Shakespeare's sonnets are the most famous collection of love poems in the English language. Here Shakespeare celebrated his passionate friendship with a young man, deplored his friend's seduction by Shakespeare's own mistress, expressed his chagrin at the friend's relationship with a rival poet, and in the final group of poems explored his own humiliated infatuation with "a woman colored ill"--the Dark Lady who has tempted his "better angel" from him. Lyrically beautiful and psychologically fascinating, the sonnets exert a double appeal: as individual poems, and as a complexly interrelated sequence. All 154 poems are presented here in a freshly edited text, along with Shakespeare's wry, touching portrait of a forsaken maiden in A Lover's Complaint, a poem first printed with the sonnets in 1609. This volume also includes little-known alternative versions of four of the sonnets. The text of this edition is that prepared for the forthcoming Complete Oxford Shakespeare. About the Editor: Stanley Wells is General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and Senior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
Review from previous edition the most beautifully printed text available (James Fenton, The Times)
About the Author:
Stanley Wells is Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, and Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, 1988-97, now Emeritus Professor. He is one of the foremost Shakespeare scholars of his generation. He has edited The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, An Oxford Anthology of Shakespeare, and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, amongst others.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.