The Complete Sonnets and Poems

Despite the power of Shakespeare’s poems, and their foundational place within his oeuvre, modern readers have seldom been encouraged to engage with his non-dramatic works as a whole. This new edition explains how this state of affairs has arisen, and why it needs to be changed. It contains the complete Sonnets and poems with a full commentary. An extensive and lively introduction explores Shakespeare’s poetic development, and shows how the poems relate to each other and to his dramatic works. Each work is freshly interpreted, making full use of the latest research. The volume also explores what the poems may have meant to their earliest readers, and, for this reason, it includes poems attributed to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, as well as those printed under his name in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599.