ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the transmission of Sonnet 2 in manuscripts compiled at Christ Church, Oxford, during the 1620s and 1630s. In these collections, Sonnet 2 is surrounded by poems on sexuality, politics, religion, death, and other topics, which cumulatively enable many different plausible readings. Poems were transmitted into these manuscripts both individually and also within larger clusters of shared texts, suggesting that early modern readers imagined the sonnet in conversation with works by more popular authors and valued its adaptability to current cultural issues. Within their miscellanies, Sonnet 2 was valued for its common ownership more than for Shakespeare’s authorial status.