The Complete Sonnets and Poems
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Description
Despite 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. It 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. Each work is freshly interpreted, making full use of the latest research. The volume also explores what the poems may have meant to their earliest readers, and, for this reason, it includes poems attributed to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, as well as those printed under his name in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599.Features
- The only complete, fully annotated edition of all Shakespeare's sonnets and poems, arranged in their order of composition: this must be the student's edition of choice.
- The detailed introduction examines the sonnets' biographical and literary background, including the mysteries of 'Mr W.H' and the 'dark lady', relates them to the poems, and discusses dating and textual matters.
- Edited by a noted scholar of the period.
Reviews
"Colin Burrow has produced an excellent edition of the non-dramatic works... This Poems and Sonnets is of high quality, elegent in physical, as well as intellectual, presentation"--New Studies in the Shakespearean Heroine
"[Burrow is] erudite, critically and philosophically sophisticated, and treat[s] textual issues with the seriousness they require.... [Burrow] has been able to offer, in his book-length introduction, the best study there is of Shakespeare as a poet. Burrow writes wonderfully about the interplay between the various poems and genres.... If the bookshelf had room for only one edition of Shakespeare's poems, Burrow's would be the one."--Stephen Orgel, London Review of Books
"Burrow's introduction is perhaps the best single essay on the sonnets available.... Finally, an edition lives or dies by the commentary to individual lines. In his notes, Burrow's insights into the tension between language and circumstance are brilliantly demonstrated in large and small ways (words, images, punctuation, etc.). In short, 'The Complete Sonnets & Poems' completes the work of many editors in making the case for the centrality of the poems to Shakespeare's legacy, and it makes the poems themselves not only approachable and fascinating but often deeply moving. Even in our modern sense of the word, Burrow's Shakespeare is a great poet."--Christian Science Monitor
"The Sonnets have been very well and thoroughly edited in recent years, and a new edition must work rather hard to justify its existence. This edition manages to do so brilliantly."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Annotated with great knowledge and taste, essential for serious students."--Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance
About the Author(s)
William Shakespeare
Edited by Colin Burrow, University Senior Lecturer and a Fellow and Tutor of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University
