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.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1889.

Swinburne, it may also be used to promote more conservative policies and literary interpretations in other writers such as Robert Browning and Charles Dickens.".