The Shakespeare Sonnet Order: Poems and Groups

The Shakespeare Sonnet Order, Poems and Groups, by Brents Stirling, confronts one of the most persistent puzzles in Shakespeare studies: the sequence of the 1609 Quarto. Published without Shakespeare’s sanction and likely pirated by Thomas Thorpe, the Quarto is the only surviving early text of the Sonnets, but its arrangement is riddled with incoherence, abrupt shifts, and broken continuities. Stirling contends that while the volume preserves genuine “runs” of closely interconnected poems—l...