Product Description

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers - a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings - on-page and facing-page commentary and notes explain language and allusions - detailed introductions consider the sonnets' biographical and literary background, how the poems relate to the plays, dating and textual matters, and the mysteries of 'Mr W. H.' and the 'Dark Lady' - includes poems attributed to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century - full index to introductions and commentary - durable sewn binding for lasting use 'not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship.' Times Literary Supplement

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85163 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

Review
A long and detailed critique, which ends with excellent praise 'This Complete Sonnets and Poems is a distinguished addition to a distinguished series. It will repay comtinuing study, and act as a valuable point of reference for readers concerned more generally with Shakespeare's art and language. Colin Burrow's good sense, tact and balance as an editor are deeply impressive.' (H.R.Woudhuysen, TLS )

Customer Reviews

A fine, comprehensive, and up-to-date edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems
I won't bother talking about the sonnets or Shakespeare's other poetry themselves as the other reviews have, as information about these is plentiful. What I will say is this: Colin Burrow's edition is a fine example of scholarship, set out in an accessible format, with a well-written insightful book-size (!) introduction and comprehensive explanatory notes.

For those who aren't aware, this is the most up-to-date edition of the sonnets in print (published in 2002 compared with the 1997 Arden edition) and for this reason - alongside the fact that it is inexpensive, the introduction is so insightful, and that the inclusion of Shakespeare's other poetry encourages further reading and cross reference - I think it should really be the first choice for those interested in the Sonnets alone. Shakespeare's other poems, however, do exist in a slightly more recent Arden edition (published in 2007) and the very serious reader might want to check this out - but the differences are few and merely technical, and Burrow's edition therefore fares well in this respect too. I highly recommend it.

The undiscovered Shakespeare?
Most of us Shakespeare lovers would take it for granted that we'd be missing out if we'd never read Hamlet, or Othello, or Romeo and Juliet. We also make the special effort occasionally to get to see some of the less well-known plays. But how many of us have ever made the time to sit down and read through Rape of Lucrece, or Shakespeare's 1593 bestseller Venus and Adonis?

Having (finally) got round to doing this I can totally recommend the experience. These poems were written for aristocratic patron the Earl of Southampton and are fully of juicily beautiful turns of phrase. They are extraordinarily dramatic. But most interesting of all to me, they show me another side of Shakespeare; something I can't get from the plays alone. They are meditations on how love works, what sexual attraction is and whether we should control it, which are sustained for many hundreds of lines, in a way that a play cannot because it has to pursue a dramatic course.

And I haven't even said anything about the sonnets. We all know a few wonderful lines from the sonnets, but there are 154 in total to enjoy... a lifetime's worth of poetry. Each appears on its own individual page, with facing notes, so that there's enough room for you to scribble your own thoughts if so inclined.

In this edition, which I think is the best on the market, you also get 169 pages of expert critical commentary from Colin Burrow, Lecturer at Cambridge, ranging from a discussion of contemporary legal attitudes to rape to homoeroticism in the sonnets.

I don't know whether it's the case now that Oxford World's Classics have reprinted, but my edition is properly bound, too, so that it won't fall apart for a good while, I hope.

For any serious lover of Shakespeare - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit.
(Sonnet 26.)

How to do justice to the legacy of literary history's greatest mind -- moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe's "universal genius" and his rebel contemporary Schiller; forget the 19th century masters; forget contemporary literature: with the possible (!) exception of three Greek gentlemen named Aischylos, Sophocles and Euripides, a certain Frenchman called Poquelin (a/k/a Moliere), and that infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde, there's more wit in a single line of Shakespeare's than in an entire page of most other, even great, authors' works. And I'm not saying this in ignorance of, or in order to slight any other writer: it's precisely my admiration of the world's literary giants, past and present, that makes me appreciate Shakespeare even more -- and that although I'm aware that he repeatedly borrowed from pre-existing material and that even the (sole) authorship of the works published under his name isn't established beyond doubt. For ultimately, the only thing that matters to me is the brilliance of those works themselves; and quite honestly, the mysteries continuing to enshroud his person, to me, only enhance his larger-than-life stature.

