Product Description

In 1593 Shakespeare awoke and found himself famous. Lines from his comic, erotic, tragic poem Venus and Adonis were on everyone's lips.The appearance in 1594 of the darkly reflective and richly descriptive Rape of Lucrece confirmed his fame as 'Sweet Master Shakespeare', Elizabethan England's most brilliant non-dramatic poet. Shorter poems in this volume testify further to Shakespeare's versatility and to his poetic fame. Some, like the much-debated 'Phoenix and Turtle', pose problems of meaning; others raise questions about authorship and authenticity. Detailed annotation and a full Introduction seek to resolve such difficulties while also locating Shakespeare's poems in their literary context, which includes his own career as a playwright.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #308811 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 616 pages

William Boyd
Katherine Duncan-Jones is both one of the world's greatest experts on Shakespeare's life and work and also a writer of tremendous insight and empathy. This is a superb edition of Shakespeare's poems.

Gregory Doran
Quite the most insightful, thorough and authoritative account of Shakespeare's great narrative poems that you could imagine.

From the Back Cover
The Arden Shakespeare is the established scholarly edition of
Shakespeare's work. This volume features the narrative poems Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, as well as shorter poems, such as the
collection of sonnets and amorous lyrics entitled The Passionate Pilgrim
and `The Phoenix and Turtle'. Also included are various poems and epigrams
attributed to Shakespeare.

This edition of Shakespeare's Poems provides:
- A clear and authoritative text, edited to the highest standards of
scholarship.
- Detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text.
- A full, illustrated introduction to the poems' historical and cultural
contexts.
- An in-depth survey of critical approaches to the poems.
- A full index to the introduction and notes.
- A select bibliography of references and further reading.

With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary, The Arden Shakespeare is
the finest edition of Shakespeare you can find.

Customer Reviews

Arden Shakespeare
In some respects I think it'd be rather presumptuous of me to attempt to review Shakespeare. Someone so well known and influential wouldn't benefit from my opinions on their work, plus there are more scholarly and concise reviews out there. But I can comment on these Arden versions. Of all the Shakespeare I've read I've always found the Arden copies to be well laid out and to have excellent commentary and notes on the text. They really add to your understanding of Shakespeares outstanding plays and introduce you to the depth in his work. They have superb paper quality and are bound well, withstanding repeated readings and intensive study. For your collection of Shakespeare you can't do much better than Arden publications, some are quite hard to get hold of but it's worth the effort.

Skilful advocacy
In the opinion of the two editors of this volume (Katherine Duncan-Jones and HR Woodhuysen) Shakespeare's narrative poems are 'the most neglected items in the Shakespeare canon'. Ironically, it was as poet rather than dramatist that Shakespeare made his name, and both 'Venus and Adonis' and 'The Rape of Lucrece' were immediate 'hits' with Elizabethan readers. As advocates of the poems, the editors of this 3rd edition Arden hope to attract a new generation of enthusiastic readers. (The previous editor, HT Prince was, by contrast, one of their many detractors.) The expectation here, moreover, is that these new readers will make up their own minds about the arguments being presented, rather than, simply, being passive recipients of scholarly wisdom - a laudably democratic ideal characteristic of Arden3.

But what of the arguments? The poems are presented as works which offer things that the plays either cannot or do not: a more comprehensive anatomising of inner mental states and a stronger affinity with the visual arts. However, the Introduction's attempt to link Shakespeare with Renaissance painting - even going as far as to suggest that he had an acquaintance with art theory - lacks concrete evidence. Assertions like 'He could ... have seen an example of an Italian painted battle scene in a nobleman's house', seem over-speculative, an impression that is reinforced by the next sentence: 'Such access is not implausible.' Not implausible, perhaps, but not entirely convincing, either.

One of the real strengths of Duncan-Jones' previous Arden edition (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1997) was its richly insightful analysis of the sequence. Its section on numerological significance was, I thought, profound and persuasive. She makes a similar attempt here (for Duncan-Jones' hand played the greater part in the Introduction, we learn; Woodhuysen's in the Commentary). She considers that the total number of stanzas in 'Venus' - 199 - is suggestive of incompleteness, while the poem's exact mid-point, with Adonis atop Venus but refusing to consummate, has special importance because of its pivotal positioning. Were Elizabethan readers so alert as to pick up on such mathematically and structurally abstruse matters? Possibly, but again the arguments seem more hopeful than convincing here.

Yet this Introduction has its undoubted strengths. It is particularly successful in placing the poems in their historical context (plague-ridden London, in the case of the 1593-4 narrative poems). As one of the most recent (2007) additions to the Arden series, this edition is able to refer to such events as Greg Doran's critically acclaimed 2004 'Venus and Adonis: A Masque for Puppets' production at The Other Place, Stratford, as well as influential criticism from the first decade of the C21, in which (often) feminist writers have helped to restore Shakespeare's non-dramatic work to the limelight.

Yet again, then, it is Arden that sets the standard. This third edition represents a significant advance on the second and is currently unrivalled as a comprehensive guide to this hitherto neglected facet of the Shakespeare canon (and apocrypha).