SOURCE: "The Scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Productions, edited by Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 35-49.

In the following essay, de Grazia asserts that in terms of Elizabethan cultural imperatives, the primary scandal of Shakespeare's sequence is the depiction, in the final twenty-eight lyrics, of a love that threatens to annihilate the patriarchal and hierarchical order of society.

Of all the many defences against the scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets—Platonism, for example, or the Renaissance ideal of friendship—John Benson's is undoubtedly the most radical. In order to cover up the fact that the first 126 of the Sonnets were written to a male, Benson in his 1640 Poems: Written by Wil Shakespeare. Gent. changed masculine pronouns to feminine and introduced titles which directed sonnets to the young man to a mistress. By these simple editorial interventions, he succeeded in...