ABSTRACT
Malone’s stabilization of the sonnets and his carefully negotiated paratexts influenced almost every subsequent reader of these poems. Sonnet readers after Malone applied his ideas critically to the sonnets in their own copies, sometimes leaving queries about addressees in their margins and referencing Malone’s commentary in their annotations. By the early nineteenth century, when James Boswell prepared the first major post-Malone edition of Shakespeare’s works, Malone’s groups, characters, and biography were well established. Boswell took great pains to mitigate the effects of Malone’s structure, but he did not recommend any other critical approaches. Consequently, most subsequent scholars have followed Malone’s structure, overlooking many other possibilities.
