Customer Reviews

Complete Sonnets

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The Dover Thrift Edition of the Complete Sonnets is exactly that: the complete sonnets, and nothing more. Though often scorned by literary snobs, the entire Dover series does fulfill one very useful function: it provides cheap, easy-to-read, and widely-available versions of literary classics. What you get, in this case, are all of Shakespeare's sonnets (undisputably some of the greatest poems ever written and a true treasure of English literature; obviously, a review of any edition of these poems will inevitably focus not upon the work itself, which is beyond repute, but, rather, on the individual edition as presented) -- and nothing else. Much more expansive (and expensive) versions are available, featuring an introduction to the sonnets with background information, notes and annotations, a handy list of definitions for archaic and obscure Elizabethian words -- and, more than likely, at least one pretentious individual interpretation of the work. Obviously, if one is looking to study Shakespeare, really go in-depth into the sonnets for scholarly or academic purposes, then one should look into one of the editions just described. If you just want a copy of the sonnets without desiring to spend too much money, you don't need or don't want all of those extras, or you simply want to impress incredulous people by owning a set of Shakespeare's sonnets, however, then you could do worse than picking up this inexpensive little book.

A colleague advised that I assign my college students this edition, and I am glad she did. Rather than reading the few anthologized works together with some handouts, students now own the entire set. For anyone not familiar with Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, this gives an affordable and portable version. For anyone familiar with the works, this book offers them in a beautifully light, compressed format that itself enhances rereading and re-interpretation. The book begins with a helpful one-page background on the sonnet form and on Shakespeare's collection, and ends with an also-helpful alphabetical list of first lines. The two-page glossary of terms at the end may be too little, too late, but the drawbacks of Dover's edition--its lack of notes and its use of roman numerals to number the poems--pale compared with the book's availability. As an enthusiast myself--someone who studied at the Shakespeare Institute, England, writing a 310-page thesis on the Bard--I feel grateful to be able to help others to such an inexpensive and pleasant way to own and explore Shakespeare's entire collection of sonnets. Because I could skim the poems in sequence so quickly and easily with this edition, the interrelationships among Sonnets 113, 114, 115, and the famous 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," for example, struck me in a new way as I reread them in this little book. A highly- recommended edition.

My English major friends kept raving about the sonnets, so I finally decided to spend a buck to get this least expensive edition. It was kind of interesting. I could tell that Shakespeare was really intense about his issues - but I was lost as to why everybody was so crazy about them. I also did not like having paper that was so thin that my highlighting and notes went right through to ruin the other side of the page :(

Finally I spent another buck to get an (almost as inexpensive) edition (used) - the Signet edition edited by Burto. That helped a lot - with definitions of terms and hints about lots of secret relationships possibly there for those who would dig further. At last I'm starting to figure out why this guy is considered so awesome. To really get an appreciation of Shake's heart and mind, beginners like me really need more than just the poems.

Now I'm borrowing an English major's copy of Dr. Vendler's edition (Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets). It's pretty heady, so I'm just trying to read her introduction. Whew! I haven't tested out all her theories, but is so much incredible care and complexity going on behind the scenes in these poems - it's no wonder people are still boggled after 400 years.

Truly amazing - but unless you're an English major I wouldn't recommend bothering with this doubtful dollar deed. Getting a copy of the Signet or Folger Library editions will make beginners much happier.

The perfect pocket edition of Mr. Shakespeare's sonnets!

Of course, if you are wondering what they mean, and all that, you will have to get yourself familiar with Rowse's edition of the sonnets: A. L. Rowse: Shakespeare's Sonnets.

But once you know who the principal characters are -- Henry Wriothesley, the young Earl of Southampton, Christopher Marlowe, and Emilia Lanier -- plus young Will Shakespeare himself -- then the Dover will do fine for you and yours.

After all, this is exactly the book you could have bought on its first day of publication, four centuries ago!! :-)

ttfn

jimmy

Not one of America's best gifts to England :( - -
A couple bucks more for the Signet or Folger editions will help you so much more to appreciate our Bard. (or... if you're a Brit, the "New Penguin" edition is a great way to go).
Like Steve says, you'll get NO help (or love) from this *thrift* edition.

The sonnets of Mr Shakespeare are wonderful literary exercises. They are probably a bit mannered, and they may well have been written with his left hand...idly recording his love life and his autobiography while his mind raced on to greater things.

But there should be no Doubt at all, that -- even though the paper may be [inexpensive], and the type face be uneven -- and there be no NOTES there at all...

still, one can read:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Where yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,
Upon those boughs where late the sweet birds sang
Bare ruined choirs...

Oh, ..., I have misquoted the sonnet. You Will have to
go read it yourself! :-)

In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset sinketh in the west....

O yes, send out for footnotes!

Although I had read a number of Shakespeare's sonnets in both high school and college, I did not know I would find so much satisfaction out of his complete sonnets. The beloved of Shakespeare is truly preserved through each of these tightly constructed poems. I think this is a must read for young and old alike as the themes, symbols, and ideas encapsulated in these sonnets have guided the course of the Enlgish Langauge as we know it. Profound.

I will just come out and say it: despite my great love of Shakespeare's plays, I am not at all a big poetry person--even when that poet is THE Poet. I like a good story rather than a smattering of pretty thoughts and usually poetry does not quite make the cut.

And yet the hopeless romantic that lies within me was entranced by the beauty and passion of Shakespeare's sonnets. Probably because there is actually something of a plot in the order of the poems, one of love and betrayal and all that good stuff. I understand that many scholars try to make it an autobiographical account, but either way the sonnets are wonderful.

These are for anyone who likes Shakespeare, poetry, good writing, or just romance.

Shakespeare's sonnets are contained in this very, very cheap edition, making them not only accessible but portable. What else can you ask for?

