Internet Resources
- Shakespeare's SonnetsAll the sonnets are provided here, with descriptive commentary attached to each one, giving explanations of difficult and unfamiliar words and phrases, and with a full analysis of any special problems of interpretation which arise. Sonnets by other Elizabethan poets are also included, Spenser, Sidney, Drayton and a few other minor authors. The poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt are also given, with both old and modern spelling versions, and with brief notes provided. Check the menu on the left for full details of what is available.
- Shakespeare's SonnetsShakespeare’s Sonnets are often breath-taking, sometimes disturbing and sometimes puzzling and elusive in their meanings. As sonnets, their main concern is ‘love’, but they also reflect upon time, change, aging, lust, absence, infidelity and the problematic gap between ideal and reality when it comes to the person you love. Even after 400 years, ‘what are Shakespeare’s sonnets about?’ and ‘how are we to read them?’ are still central and unresolved questions.
- The SonnetsFull text of Shakespeare's sonnets from MIT.
- Shakespeare the PoetToday we remember Shakespeare as the greatest playwright of all time; however, in his own lifetime, he was equally revered as a poet. His first two books of poetry, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, were reprinted many times. In fact, they were more popular in print than any of Shakespeare’s plays. Many of the earliest literary critics and anthologists of English-language verse cite these two narrative poems because of their exemplary lines. Like his plays, his poems were probably sold unbound or in flimsy, paper bindings, making their survival unlikely unless an early owner bound them up with other booklets in sturdy bindings.
Streaming Media
- Shakespeare's SonnetsReleased alongside a spectacular edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets for the Apple iPad, this beautifully produceprogram features specially filmed performances of all 154 Sonnets by a stellar cast of actors including, Fiona Shaw, Sir Patrick Stewart and David Tennant.
- Shakespeare's Sonnets: Crash Course LiteratureThis week, we're learning about sonnets, and English Literature's best-known purveyor of those fourteen-line paeans, William Shakespeare. We'll look at a few of Willy Shakes's biggest hits, including Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," Sonnet 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment," and Sonnet 130, "My mistresses's eyes are nothing like the sun." We'll talk about what makes a sonnet, a little bit about their history, and even a little bit about how reading poetry helps us understand how to be human beings.
Perspectives
So Long as Men Can Breathe
In this lively, fascinating account of the publication of Shakespeare'sSonnets, noted biographer Clinton Heylin brings their convoluted history to light, beginning with the first complete appearance of theSonnets in print in May, 1609. He introduces us to the "unholy alliance" involved in this precarious enterprise: Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, a self-described "well wishing adventurer;" George Eld, the printer, heavily embroiled in large-scale pirating; William Aspley, the prestigious bookseller, who mysteriously ended his association with Thorpe soon after. Leaving the calamitous world of Elizabethan publishing, Heylin goes on to chart the many editions of theSonnets through the years and the editorial decisions that led to their present configuration. Passionate, astute, and brilliantly entertaining, the result is a concise and vivid history of perhaps the greatest poetry ever written.
An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems
An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems provides a lively and informed examination of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; the Sonnets; and various minor poems, including some only recently attributed to Shakespeare. Peter Hyland locates Shakespeare as a sceptical 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 twenty-first century readers.
The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets
The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets: "A Satire to Decay" is a work of detective scholarship. Unable to believe that England's great dramatist would publish a sequence of sonnets without a plot, Mark Jay Mirsky, novelist, playwright, and professor of English, proposes a solution to a riddle that has frustrated scholars and poets alike. Arguing that the Sonnets are not just a "higgledy piggledy" collection of poems but were put in order by Shakespeare himself, and drawing on the insights of several of the Sonnets' foremost contemporary scholars, Mirsky examines the Sonnets poem by poem to ask what is the story of the whole. Mirsky takes Shakespeare at his own word in Sonnet 100, where the poet, tongue in cheek, advises his lover to regard "time's spoils"-in this case, "any wrinkle graven" in his cheek-as but "a satire to decay." The comfort is obviously double-edged, but it can also be read as a mirror of Shakespeare's "satire" on himself, as if to praise his own wrinkles, and reflects the poet's intention in assembling the Sonnets to satirize the playwright's own "decay" as a man and a lover. In a parody of sonnet sequences written by his fellow poets Spenser and Daniel, Shakespeare's mordant wit conceals a bitter laugh at his own romantic life. The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets demonstrates the playwright's wish to capture the drama of the sexual betrayal as he experienced it in a triangle of friendship and eroticism with a man and a woman. It is a plot, however, that the playwright does not want to advertise too widely and conceals in the 1609 Quarto from all but a very few. Despite Shakespeare's moments of despair at his male friend's betrayal and the poet's cursing at the sexual promiscuity of the so-called Dark Lady, The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets sees the whole as a "satire" by Shakespeare and, particularly when read with the poem that accompanied it in the 1609 printing, "A Lover's Complaint," as a laughing meditation on the irrepressible joy of sexual life