ABSTRACT
This chapter explores adaptations of several Shakespearean sonnets in the late seventeenth century: Sonnet 116 in Henry Lawes’ mid-century political song; several sonnets incorporated in John Suckling’s Brennoralt; extracted sonnet lines reshaped in Joshua Phillips’ The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence and Joshua Poole’s English Parnassus; Sonnet 55 transformed into a prefatory poem for William Chamberlayne’s Eromena; and four manuscript recontextualizations of individual sonnets. While different in form, all these approaches reflect a common willingness to adapt and appropriate Shakespeare’s texts for new purposes and show the comparative insignificance of Shakespeare’s name and canon even among readers who appreciated his rhetoric.
