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The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

by William Shakespeare (Author), Colin Burrow (Editor) "Right honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for..." (more)
Key Phrases: first cited usage, first cited example, late rare words, Winter's Tale, Book of Common Prayer, Lover's Complaint (more...)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Review
`'it was a brilliant idea to produce the narrative poems and sonnets as a single edition....[Burrow's] book-length introduction [is] the best study there is of Shakespeare as a poet.' 'if the bookshelf had room for only one edition of Shakespeare's poems, Burrow's would be the one'' Stephen Orgel, London Review of Books

`'it is a superb edition, beautifully conceived, learned, intelligent, generous, judicious; but most impressive in the way it locates Shakespeare's poems in relation to each other and to his career.' ' Stephen Orgel

`'lucid, acute, to the point, and often amusing . . . a distinguished addition to a distinguished series.'' Henry Woudhuysen, Times Literary Supplement

`'Colin Burrow's good sense, tact and balance as an editor are deeply impressive.'' Henry Woudhuysen, Times Literary Supplement

`the best edition of these (mostly) cracking poems' Evening Standard

Product Description
This is the only fully annotated and modernized edition to bring together Shakespeare's sonnets as well as all his poems (including those attributed to him after his death) in one volume. A full introduction discusses his development as a poet, and how the poems relate to the plays, and detailed notes explain the language and allusions. While accessibly written, the edition takes account of the most recent scholarship and criticism.

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Product Details

Paperback: 768 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; annotated edition edition (July 18, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 019281933X
ISBN-13: 978-0192819338
Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.8 x 1.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #561,384 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
Right honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden; only if your Honour seem but pleased I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
first cited usage, first cited example, late rare words, compare sonnet, sickle hour, graver labour, dull flesh, manuscript miscellanies, first citation, feminine rhymes

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Winter's Tale, Book of Common Prayer, Lover's Complaint, All's Well, Shakespeare's Sonnets, True Tragedy, Twelfth Night, Barnabe Barnes, England's Helicon, Richard Barnfield, Compare Livy, Earl of Southampton, Solemnization of Matrimony, Two Gentlemen, Bartholomew Griffin, Clapham's Narcissus, Diverse Humours, Drayton's Idea, Pericles Scene, Prince Harry, Thomas Wilson, Daniel's Delia, Henry Wriothesley, Merry Wives, Scylla's Metamorphosis

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 100 books:

Venus and Adonis. by William Shakespeare on 48 pages
Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe on 9 pages
The Narrative Poems (The Pelican Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare on 4 pages
The Rape of Lucrece (Penguin Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare on 4 pages
Sir Thomas More: By Anthony Munday and Others by Vittorio Gabrielli on page 404, page 432, and page 482

See all 100 books this book cites

18 books cite this book:

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Patrick Cheney on 21 pages
Critical Essays on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint: Suffering Ecstasy by Shirley Sharon-Zisser on page 129, page 134, and Back Matter
Edmund Campion: Memory And Transcription by Gerard Kilroy on page 22, and Back Matter
James Merrill's Poetic Quest: (Contributions to the Study of World Literature) by Don Adams in Back Matter
The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Kirk Freudenburg in Front Matter

See all 18 books citing this book

Books on Related Topics (learn more)

Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	67% buy the item featured on this page: The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford World's Classics) 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
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Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb!, July 7, 2005

By	Dr. Richard M. Waugaman (Chevy Chase, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a wonderful edition of Shakespeare's poetry, which has been neglected as the preponderance of attention is devoted to his plays. Colin Burrow is a breath-takingly fine scholar, who modestly and unobtrusively shares his immense learning to greatly enrich our reading of Shakespeare's poetry.

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage, September 11, 2008

By	Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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

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