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Shakespeare & Beyond

Excerpt: The Afterlife of Shakespeare's Sonnets

book cover
book cover

book coverWhy weren’t Shakespeare’s sonnets included in the First Folio? And what was the effect on the way that later readers and critics considered Shakespeare’s total body of work?

Jane Kingsley-Smith of Roehampton University, London, explores these questions in the below excerpt from her 2019 book The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, published by Cambridge University Press. The book examines how Shakespeare’s sonnets were received at the time of their publication and how they’ve been thought of ever since.