ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines the history of Czechoslovakia from the time of its birth after the First World War to the present day and reflects on how the challenges of the 20th and 21st century impacted the lives of the country’s non-heterosexual population. It introduces William Shakespeare’s original collection published in 1609, and then maps the changing critical responses to the Sonnets over the following four centuries, with a focus on the controversy surrounding the possible male recipient of the poems. The book looks at the gender ambiguity of the source text, where the majority of the poems are dedicated to an unspecified you or thou, and asks how many of the translated poems retain this neutrality and how many choose to specify a male or a female recipient instead.
