Note on titles, terminology, and notation
Steven Monte · Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021
Note on titles, terminology, and notationI treat all titles as singular proper nouns, including Shakespeare's Sonnets and its abbreviated form, Sonnets.This practice follows that of Katherine Duncan-Jones in the third Arden edition of Sonnets.(For readers accustomed to 'the Sonnets', the convention may take some getting used to.)I refer to editors and philological scholars as 'commentators'.Like many commentators, I use 'sonnet sequence' for the work's genre: it is the most common term, and 'sequence' helpfully implies that the order of the poems matters.Similarly, I refer to other commentators by surname -a scholarly practice that, at its best, is an effi cient way of clarifying arguments and providing points of reference in debates.But conjured names can also be alienating, whatever one's familiarity with them; for frequently cited names, see the editorial list in the bibliography.In quoted texts, spelling and punctuation are modernised unless rhymes or wordplay would be obscured.