The Sonnets

In his own time, Shakespeare was best known to the reading public as a poet, and even today copies of his Sonnets regularly outsell everything else he wrote. For this edition, Stephen Orgel offers a warmly personal and original introduction to Shakespeare’s best-loved and most widely read poems. Careful readings emphasize their sexual and temperamental ambiguity, their textual history and the special perils an editor faces when modernizing the original quarto’s spelling, punctuation, and even layout. The edition retains the text of the Sonnets prepared by Gwynne Evans, together with his detailed notes on each, and a line-by-line commentary. Throughout, the ‘voices’ of the sonnets appear in all their intricacy and dramatic power.

• Texts accompanied by discursive headnotes and full commentaries • Includes an introduction by Stephen Orgel which is lively and provocative • The volume as a whole will appeal to students and poetry-lovers

Contents

List of illustrations; Preface; List of abbreviations and conventions; Introduction Stephen Orgel; Note on the text; The Sonnets; The commentary; Textual analysis; Appendix: manuscript copies of the Sonnets; Reading list; Index of first lines.