ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the sonnets’ contexts in the expanding editions of William Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim, which highlight the sonnets’ adaptability to essential early preferences, especially the amorous themes of other Renaissance sonnet sequences and the seductive elements of popular Classical texts, such as the works of Ovid. Jaggard’s paratexts align with those in late sixteenth-century editions of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, showing Shakespeare’s increased vendibility and established classical affiliations. Similarly, the volume’s earliest identifiable reader, who copied several of the Pilgrim poems into a verse miscellany, likewise appreciated Shakespeare’s classical themes.
