Conclusion

Abstract The conclusion recapitulates some key arguments of the book through a reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It offers some brief speculations on what happened after Shakespeare’s anthology period, and how the experience of being anthologized drove him to new ways of writing. It touches on other works that might be read in relation to anthologizing, including Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. And it reads the 1609 Sonnets through their peculiarly extractable couplets, which seem at times to wander free from their preceding poems, and which, in Sonnet 126, hint at a poetic afterlife—for Shakespeare and his beloved—at the hands of anthologizing readers.