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Reviewed by:
  • Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England
  • Holly A. Crocker (bio)
Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. By Sasha Roberts . Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003. Illus. Pp. xii + 254. $70.00 cloth.

As a book that addresses textual transmission, Sasha Roberts's valuable study is about far more than its title—Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England. In its analysis of early modern readers, this book issues a powerful summons to rethink our assumptions about reception's ability to construct, alter, or sustain authors and their works. Late in this book Roberts claims that her study is not a call to "abandon the notion or quest for authorial or textual authority altogether" (190, emphasis added); even so, the myriad ways in which she shows readers making free with Shakespeare's verse through annotations, emendations, and citations validates her recommendation that we view "early modern literary culture as reader-centred rather than author-led" (194).

By looking at how early modern readers responded to Shakespeare's poems, Roberts attends to important historical differences between our assumptions about reading and those evidenced by earlier habits. It is not just that she is able to trace a shift in literary tastes between early modern preferences for Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and our own esteem for the 1609 Sonnets; instead, Roberts examines the reception histories of these works, registering changes that are sensitive to temporal, gender, or material contexts.

Her first two chapters use gender theory to outline changing critical responses to Venus and Adonis, revealing that for Roberts reading is about representation as much as it is about practice. Tracing the trope of the eroticized woman reader of Venus and Adonis, Roberts shows how men have used representations of reading to give meaning [End Page 224] to poems and to women's experiences of them. Venus and Adonis was often portrayed as a poem that would threaten women's delicate chastity. But, as Roberts also argues, representing Venus and Adonis as a corrupting pastime for women readers also lent it voyeuristic appeal to men, who were encouraged to imagine women's unseen-yet-transgressive reading habits. These dual masculine fantasies are undercut by Roberts's inclusion of responses from two early modern women readers of the poem: Anne Southwell objected to it on the grounds that its wantonness denigrated poetry in general, while Frances Wolfreston autographed her book and marked bawdy passages for later readers. These divergent reactions therefore illustrate "disjunctions between rhetorical tropes and historical practices of women's reading" (50).

Yet Roberts's examination of Venus and Adonis's gentlemen readers also suggests that rhetorical tropes are important to the ways in which male readers create over time meanings for an author's works. Continual references to Venus and Adonis by gentlemen readers reveal their intimate familiarity with the work. As Roberts further shows, male readers appropriated the poem by transforming it into sententiae, even as the poem's pamphlet format moved Venus and Adonis "from the realm of poesy to a cheap, ephemeral publication" (82). Over time Venus and Adonis became associated with the inept gentleman reader of light literature; but the poem's historically diverse male readership suggests instead that the poem appealed equally to sophisticated and unrefined gentlemen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Nevertheless, the agency of actual readers is important to Roberts in her third chapter, which focuses on The Rape of Lucrece. As she notes, Shakespeare's representation of Lucrece seems to invite controversy, since Lucrece can be interpreted on the one hand as an exemplum of womanly modesty and, on the other, as a marker of feminine excess. Roberts's major contribution to this debate is her acknowledgment that texts' material formats shape their meanings. Her readings of later quartos of Lucrece demonstrate that another version of readerly agency consists in how works are put together for dissemination. Roberts argues convincingly that from 1616, when the poem was divided into discrete chapters with discursive headings, it would have been harder to read Shakespeare's Lucrece as anything other than an "innocent" or "heroine." Editorial decisions similarly attest to the increasing importance of...

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