SOURCE: “Making Love Out of Nothing at All: The Issue of Story in Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 470-88.

In the following essay, Crosman studies the first seventeen sonnets and contends that a distinct narrative may be discerned.

My thesis is that there is a discernible story in Shakespeare's sonnets, and I will support that thesis with a reading of sonnets 1-17, the so-called procreation sonnets. Because there is widespread distrust of finding narrative in the sonnets, I will begin by discussing the nature of that distrust, and will then argue in favor of permitting Shakespeare's sonnets to tell a story.

Let us begin with some characteristic and influential pronouncements on the subject:

1943

The sonnets may not be in an order which is absolutely correct but no one can deny that they are related and that they do show some development, some “story...