Sonnets

Description

Shakespeare's complete sonnets in one beautiful edition INTRODUCTION BY GERMAINE GREER Shakespeare's sonnets are lyrical, haunting, beautiful and often breath-taking, representing one of the finest bodies of poetry ever penned. They demonstrate the writer's skill in capturing the full range of human emotions within a carefully prescribed form and creating something unique in every one. Some are familiar - Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? - others unexpected, but together they form an extraordinary meditation on the nature of love, lust, beauty and time.

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire and was baptised on 26 April 1564. Thought to have been educated at the local grammar school, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he went on to have three children, at the age of eighteen, before moving to London to work in the theatre. Two erotic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were published in 1593 and 1594 and records of his plays begin to appear in 1594. The first edition of the sonnets was published in 1609 but evidence suggests that Shakespeare had been writing them for years for a private readership. Shakespeare spent the last five years of his life in Stratford, by now a wealthy man. He died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The first collected edition of his works was published in 1623.

The great master who knew everything...an unspeakable source of delight Every age has reinvented the Bard in its own image. Renaissance Man or post-modern angst... Shakespeare haunts our language * Independent * Shakespeare was the most consummate genius of all time Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third Every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself