The Secret Architecture of Shakespeare s Sonnets 1st Edition by Steven Monte ISBN 9781474481472 1474481477

This book makes two main claims: that Shakespeare’s Sonnets contains intricate hidden organization, and that Shakespeare was far more engaged with other poets and with pursuing a career as a poet than is generally assumed. The first claim presupposes that the organizational schemes have been hiding in plain view for over four centuries. The second is literary-historical and biographical, because it speaks to Shakespeare’s cultural milieu and personal ambitions. Although ‘hidden’ and ‘hiding’ may create the impression that Shakespeare wrote in code, the fundamental reason why his schemes have gone unnoticed is historical: within decades of his death, conventions of sonnet sequences became unfamiliar, and they have largely remained so since. The first claim might also be said to follow from the second, because the poets with whom Shakespeare engages most intensely wrote the most complex sequences. In proving these claims, the book approaches Sonnets as three distinct and related things: as a free-standing sequence, as a sonnet sequence among other poets’ sequences, and as a work in Shakespeare’s career as a poet.