The precise dating of Shakespeare's sonnets -- like other poets', a response to the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" -- is an even greater guessing game than that of his plays: although #138 and #144 (slightly modified) appeared in 1599's "Passionate Pilgrim," most were probably circulated privately, and written years before their first -- unauthorized, though still authoritative -- 1609 publication; possibly beginning in 1592-1593.

Format-wise, they adopt the Elizabethan fourteen-line-structure of three quatrains of iambic pentameters expressing a series of increasingly intense ideas, resolved in a closing couplet; with an abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme form. (Sole exceptions: #99 -- first quatrain amplified by one line -- #126 -- six couplets & only twelve lines total -- #145 -- written in tetrameter -- and #146 -- omission of the second line's beginning; the subject of a lasting debate.) Their order is thematic rather than chronological, although beyond the fact that the first 126 are addressed to a young man -- maybe the Earl of Pembroke or Southampton, maybe Sir Robert Dudley, the natural son of Queen Elizabeth's "Sweet Robin," the Earl of Leicester -- (the first seventeen, possibly commissioned by the addressee's family, pressing his marriage and production of an heir), and ##127-152 (or 127-133 and 147-152) to an exotic woman of questionable virtues only known as "The Dark Lady," even in that respect much remains unclear; including the nature of Shakespeare's relationship with the two main addressees, regarding which the sonnets' often ambiguous metaphors invoke much speculation. #145 is probably addressed to Shakespeare's wife; the closing couplet plays on her maiden name ("['I hate' from] hate away she threw And saved my life, [saying 'not you']:" "Hathaway -- Anne saved my life"), several others contain puns on the name Will and its double meaning(s) (exactly fourteen in the naughty #135: "Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will;" and seven in the similarly mischievous #136), and the last two draw on the then-popular Cupid theme. Sometimes, placement seems linked to contents, e.g., in #8 (music: an octave has eight notes), #12 and #60 (time: twelve hours to both day and night; sixty minutes to an hour); and in the famous #55, which praises poetry's everlasting power and as whose never-expressly-named subject Shakespeare himself emerges in a comparison with Horace's Ode 3.30 -- in turn written in first person singular and thus, denoting its own author as the builder of its "monument more lasting than bronze" ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius") -- as well as through the number "5"'s optical similarity to the letter "S," making the sonnet's number a shorthand reference for "5hake5peare" or "5hakespeare's 5onnets," echoed by numerous words containing an "S" in the text.

Of indescribable linguistic beauty, elegance and complexity, Shakespeare's sonnets owe their timeless appeal to their supreme compositional values, the universality of their themes, and their keen insights into the human heart and soul; as much as their transcendence of the era's poetic conventions which, following Petrarch, heavily idealized the addressee's qualities: a form new and exciting twohundred years earlier, but encrusted in cliche in the late 1500s. Indeed, Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" Sonnet #130 owes its particular fame to its clever puns on that very style, which went overboard with references to its golden-haired, starry- (beamy-, sparkling, sunny-) eyed, cherry- (strawberry-, vermilion-, coral-) lipped, rosy- (crimson-, purple-, dawn-) cheeked, ivory- (lily-, carnation-, crystal-, silver-, snowy-, swan-white) skinned, pearl-teethed, honey- (nectar-, music-) tongued, goddess-like objects. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" the Bard countered, proceeded to describe her breasts as "dun," her hair as "black wires," and her breath as "reek[ing]," and denied her any divine or angelic attributes. "And yet," he concluded: "by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare."

Arguably, Shakespeare's very choice of addressees (a young man -- also the subject of the famously romantic #18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day;" the first of several sonnets promising his immortalization in poetry -- as well as the "Dark Lady," in turn introduced under the notion "black is beautiful" in #127) itself suggests a break with tradition; and compared to his contemporaries' poetry, even the equally-famous #116's on its face rather conventional praise of love's constancy ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments"), echoed in the poet's vow to vanquish time in #123, sounds fairly restrained. But ultimately, Shakespeare's sonnets -- like his entire work -- simply defy categorization. They are, as rival Ben Jonson acknowledged, written "for all time," just as the Bard himself immodestly claimed:

'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
(Sonnet 55.)