Emily E. Stockard, Florida Atlantic University
Since their mysterious publication in 1609, Shakespeare's Sonnets have resisted a variety of attempts to place an ordering construct on them.1 This essay offers readers a purchase on what strikes many as a bewildering collection of poems. I will suggest that many of the sonnets can be understood as belonging to the tradition of Renaissance consolatory literature. Further, Shakespeare's rhetorical strategies of consolation place the sequence in the tradition of Renaissance skeptical thought. My approach to the Sonnets is unusual in that I consider individual poems in their surrounding contexts when, with the exception perhaps of the "procreation sonnets" (sonnets 1-17), it is more common to see them in isolation. In previous readings of the Sonnets, certain poems have been picked out for extensive treatment; many more have been ignored, perhaps rightfully so. But my approach does not require consideration of the relative literary merits of various sonnets; rather I will look at a sonnet's relation to those that surround it in order to point out patterns of argument that take form when individual sonnets are considered in their place in the sequence.
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