Shakespeare's Sonnets by
Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays is the essential Sonnets anthology for our time. This important collection focuses exclusively on contemporary criticism of the Sonnets, reprinting three highly influential essays from the past decade and including sixteen original analyses by leading scholars in the field. The contributors' diverse approaches range from the new historicism to the new bibliography, from formalism to feminism, from reception theory to cultural materialism, and from biographical criticism to queer theory. In addition, James Schiffer's introduction offers a comprehensive survey of 400 years of criticism of these fascinating, enigmatic poems.
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by
This text aims to provide a guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language.
Shakespeare's Sonnets by
The sonnets are among the most accomplished and fascinating poems in the English language. They are central to an understanding of Shakespeare's work as a poet and poetic dramatist, and while their autobiographical relevance is uncertain, no account of Shakespeare's life can afford to ignorethem. So many myths and superstitions have arisen around these poems, relating for example to their possible addressees, to their coherence as a sequence, to their dates of composition, to their relation to other poetry of the period and to Shakespeare's plays, that even the most naive reader willfind it difficult to read them with an innocent mind. Shakespeare's Sonnets dispels the myths and focuses on the poems. Considering different possible ways of reading the Sonnets, Wells and Edmondson place them in a variety of literary and dramatic contexts - in relation to other poetry of theperiod, to Shakespeare's plays, as poems for performance, and in relation to their reception and reputation. Selected sonnets are discussed in depth, but the book avoids the jargon of theoretical criticism. Shakespeare's Sonnets is an exciting contribution to the Oxford Shakespeare Topics, ideal forstudents and the general reader interested in these intriguing poems.
Shakespeare's Perjured Eye by
Fineman argues that in the sonnets Shakespeare developed an unprecedented poetic persona, one that subsequently became the governing model of all literary subjectivity.
An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems by
An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems provides a lively and informed examination of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis andThe Rape of Lucrece; theSonnets; and various minor poems, including some only recently attributed to Shakespeare. Peter Hyland locates Shakespeare as a skeptical voice within the turbulent social context in which Elizabethan professional poets had to work, and relates his poems to the tastes, values, and political pressures of his time. Hyland also explores how Shakespeare's poetry can be of interest to 21st century readers.
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."
Few collections of poems intrigue, challenge, tantalize, and reward us as do Shakespeare’s Sonnets, all written in the English sonnet form. It is not just the beauty and power of individual sonnets that engage us, but the story that their sequence seems to tell about Shakespeare's love life, whenever one reads the Sonnets in the order in which they appear in the 1609 Quarto.
It goes something like this: The first 17 sonnets advise a beautiful young man to marry and produce a child. The next 109 sonnets urge the poet’s love for him and claim that the poems will preserve his beauty. The supposed narrative concludes with 28 sonnets to or about a "dark lady."
Evidence that puts the narrative in doubt seems to matter very little. Most critics and editors agree that the sonnets are only linked within specific clusters; they were written perhaps over many years and perhaps to or about different people. Only about 25 specify the sex of the beloved.
Yet such facts surrender to the narrative pull of the 1609 collection. The persona of the poet and the sequence of emotions are so strong that few editors can resist describing the Sonnets in terms of their irresistible story.
(Adapted from the Folger Shakespeare Library edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. © 2004, 2006 Folger Shakespeare)
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