Shakespeare's Sonnet 145 and the Challenges of Legacy Criticism

Abstract This article re-evaluates the merits of Shakespeare's Sonnet 145 and explores its critical legacy over the past half-century. While the sonnet has typically been seen as inferior due to its use of tetrameter rather than pentameter, one article from 1971 made a case for it being the first poem Shakespeare ever wrote. Rather than prompt critical debate, the theory presented in the article gained nearly universal acceptance and has been amplified ever since. The problem I identify is that the theory itself has been adopted without due scrutiny, and that when we approach Sonnet 145 from the standpoint that it is neither inferior nor juvenilia, we can then see how the supposed aberrations are potentially deliberate choices made by Shakespeare to underscore the poem's content.