THE KEY TO SHAKESPEARE’S HEART

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart…

1827, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth published a collection simply known as his . Of its contents, one of the most intriguing passages is to be found in his sonnet about sonnets, , which opens with the following lines: Wordsworth’s remark about Shakespeare’s Sonnets being the “key” to Shakespeare’s “heart” proved controversial at the time. The Sonnets had long provoked blushes, embarrassment and defensive reactions. William Hazlitt referred to them as “somewhat equivocal”; Samuel Taylor Coleridge assured his seven-year-old son that Shakespeare was “in his heart’s heart chaste”. All readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets eventually have to admit that some of them express Shakespeare’s desire for