"Every point of view, every kind of knowledge and every kind of experience is limited and ignorant: nevertheless so far as l know, this volume seems to me to be as representative as it could be.---Delmore Schwartz
Act by act, scene by scene, each Shakespeare Explained guide creates a total immersion experience in the plot development, characters, and language of the specific play.
This edited collection brings together scholars from across the world, including France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the USA and India, to offer a truly international perspective on the global reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the 18th century to the present. Global Shakespeare has never been so local and familiar as it is today. The translation, appropriation and teaching of Shakespeare’s plays across the world have been the subject of much important recent work in Shakespeare studies, as have the ethics of Shakespeare’s globalization. Within this discussion, however, the Sonnets are often overlooked. This book offers a new global history of the Sonnets, including the first substantial study of their translation and of their performance in theatre, music and film. It will appeal to anyone interested in the reception of the Sonnets, and of Shakespeare across the world.
Though Sonnets Are, Generally, Easy Poems, Shakespeare S Sonnets Are Not, And Very Naturally, He Being A Master-Mind, His Sonnets Are Far From Easy To Understand. The Principal Objective Of This Book Is To Explain The Sonnets For Common Readers, And To Discuss Some Very Topical Questions About Them. The Author Persistently Kept In Mind The Difficulties Of General Readers In Understanding The Sonnets, And So He Meticulously Avoided Pedantry. The Book May Be Deemed To Be Divided Into Two Parts : The First Part Discusses Some Very Important General Topics Relating To The Sonnets; And The Second Part Devotes Itself Entirely To Explaining, Line By Line, The Sonnets, Keeping Close To The Themes Of Them. Difficult Words And Concepts Have Been Carefully Explained. The Texts Of All The 154 Sonnets Have Been Given For The Benefit Of Readers.
A Goodreads Choice Award nominee The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in this collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets This hilarious book of poetry transforms disco staples, classic rock anthems, and recent chart-toppers into hilarious iambic pentameter! All your favorite songs are here, including hits by Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, and many others. An entertaining journey into the world of Elizabethan poetry, and based on the immensely popular Tumblr of the same name, Pop Sonnets is the perfect gift for Shakespeare fans and music lovers alike. “Ever wonder what Taylor Swift and Beyoncé would sound like in iambic pentameter? We hadn’t either, but now we can't get enough.” —TIME
First published in 1961. This study analyses Shakespeare's treatment of the universal themes of Beauty, Love and Time. He compares Shakespeare with other great poets and sonnet writers - Pindar, Horace and Ovid, with Petrarch, Tasso and Ronsart, with Shakespeare's own English predecessors and contemporaries, notably Spenser, Daniel and Drayton and with John Donne. By discussing their resemblances and differences, a not altogether orthodox picture of Shakespeare's attitude to life is presented, which suggests that he was not as phlegmatic and equable a person as critics have often supposed.
In his own time, Shakespeare was best known to the reading public as a poet, and even today copies of his Sonnets regularly outsell everything else he wrote. For this new edition, Stephen Orgel offers a warmly personal and original introduction to Shakespeare's best-loved and most widely read poems. Careful readings emphasize their sexual and temperamental ambiguity, their textual history and the special perils an editor faces when modernizing the original quarto's spelling, punctuation, and even layout. The edition retains the text of the Sonnets prepared by Gwynne Evans, together with his detailed notes on each, and a line-by-line commentary. Throughout, the 'voices' of the sonnets appear in all their intricacy and dramatic power.
Helen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language. In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. The commentaries—presented alongside the original and modernized texts—offer fresh perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare’s techniques as a working poet. With the help of Vendler’s acute eye, we gain an appreciation of “Shakespeare’s elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent.”