Customer Reviews

Shakespeare's Sonnets: With Analytic Commentary

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I recently used the Arden edition of the Sonnets in a graduate level course on Renaissance literature. It's useful, too, to have Helen Vendler's "Art of the Sonnet," as well as the Penguin edition (fewer notes than the Arden). Quite simply, the Arden excels in the scholarly apparatus. Also, for a concise, readable supplement, include Greenblatt's "Will in the World" (the chapter on the sonnets). But for a close study of the sonnets, if you need a single edition, Arden is terrific.

I read these sonnets two a day over the summer, and I wish there were more than 154 of them so I could keep going into the fall. I think I'll pick up "The Tempest" next.

The poetry in this volume is beautiful, equisite and full of passion. What makes Shakespeare worth reading is the way he lets the world into his lines. His metaphors appeal deliciously to the senses, like a beam of sunlight through a high window in the afternoon, or the smell of a new cut lawn in the spring. Shakespeare's writing is immortal, not because a conspiracy of teachers got together and decided it should be, but because it is full of life, and nothing that is full of life can really ever die.

If you're not used to reading Elizabthean English or are put off by the thought of Shakespeare, this is a good place to start. This edition helpfully "translates" each sonnet into modern English on a facing page along with definitions for the more troubling words. Even with the help, I still don't think Shakespeare is all that easy to read. But anything you do in this world that makes you feel more passionate about life is a pretty good thing. If you give Shakespeare some of your time, he's bound to pay you back with plenty of interest.

Ms. Duncan-Jones' Introduction is an extraordinary example of scholarship. To say that the Sonnets have been controversial throughout the time since their publication is a mild understatement. Ms. Duncan-Jones casts a brilliant and unwavering spotlight on these controversies and resolves them.

Any serious student of Shakespeare must read this Introduction.

If there is a failing in the book, it is in the actual footnotes to the Sonnets themselves. But in the context of Booth's footnotes, for example, this failing is insignificant. Anyone who wants a line-by-line exegesis of the Sonnets has many resources available.

Go get this book and read the Introduction!

This edition of Shakespear's sonnets is all you need to read and understand the great Bard.

A very nice feature is the paraphrasing of the sonnets in contemporary English and a translation into ordinary language of the more difficult words.

The edition is a paperback small enough to be carried around to read during one's leisure.

The secondary source material found in the appendices, the fantastic footnotes, the capacioius introductions, the big clear typeface, the textual editing decisions, all make the Ardens the best single-volume Shakespeares by a long shot. The rest pale by comparison.

The only drawback, god forgive this y-chromosomed curmudgeon, that I can see in this particular Arden is that the editor, Katherine Duncan-Jones, often tends to lean a bit too far to the left, indulging into too much gender politic-ing.

Duncan-Jones also spends a quite a bit of time arguing in a rather extended manner for composition dates that are self-consciously 'provocative' and seem to be much too speculative for an introduction.

One could match this with Booth's version, which by comparison seems perhaps a touch more shallow and hidebound-- but more solid, and get a nice complimentary set of typefaces and editorial views that would balance out nicely, I would suspect.

Arden's third series illuminates the continually-shifting priorities of the moment as well as the Shakespearean texts themselves. Katherine Duncan-Jones devotes less space to such arcane matters as the practices of the Jacobean printing house and relatively more to what we now consider to be all-important: the sonnets, their meaning and literary significance. She considers that although some sonnets were obviously written before Meres's first mention of them in 1598 ('sugred Sonnets among his private friends') most were the products of the mature, Jacobean Shakespeare - hence their often knotty complexity and their relatively bitter, 'salty' tone. It is an unconventional view, like many others in this radically different edition.

By any account, this is an erudite, thoroughly researched and thoroughly readable edition with sonnet-by-sonnet annotations that don't assume undue expertise. Unlike previous Arden editions, therefore, this third series issue is ideal for readers wanting an in-depth and accessible analysis of poems that have long had the reputation of being difficult ('laboured perplexities', in the words of the C18 Shakespeare scholar, George Steevens).

Like the sonnets themselves, Duncan-Jones is often highly ingenious. Certain sonnets she considers numerologically significant. She detects a 'strongly misogynistic bias' throughout the sequence. Even those sonnets addressed to a female (ie 127-54) arouse her suspicions that the speaker has a male audience in mind as he exhibits a strong distaste for the female form generally and for 'the negative connotations of menstruation' in particular. These suspicions are strengthened on realising that the total number of these 'Dark Lady' sonnets is 28 - one for each day of the lunar cycle. (Duncan-Jones is the first to draw our attention to this detail.) Other numerical correspondences are more literary. The great central sequence (18-126) comprises 108 sonnets, thereby matching Sidney's collection. Sonnet 12, meanwhile, alludes to the number of hours in a day; 60 to hour/'our minutes'; 70 (threescore and ten) is followed by the sonnet which begins 'No longer mourn for me when I am dead'; 144 is concerned with the 'gross'-ness of his evil angel, and so on. Whether or not such decoding has unearthed Shakespeare's original intentions, there is no doubt that the sonnets were written for a highly sophisticated literary culture that, unlike ours, 'knew the rules' governing cryptic conceits.