The Dover Thrift is a great series, you can get most major works in literature for rock-bottom prices, and in this case, I spent a buck on the complete sonnets of Shakespeare, how can you beat that?

Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit.
(Sonnet 26.)

How to do justice to the legacy of literary history's greatest mind -- moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe's "universal genius" and his rebel contemporary Schiller; forget the 19th century masters; forget contemporary literature: with the possible (!) exception of three Greek gentlemen named Aischylos, Sophocles and Euripides, a certain Frenchman called Poquelin (a/k/a Moliere), and that infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde, there's more wit in a single line of Shakespeare's than in an entire page of most other, even great, authors' works. And I'm not saying this in ignorance of, or in order to slight any other writer: it's precisely my admiration of the world's literary giants, past and present, that makes me appreciate Shakespeare even more -- and that although I'm aware that he repeatedly borrowed from pre-existing material and that even the (sole) authorship of the works published under his name isn't established beyond doubt. For ultimately, the only thing that matters to me is the brilliance of those works themselves; and quite honestly, the mysteries continuing to enshroud his person, to me, only enhance his larger-than-life stature.

The precise dating of Shakespeare's sonnets -- like other poets', a response to the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" -- is an even greater guessing game than that of his plays: although #138 and #144 (slightly modified) appeared in 1599's "Passionate Pilgrim," most were probably circulated privately, and written years before their first -- unauthorized, though still authoritative -- 1609 publication; possibly beginning in 1592-1593.

Format-wise, they adopt the Elizabethan fourteen-line-structure of three quatrains of iambic pentameters expressing a series of increasingly intense ideas, resolved in a closing couplet; with an abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme form. (Sole exceptions: #99 -- first quatrain amplified by one line -- #126 -- six couplets & only twelve lines total -- #145 -- written in tetrameter -- and #146 -- omission of the second line's beginning; the subject of a lasting debate.) Their order is thematic rather than chronological, although beyond the fact that the first 126 are addressed to a young man -- maybe the Earl of Pembroke or Southampton, maybe Sir Robert Dudley, the natural son of Queen Elizabeth's "Sweet Robin," the Earl of Leicester -- (the first seventeen, possibly commissioned by the addressee's family, pressing his marriage and production of an heir), and ##127-152 (or 127-133 and 147-152) to an exotic woman of questionable virtues only known as "The Dark Lady," even in that respect much remains unclear; including the nature of Shakespeare's relationship with the two main addressees, regarding which the sonnets' often ambiguous metaphors invoke much speculation. #145 is probably addressed to Shakespeare's wife; the closing couplet plays on her maiden name ("['I hate' from] hate away she threw And saved my life, [saying 'not you']:" "Hathaway -- Anne saved my life"), several others contain puns on the name Will and its double meaning(s) (exactly fourteen in the naughty #135: "Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will;" and seven in the similarly mischievous #136), and the last two draw on the then-popular Cupid theme. Sometimes, placement seems linked to contents, e.g., in #8 (music: an octave has eight notes), #12 and #60 (time: twelve hours to both day and night; sixty minutes to an hour); and in the famous #55, which praises poetry's everlasting power and as whose never-expressly-named subject Shakespeare himself emerges in a comparison with Horace's Ode 3.30 -- in turn written in first person singular and thus, denoting its own author as the builder of its "monument more lasting than bronze" ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius") -- as well as through the number "5"'s optical similarity to the letter "S," making the sonnet's number a shorthand reference for "5hake5peare" or "5hakespeare's 5onnets," echoed by numerous words containing an "S" in the text.

Of indescribable linguistic beauty, elegance and complexity, Shakespeare's sonnets owe their timeless appeal to their supreme compositional values, the universality of their themes, and their keen insights into the human heart and soul; as much as their transcendence of the era's poetic conventions which, following Petrarch, heavily idealized the addressee's qualities: a form new and exciting twohundred years earlier, but encrusted in cliche in the late 1500s. Indeed, Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" Sonnet #130 owes its particular fame to its clever puns on that very style, which went overboard with references to its golden-haired, starry- (beamy-, sparkling, sunny-) eyed, cherry- (strawberry-, vermilion-, coral-) lipped, rosy- (crimson-, purple-, dawn-) cheeked, ivory- (lily-, carnation-, crystal-, silver-, snowy-, swan-white) skinned, pearl-teethed, honey- (nectar-, music-) tongued, goddess-like objects. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" the Bard countered, proceeded to describe her breasts as "dun," her hair as "black wires," and her breath as "reek[ing]," and denied her any divine or angelic attributes. "And yet," he concluded: "by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare."

Arguably, Shakespeare's very choice of addressees (a young man -- also the subject of the famously romantic #18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day;" the first of several sonnets promising his immortalization in poetry -- as well as the "Dark Lady," in turn introduced under the notion "black is beautiful" in #127) itself suggests a break with tradition; and compared to his contemporaries' poetry, even the equally-famous #116's on its face rather conventional praise of love's constancy ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments"), echoed in the poet's vow to vanquish time in #123, sounds fairly restrained. But ultimately, Shakespeare's sonnets -- like his entire work -- simply defy categorization. They are, as rival Ben Jonson acknowledged, written "for all time," just as the Bard himself immodestly claimed:

'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
(Sonnet 55.)

Also recommended:
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition
Shakespeare: For All Time (Oxford Shakespeare)
Much Ado About Nothing
Love's Labour's Lost
William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Two-Disc Special Edition)
BBC Shakespeare Comedies DVD Giftbox
BBC Shakespeare Tragedies DVD Giftbox
Olivier's Shakespeare - Criterion Collection (Hamlet / Henry V / Richard III)
William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
Twelfth Night