ABSTRACT
Few other literary figures are as highly revered or as comprehensively studied within the anglophone realm as William Shakespeare, and his name or his legacy hardly require an introduction. This chapter offers a brief introduction of the collection and maps the four centuries of the Sonnets ’ existence while focusing on the different critical interpretations of the male beloved at their centre. It offers an insight into the scholarship exploring same-sex desire between men in Shakespeare’s times, as this will become relevant in the various interpretations of the love depicted in the poems. The chapter moves the Sonnets to their two target cultures and list the 15 Czech and Slovak translations starting from 1923 to the present day. The 15 Czech and Slovak translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets that will be introduced in this chapter are the works of different translators and translation teams, but they are united by one common feature; they contain all 154 poems from the original volume.
