The Complete Sonnets and Poems

by Shakespeare, William; Burrow, Colin

• ISBN13: 9780198184317
• ISBN10: 019818431X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Shakespeare's Sonnets are among the most complex and beautiful poems ever written. Their exploration of love, praise, homo- and hetero-sexual desire is enacted in the richest, densest writing in English. And the first printed work to which Shakespeare's name was attached was the eroticnarrative poem, Venus and Adonis, which developed a sumptuous vocabulary in which to explore love, praise of the beloved, sexual desire, and the power of rhetoric. That poem was so popular that most of Shakespeare's contemporaries thought of him as primarily a poet, rather than a playwright. Yetdespite the power of Shakespeare's poems, and their foundational place within his oeuvre, modern readers have seldom been encouraged to engage with his non-dramatic works as a whole. This new edition explains how this state of affairs has arisen, and why it needs to be changed. The volume contains the complete Sonnets and poems with a full commentary. An extensive and lively introduction explores Shakespeare's poetic development, and shows how the poems relate to each other and to his dramatic works. The Sonnets are freshly interpreted, not as cryptic fragments ofautobiography, but as works which ask their readers to think about relationships between lyric poems and the historical circumstances which may have given rise to them. The narrative poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are placed where they belong, at the origin of Shakespeare's thinking about whatit means to desire and to be desired. The edition responds to the most recent scholarly work on the interpretation and dating of Shakespeare's poems and Sonnets. It also explores what the poems may have meant to their earliest readers. For this reason it also includes poems attributed to Shakespearein the seventeenth century, as well as those printed under his name in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Shakespeare the Poet	p. 1
Venus and Adonis	p. 6
Publication and Date of Composition	p. 6
Dedication	p. 10
Literary Milieu	p. 15
Lucrece	p. 40
Publication and Date of Composition	p. 40
The Argument, Sources, and Politics	p. 45
Reading (in) Lucrece	p. 55
Rape and Consent	p. 66
The Passionate Pilgrim	p. 74
'Let the bird of loudest lay'	p. 82
Shakespeare's Sonnets	p. 91
Publication and Circulation	p. 91
Dedication	p. 98
Date and Sequence	p. 103
Sources	p. 111
Reading the Sonnets	p. 118
A Lover's Complaint	p. 138
Date and Attribution	p. 138
The Poem and its Context	p. 140
Poems Attributed to Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century	p. 146
'Shall I die?'	p. 148
A Funeral Elegy	p. 152
Editorial Procedures	p. 159
Abbreviations and References	p. 160
Venus and Adonis	p. 171
Lucrece	p. 237
The Passionate Pilgrim	p. 339
'Let the Bird of Loudest Lay'	p. 371
Shakespeare's Sonnets	p. 379
A Lover's Complaint	p. 693
Appendix	p. 719
Poems Attributed to Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century	p. 719
Index	p. 729
Index of First Lines	p. 748
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.