Customer Reviews

Shakespeare's Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint

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I sought out this volume with high expectations: Shakespeare. Edited by the eminent scholar Stanley Wells. Published by Oxford University Press. Published 2003. Once again we understand why Hamlet urged, "believe none of us."

This is the same material released by Oxford with a copyright of 1985, 1986, and 1989. Therefore, the present review applies to all the following ISBNs: 0192804464, 0192820265, 0198129467. The issues differ only in cover. All have pages of newsprint quality paper, meaning that if you are really studying the poems and highlighting or annotating the works, then you'll have ink blurs from one page through to the next.

And with this edition you will NEED to make annotation - there is none provided. Even the inexpensive editions from Signet, Penguin, and Folger provide aids to understanding archaic words and obscure allusions and wordplay (which offers so much delight to the sonnets and reveals the intellectual power of their author).

There is evidence that Professor Wells *has* left his well-respected mark on editing the poems, since an appendix documents which substantive changes he made to the original 1609 printing. Unfortunately, the novice reader is not offered any of the professor's decades of scholarship regarding the ART and SIGNIFICANCE of these most personal of Shakespeare's writings (nor any of the debatable points that arise when one proclaims one knows better than the 1609 Quarto what the Bard "really meant".

RECOMMENDATIONS: For similar money, readers will reap much finer appreciation of Shakespeare from other volumes of Shakespeare's Sonnets (& other nondramatic poems):
William Burto's edition of 2002 (also from Oxford): 019281933X
G. B. Evans's edition of 1996 (from Cambridge): 0521294037
And ESPECIALLY:
Katherine Duncan-Jones' edition of 1997 (Arden Press): 1903436575.
These volumes also explore the fascinating (if convoluted) probable links between the Sonnets and "A Lover's Complaint," originally published with it in 1609.

RECOMMENDATIONS for ADVANCED STUDENTS: English majors will want to go further and acquire Stephen Booth's most extensive, annotated-on-steroids edition from Yale: 0300085060 (see my review there). Committed lovers of the Sonnets owe it to themselves to own and savor Helen Vendler's "Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" (reviewed at ISBN: 0674637127 ).

A wholehearted exploration of the Sonnets requires sustained stretching of a mortal's intellect, but an explorer with such expansiveness will be rewarded with a lifetime of riches: intellectual, aethetic, and spiritual. Unfortunately, this present example of unannotated, uninspired presentation of them will launch a reader on an abortive mission. You and Shakespeare *deserve* one of the better editions.