Bound to Read. Jeffrey Todd Knight

volume, the speaker’s lying “love” no longer denotes any one “mistress” figure but is free to take on shades of reference from this volume (aided perhaps in this case by the mention of an “untutored youth,” which conjures up Adonis, named only a few lines later).⁶¹ The range of potential transpositions, in other words, becomes broader with a new material context. This volume asks us to read sonnets 138 and 144 not in the sequence of poems that for us gives them meaning and a title but in a different textual assembly: one whose most prominent scene of courtship, iterated across multiple works, is Venus’s courtship of the boy.

      A similar point can be made regarding the place of Lucrece in this volume. Modern critics, addressing the historical problem of Lucrece’s perceived moral dilemma, have tended to interpret the poem either implicitly or explicitly in the context of the Sonnets or that of Shakespeare’s classical sources. Nancy Vickers, in her magisterial reading, cites sonnet 106 and Shakespeare’s rejection of the poetics of praise, arguing that Lucrece exposes the violence of erotic description as it was practiced by male writers in the Petrarchan tradition.⁶² Jane O. Newman and others have similarly invoked Ovid’s Fasti and the tale of Philomela to show how Shakespeare departed from the convention of the vengeful rape victim, portraying Lucrece instead as a tragic sacrifice to a patriarchal power structure.⁶³ In both of these interpretive frameworks, Lucrece’s agency is minimal, present only in constitutive relation to male agency, whether sexual or political. But in a compilation where Lucrece is linked to other works by Shakespeare—works attentive to female agency (and indeed, impropriety) in figures like Venus and the “dark lady” of the two sonnets—a different protagonist, one whose will can be conceived outside the male power structure, is freer to emerge.