Poem Collections

In 1598 Francis Meres praised “mellifluous & hony-tongued” Shakespeare for his Ovidian poetry, Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and “his sugred Sonnets among his private friends” (Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury, fols. 281v-82r). Some of these poems, like Sonnet 145 (thought to describe Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway), were likely printed by Thomas Thorpe in his quarto of 1609, Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted, but editors and critics have plausibly dated the composition of most of the sonnets to the following decade.