Shakespeare 1609: Cymbeline and the Sonnets von Richard Danson/Johnson Brown

How has Shakespeare been interpreted since his death in 1616? How are we to explain the posthumous fame that surrounds the name 'Shakespeare'? Shakespeare 1609: Cymbeline and the Sonnets considers these questions through case studies of two texts that appeared in about 1609 - Cymbeline as a play on the London stage, Shakespeare's Sonnets as a Quarto volume. As well as being roughly contemporaneous, these texts have been received more ambiguously than the majority of the Shakesperean canon. Cymbeline has been widely neglected, while the current fame of Shakespeare's Sonnets was not anticipated by the seventeenth-century reading public, who largely ignored the volume. This book looks at these works and considers their generic distinctiveness, their complex representations of sexuality, and the varied ways in which they have been received by subsequent generations and includes key secondary readings from influential critics.

RICHARD DANSON BROWN and DAVID JOHNSON are both Lecturers in Literature at the Open University. Richard Brown is the author of The New Poet: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints and David Johnson is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa.