What do you think?
Sonnets and Poems
FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY THE WORLD'S LEADING CENTER FOR SHAKESPEARE STUDIES This edition Essays by Lynne Magnusson and Catherine Belsey The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit www.folger.edu.
331 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published March 3, 1988
About the author
William Shakespeare
18.2k books48.5k followersWilliam Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
August 19, 2026
What more can be said of the master?
It’ll help quench the thirst of a romantic. It’ll light the wick of a dreamer.
I have beheld thy taste within such grasp, and with sweat on the brow, I remove the mask.
Sonnet 10
For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any,
Who for thy self art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lov’st is most evident:
For thou art so possessed with murderous hate,
That ‘gainst thy self thou stick’st not to conspire,
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O! change thy thought, that I may change my mind:
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:
Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 21
So is it not with me as with that Muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems,
With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare,
That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.
O! let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother’s child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air:
Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
I will not praise that purpose not to sell.
Sonnet 23
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharg’d with burthen of mine own love’s might.
O! let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.
Sonnet 29 (My forever favorite)
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 40
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love, thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest;
But yet be blam’d, if thou thy self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty:
And yet, love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love’s wrong, than hate’s known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites yet we must not be foes.
Sonnet 81
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;
And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Sonnet 94
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself, it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
Sonnet 114
Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy,
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best
As fast as objects to his beams assemble?
O ’tis the first; ’tis flattery in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up.
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare the cup.
If it be poisoned, ’tis the lesser sin
That mine eye loes it and doth first begin.
Sonnet 149
Canst thou, O cruel! Say I love thee not,
When I against myself with thee partake?
Do I not think on thee, when I forgot
Am of my self, all tyrant, for thy sake?
Who hateth thee that I do call my friend,
On whom frown’st thou that I do fawn upon,
Nay, if thou lour’st on me, do I not spend
Revenge upon myself with present moan?
What merit do I in my self respect,
That is so proud thy service to despise,
When all my best doth worship thy defect,
Commanded by the motion of thine eyes?
But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind,
Those that can see thou lov’st, and I am blind.
It’ll help quench the thirst of a romantic. It’ll light the wick of a dreamer.
I have beheld thy taste within such grasp, and with sweat on the brow, I remove the mask.
Sonnet 10
For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any,
Who for thy self art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lov’st is most evident:
For thou art so possessed with murderous hate,
That ‘gainst thy self thou stick’st not to conspire,
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O! change thy thought, that I may change my mind:
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:
Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 21
So is it not with me as with that Muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems,
With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare,
That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.
O! let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother’s child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air:
Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
I will not praise that purpose not to sell.
Sonnet 23
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharg’d with burthen of mine own love’s might.
O! let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.
Sonnet 29 (My forever favorite)
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 40
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love, thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest;
But yet be blam’d, if thou thy self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty:
And yet, love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love’s wrong, than hate’s known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites yet we must not be foes.
Sonnet 81
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;
And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Sonnet 94
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself, it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
Sonnet 114
Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy,
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best
As fast as objects to his beams assemble?
O ’tis the first; ’tis flattery in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up.
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare the cup.
If it be poisoned, ’tis the lesser sin
That mine eye loes it and doth first begin.
Sonnet 149
Canst thou, O cruel! Say I love thee not,
When I against myself with thee partake?
Do I not think on thee, when I forgot
Am of my self, all tyrant, for thy sake?
Who hateth thee that I do call my friend,
On whom frown’st thou that I do fawn upon,
Nay, if thou lour’st on me, do I not spend
Revenge upon myself with present moan?
What merit do I in my self respect,
That is so proud thy service to despise,
When all my best doth worship thy defect,
Commanded by the motion of thine eyes?
But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind,
Those that can see thou lov’st, and I am blind.
November 23, 2024
“…that you alone are you”
With the completion of this text, I have read all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets and poems at least once. Over the years I have read many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, some of them countless times, but never all of them. I had never read his narrative poems. Now I have. I’m proud of that.
I especially enjoyed VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, the two narrative poems. That is not a genre I typically care for, but I was really taken by them. That was perhaps the biggest surprise of this reading experience for me.
The Bard is good. I am not going to sit here and try to explain why he is. I will share a couple of personal highlights from the experience and leave you with that. It’s poetry, it will mean something else entirely different for you if you read it.
Sonnets 33-35 are a lovely sequence about being hurt by the one you love. Shakespeare distilled a lot of emotion into those 42 lines.
Sonnet 77 explores time and its passage, combined with remembrance. It speaks to the very essence of life.
Sonnets 55 and 121 are two of my favorites. Consider these lines from each one:
55- “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”
121- “Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed”
Sonnet 138 examines a relationship built on the lies that lovers tell each other. It is very clever, and very timeless in its premise. This line is brilliant, on a lot of levels, “When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her though I know she lies.”
Sonnet 147 might be the best poem about a toxic love/relationship ever written! Go read it and see for yourself.
As mentioned, I really enjoyed the two narrative poems. They deal with those most primal of emotions, love and lust. As long as there are people we will be dealing with these basic instincts. Here are a few lines from VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE that I enjoyed.
• “Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, but Lust’s effect is tempest after sun. Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain; Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done. Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies. Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.”
• “What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week or sells eternity to get a toy?”
• “Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining”
I could go on and on about these sonnets and poems. Rather, I encourage you to read them for yourself, bit by bit to make it more digestible if needed.
While reading these works there were so many times I would find a line that spoke directly into my life. Therein lies the power of truly great poetry. And that is why these great works will last!
With the completion of this text, I have read all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets and poems at least once. Over the years I have read many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, some of them countless times, but never all of them. I had never read his narrative poems. Now I have. I’m proud of that.
I especially enjoyed VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, the two narrative poems. That is not a genre I typically care for, but I was really taken by them. That was perhaps the biggest surprise of this reading experience for me.
The Bard is good. I am not going to sit here and try to explain why he is. I will share a couple of personal highlights from the experience and leave you with that. It’s poetry, it will mean something else entirely different for you if you read it.
Sonnets 33-35 are a lovely sequence about being hurt by the one you love. Shakespeare distilled a lot of emotion into those 42 lines.
Sonnet 77 explores time and its passage, combined with remembrance. It speaks to the very essence of life.
Sonnets 55 and 121 are two of my favorites. Consider these lines from each one:
55- “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”
121- “Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed”
Sonnet 138 examines a relationship built on the lies that lovers tell each other. It is very clever, and very timeless in its premise. This line is brilliant, on a lot of levels, “When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her though I know she lies.”
Sonnet 147 might be the best poem about a toxic love/relationship ever written! Go read it and see for yourself.
As mentioned, I really enjoyed the two narrative poems. They deal with those most primal of emotions, love and lust. As long as there are people we will be dealing with these basic instincts. Here are a few lines from VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE that I enjoyed.
• “Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, but Lust’s effect is tempest after sun. Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain; Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done. Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies. Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.”
• “What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week or sells eternity to get a toy?”
• “Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining”
I could go on and on about these sonnets and poems. Rather, I encourage you to read them for yourself, bit by bit to make it more digestible if needed.
While reading these works there were so many times I would find a line that spoke directly into my life. Therein lies the power of truly great poetry. And that is why these great works will last!
November 16, 2020
[just a note that I did not actually read the Folger edition, I'm just adding it to Goodreads for simplicity's sake as a representative for all of Shakespeare's works that are not his plays. I'm not positive which poems are actually included in this edition!]
Anyway, some of these poems were lovely but on the whole just not my cup of tea. Venus and Adonis was definitely the highlight for me.
Anyway, some of these poems were lovely but on the whole just not my cup of tea. Venus and Adonis was definitely the highlight for me.
August 26, 2023
sonnet 129 🫶🏻
October 14, 2023
Sonnets: Unlike his plays, there is little in Shakespeare's sonnets to distinguish them from the style and purpose of those of his contemporaries, and from the tradition within which they fall—in this case, that of the Petrarchan love sonnet, which Spenser re-versified. I can't help but think they would not be nearly as popular if they did not have the venerable name attached to them. Their mastery of form is undisputed, and the frequently anthologized ones are of course the epitome of loveliness, but many of them tread close to triteness, and there really didn't need to be 154 of them. Still, the cycle is undoubtedly worth a deep look and an extended appreciation of its earthy, melancholy mysteries—beyond what I can offer here. All I will say on behalf of them is that Shakespeare must surely have had Ecclesiastes on his mind when composing most of them. The handful of solemn motifs that ring repeatedly through the cycle are snatched almost directly from the ruminations of the aged Solomon. The final "Dark Lady" sonnets are much more Donne-ian in spirit (that is, in his more worldly moods) and are more obviously based solely on personal experience. But I do think that, in opposition to C.S. Lewis's criticism of Donne for equivocating eros and agape, sacred and profane love are much more easily distinguishable in these poems.
Venus and Adonis: Though often singled out for its bawdiness, I don't see this as a piece of erotic irreverence, though it is sometimes very funny. Shakespeare does have his irreverent moods, but I don't see it here. Rather, it's both a lighthearted satire of the Elizabethan obsession with classical mythology and a fairly standard exaltation of chastity, a theme which is more convincingly portrayed in...
The Rape of Lucrece: I was not expecting this to be a masterpiece. It is. It goes beyond the expected morality-play aspects to give a deep and sobering look at the psychology of sin and its various impacts, while conveying much of the same aesthetic effect as a classical tragedy. Lucrece's central lament is one of Shakespeare's most poignant soliloquies, and though he still has a ways to go until he becomes a mature tragic poet, his language is beyond reproach here and one can tell that Shakespeare is struggling with some of the same issues that he did in the early tragedies of Titus Andronicus and Richard III. Britten's eponymous opera captures the mood superbly.
The Phoenix and Turtle: What to make of this supremely enigmatic little Metaphysical gem? We rarely see Shakespeare write so overtly in this coyly probing style of "conceits". However you want to interpret it, it's hard to deny its terse power and brimming theological implications. This would probably be the first poem I would give to a college class on the English Renaissance to introduce them to the spirit of the age.
A Lover's Complaint: It's maybe not Shakespeare, but I would have no problem believing that it's a very early work of his. Pretty standard subject matter, but sterling execution.
Venus and Adonis: Though often singled out for its bawdiness, I don't see this as a piece of erotic irreverence, though it is sometimes very funny. Shakespeare does have his irreverent moods, but I don't see it here. Rather, it's both a lighthearted satire of the Elizabethan obsession with classical mythology and a fairly standard exaltation of chastity, a theme which is more convincingly portrayed in...
The Rape of Lucrece: I was not expecting this to be a masterpiece. It is. It goes beyond the expected morality-play aspects to give a deep and sobering look at the psychology of sin and its various impacts, while conveying much of the same aesthetic effect as a classical tragedy. Lucrece's central lament is one of Shakespeare's most poignant soliloquies, and though he still has a ways to go until he becomes a mature tragic poet, his language is beyond reproach here and one can tell that Shakespeare is struggling with some of the same issues that he did in the early tragedies of Titus Andronicus and Richard III. Britten's eponymous opera captures the mood superbly.
The Phoenix and Turtle: What to make of this supremely enigmatic little Metaphysical gem? We rarely see Shakespeare write so overtly in this coyly probing style of "conceits". However you want to interpret it, it's hard to deny its terse power and brimming theological implications. This would probably be the first poem I would give to a college class on the English Renaissance to introduce them to the spirit of the age.
A Lover's Complaint: It's maybe not Shakespeare, but I would have no problem believing that it's a very early work of his. Pretty standard subject matter, but sterling execution.
October 4, 2020
I listened along to this as Patrick Stewart read a sonnet a day to the world from this edition on Instagram. I followed along in my own old college Shakespeare book. Thank you, Sir Patrick! I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten to reading Shakespeare’s sonnets if not for you.
They were not quite what I expected, despite having studied them in college (we focused mostly on plays). And a few too many for comfort sounded like the poet was stuck in an abusive relationship. But they are brilliantly formed little jewels of poetry. And they do rather catch certain facets of the human experience.
They were not quite what I expected, despite having studied them in college (we focused mostly on plays). And a few too many for comfort sounded like the poet was stuck in an abusive relationship. But they are brilliantly formed little jewels of poetry. And they do rather catch certain facets of the human experience.
January 29, 2024
5/5
I've never actually just read Shakespeare's poems and sonnets for the sole purpose of reading them back to back specifically. Now that I have I don't think I can actually undo what it's done to my brain chemistry. He's so painfully human in his expressions, so smart and honest. I wish I was smart enough to recite these the way that I have some Persian poetry, at least if not by will then by repetition (which still shocks me because poetry in general is not my thing). I know in my heart that I am going to go back to this. Not like this though. But like picking it up and randomly read whatever that feels right. What I really appreciated about the Folger edition is annotation style. Not only it covers all the important bits, but it also has greate placement and font. I also found the biography, articles, essays and notes very helpful. It gave good insight on the social environment, the language and how everything came to be as they are now. A grand experience.
I've never actually just read Shakespeare's poems and sonnets for the sole purpose of reading them back to back specifically. Now that I have I don't think I can actually undo what it's done to my brain chemistry. He's so painfully human in his expressions, so smart and honest. I wish I was smart enough to recite these the way that I have some Persian poetry, at least if not by will then by repetition (which still shocks me because poetry in general is not my thing). I know in my heart that I am going to go back to this. Not like this though. But like picking it up and randomly read whatever that feels right. What I really appreciated about the Folger edition is annotation style. Not only it covers all the important bits, but it also has greate placement and font. I also found the biography, articles, essays and notes very helpful. It gave good insight on the social environment, the language and how everything came to be as they are now. A grand experience.
October 1, 2025
Pros: The narrative poems of “Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis” were the standouts to me. Lengthy, thorny, full of classical allusions, history, and mythology, but held my attention for their full length. In addition, a handful of Sonnets were really beautiful and are probably worth memorizing; my favorite of the set was Sonnet 60, with 12, 29, and 43 as honorable mentions.
Cons: The majority of the Sonnets are redundant or repetitive. The speaker himself doesn’t have any self worth and presents things in an extremely shallow and one sided view point, and the themes that show up over and over again (the destruction nature of time, the constant barrage of legal terms, finding truth in light and beauty) are far more interesting when encountered in the plays.
Do I regret going through this entire collection once? No. Will I do it again? Maybe, in a few years. For now, I’m happy enough to have taken a survey of the entire set and enjoyed the ones that spoke to me. Maybe in another five years more will call out to me and I’ll gain a deep appreciation of the cycle.
Cons: The majority of the Sonnets are redundant or repetitive. The speaker himself doesn’t have any self worth and presents things in an extremely shallow and one sided view point, and the themes that show up over and over again (the destruction nature of time, the constant barrage of legal terms, finding truth in light and beauty) are far more interesting when encountered in the plays.
Do I regret going through this entire collection once? No. Will I do it again? Maybe, in a few years. For now, I’m happy enough to have taken a survey of the entire set and enjoyed the ones that spoke to me. Maybe in another five years more will call out to me and I’ll gain a deep appreciation of the cycle.
January 9, 2018
My biggest complaint: Sometimes the footnotes seemed unnecessary and other times, when I would have liked a footnote, there was nothing.
In other words, this is an amazing book. Put together by Folger’s, this collection of Shakespeare’s non-theatrical work is buttressed by scholarship and illustrations to help explain both the time in which the sonnets and poems were written but also how they have been interpreted in the intervening centuries.
I read this book over several months, and I’m glad I took the opportunity to savor it. Lucrere, which I was finishing as the Weinstein scandal broke, was a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, but I still enjoyed it from a literary perspective. Highly recommended (and worth purchasing).
In other words, this is an amazing book. Put together by Folger’s, this collection of Shakespeare’s non-theatrical work is buttressed by scholarship and illustrations to help explain both the time in which the sonnets and poems were written but also how they have been interpreted in the intervening centuries.
I read this book over several months, and I’m glad I took the opportunity to savor it. Lucrere, which I was finishing as the Weinstein scandal broke, was a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, but I still enjoyed it from a literary perspective. Highly recommended (and worth purchasing).
November 3, 2025
I mean come on. He is revered for a reason, and his sonnets are no exception. The two halves work in perfect unison with each other as he works through his relationship with Mr W.H. a homoerotic affair analyzing his own prestige and the power of the written word by one as great as himself. Growing up my favorite poem was always Ozymandias, its perfect encapsulation of the power of the word through history enamored me, and now Shakespeare follows suit. The dark lady poems are equally direct and rude as they are grounded within complicated true love. So fun to read and honestly feels like finishing a tv show in how they are all connected and complete a full story.
January 27, 2024
Once you get over whatever trauma was wrought during high school or college regarding Shakespeare, revisit him as a poet. His love sonnets are truly some of the greatest ever penned, blowing much of modern poetry and lyricism out of the water in both technical skill and drama.
July 12, 2025
I'm really excited about having finished this, and I'm also excited to say I came away from it with some desire to reread it and primed to further appreciate "Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare", which I am hoping to start soon.
I don't think I have to say the language is beautiful. I did highlight less than I anticipated, but the sonnets in their entirety were often gorgeous. I loved his emphasis on his ability to preserve his (often explicitly male) lover's beauty through his poetry. I could not get entirely behind the procreation sonnets, but I did find the persistence amusing. I also found the dichotomy between his praise of his male lover and his (rationalizing?) of his female one very entertaining. There is what might be described as an astronomical difference.
Before moving on to the poems, I have to say, this edition is a godsend in understanding the sonnets. It's not that they're horribly difficult. It's just that it's nice to have a little summary going into them. For me, it allowed me to better appreciate the language without worrying about whether I was missing the plot.
Some of the sonnets I enjoyed most: 63, 81, 88, 94, 105, 106, 113, 130, 138, and 144.
Enjoying the poems required jumping over the enormous hurdle that is their focus on rape. The poems read really well, and they have some beautiful, evocative lines, but nonetheless, it is sometimes difficult to fully enjoy them. I definitely enjoyed "Venus and Adonis" more, though I don't discount it is problematic. I liked the lighter tone. I liked the grief at the end. I liked the idea that this is a creation myth for why love is chaotic.
I don't know that I can say I enjoyed "Lucrece". I found the first part leading up to and rationalizing the rape to be pretty difficult to read, and of course, I hate the tragedy of her fate in the end. I liked reading her part more, and I think the part where she takes in the painting of the fall of Troy is brilliant. It's just a really, really dark, long poem. I do appreciate that it's almost entirely focused on the mental state of the two characters, though.
I got nothing from "The Phoenix and the Turtle".
I liked reading the modern perspective essays in the back. As I said, I loved the notes, particularly with the sonnets. I also really liked seeing the illustrations.
I'm pretty happy I purchased this edition and took the time to read it. If you're thinking about reading the sonnets and poems, this is a good way to do it.
I don't think I have to say the language is beautiful. I did highlight less than I anticipated, but the sonnets in their entirety were often gorgeous. I loved his emphasis on his ability to preserve his (often explicitly male) lover's beauty through his poetry. I could not get entirely behind the procreation sonnets, but I did find the persistence amusing. I also found the dichotomy between his praise of his male lover and his (rationalizing?) of his female one very entertaining. There is what might be described as an astronomical difference.
Before moving on to the poems, I have to say, this edition is a godsend in understanding the sonnets. It's not that they're horribly difficult. It's just that it's nice to have a little summary going into them. For me, it allowed me to better appreciate the language without worrying about whether I was missing the plot.
Some of the sonnets I enjoyed most: 63, 81, 88, 94, 105, 106, 113, 130, 138, and 144.
Enjoying the poems required jumping over the enormous hurdle that is their focus on rape. The poems read really well, and they have some beautiful, evocative lines, but nonetheless, it is sometimes difficult to fully enjoy them. I definitely enjoyed "Venus and Adonis" more, though I don't discount it is problematic. I liked the lighter tone. I liked the grief at the end. I liked the idea that this is a creation myth for why love is chaotic.
I don't know that I can say I enjoyed "Lucrece". I found the first part leading up to and rationalizing the rape to be pretty difficult to read, and of course, I hate the tragedy of her fate in the end. I liked reading her part more, and I think the part where she takes in the painting of the fall of Troy is brilliant. It's just a really, really dark, long poem. I do appreciate that it's almost entirely focused on the mental state of the two characters, though.
I got nothing from "The Phoenix and the Turtle".
I liked reading the modern perspective essays in the back. As I said, I loved the notes, particularly with the sonnets. I also really liked seeing the illustrations.
I'm pretty happy I purchased this edition and took the time to read it. If you're thinking about reading the sonnets and poems, this is a good way to do it.
Read
May 5, 2024If you dig at all into Sonnet scholarship, you will find people questioning its presentation as being mostly declarations of love for a man with a few declarations of love for a black woman.
The basic argument is that we only think that because of the order the Sonnets are presented in, which creates a false narrative. Only a few of the sonnets actually mention that they're devoted to a man, for example. I don't buy it, because the narrative as presented is so strong. Am I being asked to believe that the printer had a handful of poems and cunningly assembled them to create a narrative that isn't there? Man, judging by the First Folio, the concept of organizing things on purpose would not occur to anyone for hundreds of years.
There are also some people who argue that we can't assume that the sonnets represent the legitimate point of view of William Shakespeare.
First of all, he started his dedication to "The Rape of Lucrece" with, "the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety," so it's not like he isn't on record declaring his love for a man.
But also, what about Sonnet 136? After two poems full of puns on the word "will," he closes with
I submit that if we were not meant to interpret these first-person poems as being from the point of view of William Shakespeare, that line probably wouldn't be in there.
Anyway, I loved reading these. They're great.
The basic argument is that we only think that because of the order the Sonnets are presented in, which creates a false narrative. Only a few of the sonnets actually mention that they're devoted to a man, for example. I don't buy it, because the narrative as presented is so strong. Am I being asked to believe that the printer had a handful of poems and cunningly assembled them to create a narrative that isn't there? Man, judging by the First Folio, the concept of organizing things on purpose would not occur to anyone for hundreds of years.
There are also some people who argue that we can't assume that the sonnets represent the legitimate point of view of William Shakespeare.
First of all, he started his dedication to "The Rape of Lucrece" with, "the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety," so it's not like he isn't on record declaring his love for a man.
But also, what about Sonnet 136? After two poems full of puns on the word "will," he closes with
And then thou lovest me for my name is Will
I submit that if we were not meant to interpret these first-person poems as being from the point of view of William Shakespeare, that line probably wouldn't be in there.
Anyway, I loved reading these. They're great.
June 1, 2017
In This Collection
Sonnets
Reading these in-context, along with the explanations provided, opened up my eyes to Shakespeare's world. Most of the sonnets are not just flowery heterosexual romances as they are often used today; they are words of love that are open to vast interpretations and feelings. Shakespeare uses his love as his muse and expresses it through unique turns of phrase and fascinating plays on words.
Venus and Adonis
This one completely rocked my world - a divine treat for the mind and the soul. It transcends our world and exquisitely and cleverly wields such wisdom. It was really a passionate explanation of love and death and despair. One of my favorites of Shakespeare so far, I think.
Lucrece
Heartbreaking, but inventive for the time. It puts emphasis on how women were unjustly seen as “stained” from abuse, and how they were thought to have earned it in some way. Our heroine was stripped of something she held dear, and it was with her own body; the devastation was tangible.
Sonnets
Reading these in-context, along with the explanations provided, opened up my eyes to Shakespeare's world. Most of the sonnets are not just flowery heterosexual romances as they are often used today; they are words of love that are open to vast interpretations and feelings. Shakespeare uses his love as his muse and expresses it through unique turns of phrase and fascinating plays on words.
Venus and Adonis
This one completely rocked my world - a divine treat for the mind and the soul. It transcends our world and exquisitely and cleverly wields such wisdom. It was really a passionate explanation of love and death and despair. One of my favorites of Shakespeare so far, I think.
Lucrece
Heartbreaking, but inventive for the time. It puts emphasis on how women were unjustly seen as “stained” from abuse, and how they were thought to have earned it in some way. Our heroine was stripped of something she held dear, and it was with her own body; the devastation was tangible.
November 23, 2025
This is going to be the shortest and most pointless review I've written in some time, but after trudging through this collection over the past like 8 months, there's not much for me to say, and I'm just not the one you should be taking advice for Shakespeare's poetry. I think some of it is very nice, and his language is great as usual - very often things stand out and you're like "yeah, that's great."
But I don't know how to approach this, either one sonnet is too little or running them back to back they blend together. There's a lot of insight to dig into from all sorts of cultural lens, but it's so much beyond me at this point - I'm glad I read this, especially the longer Venus and Adonis is particularly nice, but... I see it as "completionist only", the plays are the thing, after all.
But I don't know how to approach this, either one sonnet is too little or running them back to back they blend together. There's a lot of insight to dig into from all sorts of cultural lens, but it's so much beyond me at this point - I'm glad I read this, especially the longer Venus and Adonis is particularly nice, but... I see it as "completionist only", the plays are the thing, after all.
July 30, 2024
This edition does not include A Lover's Complaint and The Passionate Pilgrim, however I read these two poems from another edition I have of Shakespeare's complete works (along with the poems of this edition). The notes and summaries of this edition were very helpful especially for the more difficult sonnets. As a whole the sonnets felt a little repetitive (I'm thinking especially in comparison to the Petrarch sonnets I read a few years ago), but there are definitely standouts. I have the first half of Sonnet 116 memorized just from rewatching the Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility so many times. I should try to memorize the whole sonnet sometime.
April 14, 2023
It's Shakespeare. You are not going to see me rate this less than 5 stars. But it can be difficult to read straight through. The first 18 sonnets were on the same topic (the need to have offspring) and couild get repetitive. I actually enjoyed the longer poems (Venus and Adonis; The Rape of Lucrece) more than the sonnets.
This was an excellent edition with numerous essays and notes to help in understanding. Not only were there Notes, there were "Longer Notes." Although a bit tricky to navigate with a Kindle, I figured it out.
This was an excellent edition with numerous essays and notes to help in understanding. Not only were there Notes, there were "Longer Notes." Although a bit tricky to navigate with a Kindle, I figured it out.
October 19, 2025
‘Twas enthused to read thine sonnets, I was,
Seven score and fourteen o’er the same days
Was my task. First to marry off because
Of love of God and family. Then so says
Of love that shall be compared to a summ’r’s
Day. Then, of love, of love, of love, and love.
Too much shallow love made me feel dumber
For reading this. E’en the Dark Lady’s trove
Of Sonnets could not renew my burnout.
But save the poems. Lucrece, Venus and
Adonis, Phoenix and Turtle turned ‘bout
My wish to leave this book in time’s sand.
As such, I rate this anthology three,
The sonnets condemn, but the poems set free.
Seven score and fourteen o’er the same days
Was my task. First to marry off because
Of love of God and family. Then so says
Of love that shall be compared to a summ’r’s
Day. Then, of love, of love, of love, and love.
Too much shallow love made me feel dumber
For reading this. E’en the Dark Lady’s trove
Of Sonnets could not renew my burnout.
But save the poems. Lucrece, Venus and
Adonis, Phoenix and Turtle turned ‘bout
My wish to leave this book in time’s sand.
As such, I rate this anthology three,
The sonnets condemn, but the poems set free.
January 9, 2019
If you are studying Shakespeare's Sonnets, this is the book to get. Complete with 150 sonnets, the common meanings and purposes of each sonnet explained, word pronunciation explained, different word usage detailed, etc. There is so much in here not only about the sonnets, but about the language at the time Shakespeare lived. A fantastic read.
December 20, 2020
This is not an objective rating at all--I am simply not a poetry binch and did not enjoy a single second of this, even though I can recognize that they're good poems. BUT ON THE BRIGHT SIDE I have now officially read the complete works of Shakespeare!!!
May 21, 2021
I had always considered Shakespeare a playwright more than a poet (a sign of my poor English education), so this collection was enlightening. It was fun to consider some of the sonnets as practice for monologues in his plays, and I will probably revisit his longer poems.
December 28, 2024
This particular edition was very helpful in understanding the sonnets which I enjoyed.
