Introduction

In studying Shakespeare’s Sonnets and narrative poems, this book focuses in particular on their variously manifested scepticism, their concern both with what wisdom might be in human conduct and with the extent to which human conduct might be directed by wisdom, their preoccupation with knowing, inventing, or reinventing the past, their exploration of the relations among self-knowledge, sexuality and death, and their ambiguous figuring o f gender.1 As it does so the book considers how Shakespeare’s poems compete with, rewrite, contradict or harmonize with those by some other writers, especially by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And o f course at different points the book considers similarities or differences between Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse and his plays.