Most of Shakespeare's sonnets are love poems to a young man. In 1640 a publisher changed some of the pronouns so they seemed to be written to a woman, and for a century and a half that was the version people read.
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Shakespeare's 154 sonnets were printed in 1609. The first 126 are written to a young man, whom the poet first urges to marry and have children and then simply loves. The rest turn to a dark-haired woman. Here each line has the old words and senses explained under Shakespeare's own spelling. It is being pressed now and can't be read here yet. Support it and it opens sooner.
The 1609 edition came from the publisher Thomas Thorpe, with a dedication to a mysterious Mr. W. H. In 1640 John Benson reprinted the poems under invented titles and changed the pronouns in a few of them. Readers went back to the 1609 text only at the end of the eighteenth century, with the scholar Edmond Malone.
Sonnet 20 calls the young man the master-mistress of my passion, with a woman's face and a woman's gentle heart, and ends on a pun about what nature added to make him a man.
Making an interlinear Sonnets to the Young Man is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Sonnets 1–126 gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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