This is the first comprehensive study of early modern texts, readings, and readers of Shakespeare's poems in print and manuscript, Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England makes a compelling contribution both to Shakespeare studies and the history of the book. Examining gendered readerships and the use of erotic works, reading practises and manuscript culture, textual forms and transmission, literary taste and the canonisation of Shakespeare, this book argues that historicist criticism can no longer ignore histories of reading.

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction Ladies Reading 'Bawdy Geare': Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis , and the Early Modern Woman Reader Light Literature and Gentlemen Readers: Venus and Adonis , Textual Transmission, and the Construction of Poetic Meaning The Malleable Poetic Text: Narrative, Authorship, and the Transmission of Lucrece Textual Transmission and the Transformation of Desire: The Sonnets , A Lover's Complaint and The Passionate Pilgrim Afterword Bibliography Index

SASHA ROBERTS is Lecturer in English at the University of Kent. Her previous publications include Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900: An Annotated Anthology co-edited with Ann Thompson (1997), Writers and Their Work: Romeo and Juliet (1998), and essays on Shakespeare and the history of reading. She is currently researching the formation of literary taste in early modern manuscript culture.