Vocabulary and chronology: the case of Shakespeare's sonnets
M. Jackson · The Review of English Studies · 2001
There is still no agreement about when Shakespeare wrote his sonnets. But statistical analysis of rare-word links between groups of sonnets and Shakespeare's plays provides solid new evidence. Each Shakespeare play can be shown to be most closely connected in its rare-word vocabulary with other plays written within the same period. Shakespeare poems whose dates of composition are known display the same relationship to the chronologically ordered dramatic canon. This principle helps date the sonnets. The traditional notion that they were essentially completed in the period 1593-6 is certainly mistaken. The time-span, even for Sonnets 1-103 and 127-54, must be extended forward at least another three years, and most, if not all, of the last twenty-odd in the sequence to the Fair Youth (104-26) belong to the seventeenth century. This article builds on the pioneering work of A. Kent Hieatt and his associates, but significantly modifies their findings. It supports Katherine Duncan-Jones's conclusions in her Arden edition of the sonnets (1997) that Shakespeare was composing, revising, and arranging the 1609 Quarto sequence until well into the seventeenth century.