No edition of Shakspere's Sonnets, apart from his other writings, with sufficient explanatory notes, has hitherto appeared. Notes are an evil, but in the case of the Sonnets a necessary evil, for many passages are hard to understand. I have kept beside me for several years an interleaved copy of Dyce's text, in which I set down from time to time anything that seemed to throw light on a difficult passage. From these jottings, and from the Variorum Shakspere of 1821, my annotations have been chiefly drawn. I have had before me in preparing this volume the editions of Bell, Clark and Wright, Collier, Delius, Dyce, Halliwell, Hazlitt, Knight, Palgrave, Staunton, Grant White; the translations of FrançoisVictor Hugo, Bodenstedt, and others; and the greater portion of the extensive Shakspere Sonnets literature,
The poet's name is rightly written Shakespeare, rightly also Shakspere. If I err in choosing the form Shakspere, I err with the owner of the name.
? To which this general reference may suffice. I often found it convenient to alter slightly the notes of the Variorum Shakspere, and I have not made it a rule to refer each note from that edition to its individual writer.