But if the sonnets themselves aren't sufficiently full of puzzles, here's another: in her Preface, Duncan-Jones claims to have 'avoided' John Kerrigan's 1986 Penguin edition, although 'excellent in its subtlety and scholarship', for fear of over-reliance. Yet apart from both agreeing that 'A Lover's Complaint' is an integral part of the overall scheme (sonnets-complaint, following Samuel Daniel's model, Delia) their rival editions seem poles apart. He (JK) guards against using the sonnets to speculate about Shakespeare the man and is dismissive of such fantasies and 'crackpot theories'. She (KD-J) considers the sequence's title, 'Shakespeare's Sonnets', of paramount importance, and one, moreover, that invites, and even positively insists upon, autobiographical inference. She in turn is dismissive of editors and critics who avoid confronting the poems' homoeroticism by speaking, for example, of the cult of 'comradely affection in literature' (Kerrigan). Her verdict on such thoughts: 'Sidney Lee lives!' (Lee being a critic who, immediately after Oscar Wilde's imprisonment, sought to conceal the Sonnets' potentially explosive homoeroticism. For respectable Victorians, the Sonnets were overspiced.) So much for excellence, subtle scholarship and potential over-reliance.

Combative, therefore, as well as eloquent, this edition doesn't so much fence-sit as hurdle them full-on. Whether you agree with Duncan-Jones's stance or not, there's no denying that her case is vigorously pursued and her evidence presented with skill. Admirably, her edition preserves the arrangement of the 1609 Quarto together with much of its spelling and punctuation on the grounds that excessive modernising of spelling results in blurring potential double meanings. And punctuation? Her edition is the first modern one to restore the empty parentheses at the end of the six-couplet 'Sonnet' 126. The two pairs of brackets, she believes, represent the graves awaiting the bodies of poet and 'lovely Boy'.

Definitely not the last words on the Sonnets. But some of the more fascinating, nonetheless.

William Shakespeare is best known as a playwright. When you think of Shakespeare, you automatically think of plays -- "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth," "Hamlet," etc.

But he was also a poet of considerable skill. And while he sprinkled his various plays with poetry and songs, his poems are best appreciated when they're read all by themselves -- particularly the cluster of brilliant "Sonnets" that he penned. These works just have a unique, hauntingly vivid flavour of their own.

Each sonnet has no title, and is simply identified by numbers. And while Shakespeare's love poems are the best known of these works, he addresses different themes in theme -- old age, writer's block loneliness, the cruelty of the world, sex, beauty, a mysterious rival poet, and Shakespeare's own complicated romantic feelings (love that "looks upon tempests and is not shaken").

And these poems are absolutely lovely. Some of these sonnets are pretty well-known ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate") but most of them are a little more obscure. They have vivid metaphors and imagery ("let not winter's ragged hand deface," "gold candles fix'd in heaven's air") and hauntingly lovely passages ("What is your substance, whereof are you made,/That millions of strange shadows on you tend?").

And these sonnets really give you new insights into Shakespeare as a person -- he feels uncertainty, passionate love, unhappiness, lust and quirky humor. But while it's obvious these sonnets were deeply personal, they can still be appreciated on their own, particularly as love poetry.

William Shakespeare's "Sonnets" are rich with meaning, language and atmosphere -- the Elizabethan English takes a little deciphering, but it's well worth it.

This CD collection is an absolute joy. Mr Butler brings the sonnets to life with his clear elocution and his obvious understanding of the verses. the sonnets are not easy reading. I have heard people say"They are incomprehensible" Not this rendition. Every word has a meaning and Mr Butler makes sure we hear and understand each one. His"accent free"accent lends itself to this recording and we progress,like a running stream thru the total collection, with every sonnet sounding as fresh as its predecessor. Mr Butler's eloquence and Mr Shakespeare's writing makes this a winning collection for everyone,students,male, female, romantics and lovers, young and old

Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden Shakespeare's Sonnets is closer to Stephen Booth's linguistic approach from Helen Vendler,s artistic analysis of the Sonnets. I think she made a mature choice because Old Will in his love lyrics is ambigous and misleading.His words are loaded with meanings and accordingly are open to more than one interpretation.Publishing the detailed notes and commentry on the same page looks more practical and helpful, not only for the students but also for the general reader.Nevertheless, Hank Wittemore's version of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, recently published for the first time , emphasizes that the dedicatee of Shakespeare,s Sonnets is Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton and not William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke as the Arden,s editor of the Sonnets suggests in her introduction. Since 400 years the dedicatee,s identity had been masked. A.L. Rowse in 1964 published his version of the Sonnets and held that Shakespeare dedicated his poems to his close friend and patron Earl of Southampton. Now Wriothesley proved what Rowse had cocluded in his literary and historical researching half a century ago.
In the next edition of the Arden,s Sonnets I hope Katherine Duncan-Jones sheds more illuminating light on this issue which puzzled many Shakespearians for a very long time.

Abdulsattar Jawad
Duke University

I am a great fan of Shakespeare, so when I bought this book what I was expecting wasn't what I saw. I saw the most intriguing sonnets probaly ever known to man. It wasn't all about love and fear. It was involving a great many things. It had all the human feelings, sadness, happieness, hate, love, curiosity, fear, pain, grief, stress, and you get the ideal. I don't want to give it away so if you seem interested read this wounderful book.