'This Complete Sonnets and Poems is a distinguished addition to a distinguished series. It will repay continuing 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 aneditor are deeply impressive.' -H. R. Woudhuysen, Times Literary SupplementThis is the only fully annotated and modernized edition to bring together Shakespeare's Sonnets as well as all his poems (including those attributed to him after his death). A full introduction discusses his development as a poet, and how the poems relate to his plays; detailed notes explain the language and allusions in clear modern English. While accessibly written, the edition takes account of the most recent scholarship and criticism.

Although best known for his plays, William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was also a poet who achieved extraordinary depth and variety in only a few key works. This edition of his poetry provides detailed notes, commentary and appendices resulting in an academically thorough and equally accessible edition to Shakespeare’s poetry. The editors present his non-dramatic poems in the chronological order of their print publication: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; the metaphysical ‘Let the Bird of Loudest Lay’ (often known as The Phoenix and the Turtle); all 154 Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. In headnotes and extensive annotations to the texts, Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne elucidate historical contexts, publication histories, and above all the literary and linguistic features of poems whose subtleties always reward careful attention. Substantial appendices trace the sources for Shakespeare’s narrative poems and the controversial text The Passionate Pilgrim, as well as providing information about poems posthumously attributed to him, and the English sonnet sequence. Shrank and Lyne guide readers of all levels with a glossary of rhetorical terms, an index of the poems (titles and first lines), and an account of Shakespeare’s rhymes informed by scholarship on Elizabethan pronunciation. With all these scholarly resources supporting a newly edited, modern-spelling text, this edition combines accessibility with layers of rich information to inform the most sophisticated reading.

In 1593 Shakespeare awoke and found himself famous. Lines from his comic, erotic, tragic poem Venus and Adonis were on everyoneÂ'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 ShakespeareÂ's versatility and to his poetic fame. Some, like the much-debated Â'Phoenix and TurtleÂ', 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.

Shakespeare has never been more ubiquitous, not only on the stage and in academic writing, but in film, video and the popular press. On television, he advertises everything from cars to fast food. His birthplace, the tiny Warwickshire village of Stratford-Upon-Avon, has been transformed into a theme park of staggering commercialism, and the New Globe, in its second season, is already a far bigger business than the old Globe could ever have hoped to be. If popular culture cannot do without Shakespeare, continually reinventing him and reimagining his drama and his life, neither can the critical and scholarly world, for which Shakespeare has, for more than two centuries, served as the central text for analysis and explication, the foundation of the western literary canon and the measure of literary excellence.The Shakespeare the essays collected in these volumes reveal is fully as multifarious as the Shakespeare of theme parks, movies and television. Indeed, it is part of the continuing reinvention of Shakespeare. The essays are drawn for the most part from work done in the past three decades, though a few essential, enabling essays from an earlier period have been included. They not only chart the directions taken by Shakespeare studies in the recent past, but they serve to indicate the enormous and continuing vitality of the enterprise, and the extent to which Shakespeare has become a metonym for literary and artistic endeavor generally.

This Companion provides a full introduction to the poetry of William Shakespeare through discussion of his freestanding narrative poems, the Sonnets, and his plays. Fourteen leading international scholars provide accessible and authoritative chapters on all relevant topics: from Shakespeare's seminal role in the development of English poetry, the wide-ranging practice of his poetic form, and his enigmatic place in print and manuscript culture, to his immersion in English Renaissance politics, religion, classicism, and gender dynamics. With individual chapters on Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', the Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint, the Companion also includes chapters on the presence of poetry in the dramatic works, on the relation between poetry and performance, and on the reception and influence of the poems. The volume includes a chronology of Shakespeare's life, a note on reference works, and a reading list for each chapter.