Dimensions
130 x 198 x 14mm
An Everyman Shakespeare.
Poems that shaped our language of love. With their devastating depiction of jealousy and lust, love tangled with hate, heterosexual and homosexual desire, Shakespeare's sonnets are among the most breathtaking love poems yet written. Unparalleled in their intensity of private passion, they celebrate love and its tendernesses as well as exploring its sorrows.
Perhaps against Shakespeare's wishes, in 1609 'The Sonnets' were first published together with 'A Lover's Complaint'. The lament of a young woman as she weeps beside a river, 'A Lover's Complaint' tells how she was seduced and betrayed. When read after 'The Sonnets', as the first printer intended, this melancholy poem unarguably deepens the mysterious beauty of 'The Sonnets'.
A comprehensive edition, with introduction, notes, selected criticism, index and chronology of Shakespeare's life and times.
