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Shake-speares Sonnets lies much too far outside the governing literary conventions of Renaissance sonnet sequences in England (and the rest of Europe, for that matter) to have been anything other than a series of real-world verse epistles to and about an unnamed historical person, making mention of other unnamed historical persons, and written by the historical person William Shakespeare—who, I argue (again somewhat controversially, as some may be surprised to hear), is the book's “I.”
Appendix B argues that Barnfield, who makes it clear that he (having taken on the pastoral persona Daphnis, and who is the “I” of those of his books which are in dialogue with Shake-speares Sonnets) was attempting in The Affectionate Shepheard to write an early reunification piece in the hopes of healing the long fragmented Albionic Britain—of making England, Scotland, and Wales once again the sacred, unified sovereign entity it had been in the old chroniclers' mythopoetic histories.
Appendix C provides a modern edition of Barnfield's Greenes Funeralls. I make necessarily frequent reference to that book's specific sonnets in these pages. I thought a modern text necessary for present readers because the original edition is scarce even in scholarly reprints, inaccessible online to many readers (at such sites as Early English Books Online) because either they or their institutions have not purchased such access, and because the original edition—even as it appears in the scholarly reprints—is too badly spelled and punctuated to be decipherable—and is hence uninterpretable.
For the four main texts examined in detail in this book (Shake-speares Sonnets and three early-1590s books by Richard Barnfield), I have adopted the following editorial principles: for Shakespeare, I use the modernized edition of John Kerrigan, departing from it only for one word in Sonnet 86, “compiers,” in order to preserve the 1609 quarto's original spelling (and