Customer Reviews

Shakespeare's Sonnets (Folger Shakespeare Library)

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I had fallen in love with Shakespeare's Sonnets since I was introduced to it in my freshman year. I'm no expert on Shakespeare, but this is the most wonderful edition of a Shakespeare's Sonnets book. Not only is the cover handsome,(something you'd be proud to carry along with you everywhere)it has excellent annotations(just enough to help you understand the sonnets but not so much that it bogs you down) and plus, in addition to all of that it is very low cost. Buy it, you won't regret it!

The analysis given to Shakespeare's sonnets is immecable. The authors know what they are writing about. I particularly liked the introduction and the end of the book interpretation with the first words of each of the sonnets.

One of my Amazon friends recently reviewed a compilation of "Shakespeare's Sonnets," edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. I regret to say that I have not attended to the Bard's sonnets in many a year. Recently, I read Bryson's sprightly biography of Shakespeare, and this--combined with my friend's review--sparked me to purchase this volume.

In the Editors' Preface, they note (Page ix): "This edition. . . reflects these current ways of thinking about Shakespeare." Their Introduction on "Shakespeare's Sonnets" provides nicely constructed context for the poems themselves. Editors notes that (Page xiii): "Few collections of poems--indeed, few literary works in general--intrigue, challenge, tantalize, and reward as do Shakespeare's Sonnets." The years in which the author produced these sonnets are described as (Page xxxii) ". . .among the most exciting in English history. . . "

But it is the poems themselves that are the heart of this. The Editors do a wonderful job of providing context, but--in the end--each reader must make of these works what they will.

Given my age, I do find this poignant (Sonnet 22):

"My glass shall not persuade me I am old
So long as youth and thou are of one date,
But when in thee Time's furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate."

One of my favorites (Sonnet 29):

"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state. . . .
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising. . . ."

And (Sonnet 87):

"Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate.
The charter of my worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate."

And so many others. . . . Shakespeare is not, of course, to everyone's taste. However, for those who enjoy the Bard's art, this is a wonderful version of his sonnets. Highly recommended!

Shakespeare's Sonnets come from the Bard's deepest thoughts, his passions, suffering and the expression of the ultimate Joy of Beauty, Poetry and Love. Here are the words of a suffering soul, in love with "someone" much younger than himself, thus his references to age being no barrier to true Love in many of the verses.

All or most scholars agree, the Sonnets were written about and to a single person. The argument, of course, is who this person was...Oscar Wilde speculated the object of the Master's heart was a young male actor, due to the law, had to play all the female parts as acting in the 16th century was purly a man's job.

Shakespeare himself has become a mystery as to his true identity for many years. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud's "free time", was devoted to revealing the Bard's true identity.

For me, when reading the Sonnets, Who wrote them or Who they were written For makes no difference. Because the Sonnets are the most beautiful Ode to Poetry, the Muse and Real Love and its Tragedy, that all too often, is true Love's end result.

This particular edition claims to be the best study of the Sonnets and the Bard himself. This is perhaps true, but the verses have not changed in 500 years.


Over the last three nights, reading or more acurately 're-reading' these wonderful verses, my admiration for the English language, its beauty and cadence, its ability for subtle irony and truth is astounding.

One of my favourites: LXXV.

"So are you to my thoughts, as food for life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground:
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the flinching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by-and-by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight,
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day;
Or gluttoning on all, or all the away."

"Feasting on your sight", just to see (her) brings on so much joy.

No delight... but saving her image in his mind like a glutton, a wanting, a Love deep and experienced from afar...

Merely to remind yourself of the beauty of the English language read the Bard's Sonnets and Poems.

A gift.

I just received my Kindle today. Thusfar, I'm quite pleased with the device but my first digital purchase is a disappointment. The Amazon description states the following:

Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on the page facing each sonnet

* A brief introduction to each sonnet, providing insight into its possible meaning

* An index of first lines

* An essay by Professor Lynne Magnusson, a leading Shakespeare scholar, providing a modern perspective on the poems

* Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books.

None of this is true. I suspect that Amazon's editors have failed to see that the Digireads.com editions of various books differ from the paper editions.

Length:: 6:30 Mins

I think I expend a fairly sufficient time within the video itself in explication of why this particular sonnet so appeals to me. But, to expatiate a bit more: It seems so very modern in comparison with most of the others! It has a Gothic quality that reminds one of Poe et al. and, moreover, a very modern take of how the dream life invades one's world when one is in love.

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

This book has no table of contents, no annotations and no index. The painting on the cover is not identified. Since these sonnets are available in many places, free of charge, and there are several other inexpensive editions with a table of contents, index and other information, it is difficult to understand why anyone would buy this particular book. If you look carefully you can find a date on the bottom of the last page. The date is 11 January 2012. I received my copy 13 January 2012. One of the other reviews is dated 2004 and some of them refer to it as a Folger's library edition. This is not a Folger's library edition as some of the other reviewers have indicated. There certainly seems to be a mismatch between the reviews on Amazon and the book I received. I returned it to Amazon the same day it arrived.

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.

If you're a romantic, Shakespeare's Sonnets is something you'd definitely want to have in your personal library!