Elizabethan's reaction to William Shakespeare's love poems?

His poems were printed far more than his plays were. In his own time Shakespeare was known, not as a creator of great characters, but as a writer of great lines, and lots of them. His sonnets were circulated, “among his private friends.” who passed them from one to another. This sharing of Shakespeare's poems, Francis Meres wrote in 1598, was like sharing a cup of sweetened wine, perhaps like kissing on the lips. Ben Jonson catches the scenario in a famous lyric: “Drink to me only with thine eyes, / And I will pledge with mine; / Or leave a kiss but in the cup, / And I’ll not look for wine” Reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in manuscript, Meres seems to imply, was in itself an act of passion.

There is a very good book that will help you greatly in understanding and answering this question. It's "The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets," by Robert Matz. It's written by a respected Shakespeare scholar, but he wrote it specifically for students, so it's relatively easy to read and understand. It explains a lot about attitudes towards love in Shakespeare's society and how his poems fit into the various attitudes towards love (and money and power as well). If your library doesn't have it they can probably get it for you via inter-library loan.

As his plays focused primarily upon tragedy and comedy in the area of love,

thereby implying its` unlikeliness as a necessity,

or even as a lasting,`probable, is likely that his poems/Sonnets

were received in closed circles as something like genius` flights of

poetic indulgence.

Many or some of Shakespeare`s lovers were male and the Sonnets were

(most wise and perceptive as well as beautiful) artistic tributes

to the feelings and understandings he had,of these

and of others of both sexes,love-liasons.

Shakespeare was very well married to an intelligent and highly astute

woman,who `kept the hearth alive` by running an excellent family business or two,

keeping a socially - respected household outside of her husband`s

literary affair(e)s, and he returned home regularly to her.It seems

the had a manageable,`understanding`..not unusual,

in higher/`successful` society in the historic period,the caveat

generally being that provided wives were treated well, and

the liasons were not local,to embarrass and to affront ,

such were tolerated...`love`,being an emotional`conundrum`.