by Francis Meres it seems likely that a number of the Sonnets were circulating ‘among [Shakespeare’s] private friends’ before and (or) during 1598; yet exactly which sonnets, and did their being circulated (if it happened) affect either their composition or that of any which Shakespeare wrote subsequently?3 Moreover, to what extent is the order o f the poems Shakespeare’s? W ho was M r W. H., to whom the publisher of the Sonnets dedicated them, and who was the youth (or, perhaps, who were the youths) to whom and about whom sonnets 1-126 were written? Were those two people one and the same - if, of course, the youth actually existed? W ho was the Dark Lady o f sonnets 127-52, assuming that she too really lived? The answer to each question is simply that no one knows; at present, to seek an answer is to enter a Sargasso Sea o f ink and speculation.4
