The Early Modern English Sonnet: Ever in Motion provides a provocative reassessment of the sonnet's place in English literary history. The introduction and the chapters that follow fulfill the promise of the title (a borrowing from Michael Drayton) and illustrate the sonnet's evolution in early modern England. The editors and the authors of the individual chapters break new ground by juxtaposing the sonnet, or, rather, our historical and literary understanding of the sonnet, alongside fresh and new interpretations that both students and advanced scholars of poetry and poetics will find indispensable.

The scholarly methodology is largely linguistic and contextual. The authors employ close reading, philology, textual editing, translation studies, and New Formalism. As part of their invitation for us to reread the sonnet, the authors also marshal the scholarly expansions offered by New Historicism. The temporal scope is appropriate for the ambitions of the anthology, and it takes us from Wyatt and Surrey to the end of the seventeenth century. The chapter's thematic divisions overlap to allow for interdisciplinarity. By way of example, chapters 1, 3, and 8, meditate on the social practices of the sonnet, with chapter 8 also investigating social miscellanies and patterns of publication. There are nine chapters that range from revisiting canonical poets, like Shakespeare and Spenser, to explicating the works of lesser-known entities, such as Harvey and Barnes. Additionally, the contributors illustrate how the sonnet shifted from personal exegesis to cultural works of art. What's more, the anthology seeks to illuminate the sonnet's cultural symbiosis with other poetic forms. Finally, the anthology is careful to foreground its reevaluation of the sonnet to include necessities of geography and literary jealousy. For instance, how does England's spatial relationship to Italy and France influence the English sonnet?

Chapters 1 and 2 are connected by a focus on the Continental apparatuses of sonnet making and codification in Italy, France, and England. In chapter 1, William J. Kennedy provides examples of how Italian commentary on Petrarch's Canzoniere paved the way for English translations of Petrarch. In chapter 2, Carlo Alberto Girotto, Jean-Charles Monferran, and Rémi Vuillemin interpret the poetic treatises written in Italian, French, and English as prescriptive forms of annotation. In chapters 3 and 4, Guillaume Coatalen and Sophie Chiari, respectively, consider the performative aspects of the sonnet. Coatalen argues that theatrical personifications of the sonneteer were mocked as effeminate, but he also points out that over time, the form lent itself to the patrician needs of the nobility. Chiari's attention to performance revolves around the sonnets in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, which she traces from dramatic dissemination to print. Both Coatalen and Chiari highlight the ways in which the sonnet was reconditioned to accommodate the purposes of personal advancement.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 offer a recuperative methodology for accessing unexplored sonnets and sonnet sequences by examining the physical environments of the sonnet. In chapter 5, Chris Stamatakis radically re-presents sonnet sequences by insisting that the unsequenced sonnets offer more interpretive potential than our traditional interpretations of sequences. In chapter 6, Elisabeth Chaghafi seeks to find a place for the unrecognized sonnets of Gabriel Harvey, “Greene's Memorial.” Chaghafi posits that Harvey's sonnets may lack a poetic taxonomy but they are indicative of Harvey's efforts to frame himself as arbiter of his emotions: his sonnets perform the work of mediator between himself and his detractors and, consequently, they should be read as having inherent literary value. Similar to Chaghafi's assertions, Vuillemin finds a congruence between the sonneteer and self-aggrandizement. Vuillemin focuses on Barnabe Barnes's two sonnet sequences, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), and A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets (1595). Vuillemin's contention is that both sequences illustrate Barnes's deliberate strategy for staging poetic ambition, and therefore both sequences are concomitant.

The last chapters, by Hugh Gazzard and Andrew Eastman, respectively, function as cutting-edge primers on textual scholarship. Gazzard provides a modern edition and a thorough elucidation of the The Muses Garland (ca. 1601), a short, printed miscellany of five sonnets. Here Gazzard expounds on the textual practice that aided in the reproduction of this startling document. Like Gazzard, Eastman develops a technique of textual transcription but with a return to Shakespeare's sonnets. Furthermore, Eastman abandons narrativity for the sturdier structures of syntax, rhythm, and punctuation. Gazzard and Eastman's textual innovations reflect the collective labor performed in this anthology, its deft engagement with existing scholarship, and its firm alliance with original modes of poetic inquiry.