This thesis undertakes a study of Shakespeare's sonnets that seeks to locate them in the determinate historical circumstances of the moment of their production. Subjectivity in the sonnets is read as the location of a series of conflicts which are ultimately socio-historical in nature. Contemporaries identified the sonnet form as a discourse of the aristocracy, especially in its manifestation of courtly love. Shakespeare's sonnets attempt to manage the pressures that the history of the late sixteenth century impose upon this discursive formation from within the genre itself. The first and second chapters of the thesis set out the historical framework within which the generic requirements of the sonnet were played out, and discuss the tensions which result. Chapter three reads the first seventeen sonnets in the light of this work, arguing against a view of these particular poems as a homogeneous group of marriage sonnets. These sonnets set out the homosocial considerations that underpin the relationship between the addressor and the young nobleman in a way that foreshadows the conflicts that are played out in later poems. Chapter four traces these conflicts in terms of the subjectivity of the young man, noting that the historical crisis in the ideology of the aristocracy renders his subject-position unstable. Chapter five relates this result to the related subjectivity of the adressor, the poetic persona of the poems, and reads his position as noting the disjunctions in the dominant ideology, while nevertheless being unable to move away from its interpellation of his position. Chapter six notes the consequent disruption of gendered identity, both for the "dark lady" and the poetic persona himself. The conclusion argues for a materialist perspective on the sonnets' problematising of subjectivity in the Renaissance.

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In this dissertation, I examine the influence of Pyrrhonist skepticism over Shakespeare’s sonnets. Unlike academic skepticism, which begins from a position of doubt, Pyrrhonist skepticism encourages an embrace of multiple perspectives that, according to Sextus Empiricus, leads first to a suspension of judgment and ultimately to a state of tranquility. The Pyrrhonian inflection of Shakespeare’s sonnets accounts for the pleasure and uncertainty they cultivate in readers. By offering readers multiple perspectives on a given issue, such as love or infidelity, Shakespeare’s sonnets demonstrate the instability of information, suggesting that such instability can be a source for pleasure. One essential tool for the uncertainty in the sonnets, I argue, is the figurative language they draw from a variety of fields and discourses. When these metaphors contradict one another, creating fragmented images in the minds of readers, they generate a unique aesthetic experience, which creates meaning that transcends the significance of any of the individual metaphors. In the first two chapters, I identify important contexts for Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the pliability of figurative language: Reformation-era religious tracts and pamphleteers’ debates about the value and function of the theater. In Chapter 3, I examine Shakespeare’s response to the Petrarchan tradition, arguing that he diverges from the sonneteers, who often use figurative language in an attempt to access and communicate stable truths. Shakespeare creates epistemological instability in sonnets both to the young man and to the dark lady, and, as I argue in Chapter 4, this similarity offers readers an opportunity to think beyond traditional divisions between the two sonnet subsequences.

The second edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, titled Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-Speare, Gent, and published by stationer John Benson in 1640, was a text typical of its time. In an effort to update the old-fashioned sonnet sequence in which its contents had first reached print, the compiler or editor of the Bensonian version rearranged the poems from the earlier quarto text, adding titles and other texts thought to have been written by or about the sonnets' author. The immediate reception of the 1640 Poems was a quiet one, but the volume's contents and structure served as the foundation for more than half of the editions of Shakespeare's sonnets produced in the eighteenth century. In part due to the textual instability created by the presence of two disparate arrangements of the collection, Shakespeare's sonnets served only as supplements to the preferred Shakespearean canon from 1709 to 1790. When, at the end of the century, the sonnets finally entered the canon in Edmond Malone's groundbreaking edition of the plays and poems together, Benson's version was quickly overshadowed by the earlier text, which was preferred as both more authorial and, due to Malone's careful critical readings, autobiographical. In contrast to the many scholars since Malone who have overlooked or denigrated the Poems of 1640, this thesis studies the second edition of Shakespeare's sonnets within the framework of the early modern culture that produced it, arguing that Benson's edition provides valuable evidence about the editorial habits and literary preferences of the individuals and culture for which it was originally intended.