I found the content in Venus & Adonis, and Lucrece to be quite disturbing; however, I did enjoy The Phoenix and The Turtle especially the last five stanzas, Threnos.
I found the content in Venus & Adonis, and Lucrece to be quite disturbing; however, I did enjoy The Phoenix and The Turtle especially the last five stanzas, Threnos.
February 22, 2009
I enjoyed reading these sonnets--I definitely enjoyed some of them more than others.
February 26, 2021
Ahh. Re-reading these always makes me so happy. 116 will always be my favorite, even if it reads more bittersweet to me now.
January 22, 2020
Compared to the dramatic works that we most know Shakespeare by, the sonnets and poems of the master have a certain restrained, sometimes more restricted, but no less brilliant feel and appeal to the careful reader. Many of the Sonnets are likely famous in the context of their treatment and approach of that most perennial and important subject: love. In addition, “The Phoenix and Turtle” is known by more involved and knowledgeable Shakesperaeans as one of the most complex and sonorous poems about love. For even more devoted Shakespeareans, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are witty poems that set up later Shakespearean concerns and themselves have merit. Though the former is sometimes judged as the inferior to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, the latter has achieved respect for its treatment of sexual violation and the uneasy intersection of the private violation of a woman and the public violation of a city by a tyrant. Lucrece later echoes in Macbeth, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Cymbeline; in those works either the tyrant-violator’s psychology or his founding of the state is evoked.
But this review will mostly focus on the Sonnets, as well as “The Phoenix and Turtle.” The former is simpler, though no less complex in implication, than the latter, but both show Shakespeare as a great formal experimenter and a deep thinker about the emotions, psychology, and rationale of love and passion. The former is more conversational and colloquial at times, the latter much more majestic and heraldic. The former has one speaker in what sometimes appears as a dialogue of one; the second, though obviously controlled by one poetic narrator, incorporates at least two or three voices in its rich harmony. In both Shakespeare shows himself as much a master of non-dramatic poetry as he has shown himself a master creator of character and story mixed with eloquent and intelligent poetry and prose.
But to more fully grasp these inexhaustible Sonnets and the body of work that is called the Sonnets, it will help to get a picture of what exactly our poet is doing.
The broad divisions of the Sonnets involve the personae of a beautiful man the poet both adores and badgers to procreate, called the Fair Youth (1-126), and a mistress that seems to bring a more complex and erotic dimension to this whole picture of love, called the Dark Lady (127-154). Then there is this Rival Poet, who we do not fully know, but scholars sense there is someone out there, and “Rival Poet” is as good as any for a designation. When all else fails, labels will save you; if they cannot save, they can at least put a little light on.
Regarding this Fair Youth, so many of the greatest sonnets are dedicated to him, from the very first one:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But, as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory.
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be—
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
Though the sonnets will become more advanced, sophisticated, better, as the sequence goes on, already we see Shakespeare the poet accepting the form of the sonnet, taking its concerns with beauty and passion and more, and bringing his imagination into conformity with it enough to write a sonnet, and, as he grows and writes more, he advances and makes more complications. Of course, the sequence isn’t purely chronological; but the arrangement can provide some guidance, and some of that arrangement feels intentional.
In this, we have a contest between death and endurance, a perennial conflict enacted in poetry from the very beginning (though death exists, poetry will outlast it), between the decay and endurance of beauty, between the loss and the continued existence. The most conventional theme, one later enacted in some form in the other poems and plays of Shakespeare, is that the beautiful person must reproduce to produce that beauty, and to shun marriage and reproduction is to shun that task, to be a miser, to squander the gift of Nature. Rather conventional, and sometimes pedestrian in a way. But it is the way Shakespeare, or rather his speaker, expresses this, the way language and metaphor and simile work to create an emotional situation and speaker and hearer, the words and sentences, that most engages the reader.
Though the Sonnets sometimes descend to a kind of banality, there is always a rich complexity in many of them. Such as in here:
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.
Or a certain poignance mixed with hope, as in this:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste;
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since canceled woe,
And moan th’ expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
Or a celebration of that which endures:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Or an expression of a kind of emotional and spiritual dilemma connected to love:
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still.
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colored ill.
To win me soon to hell my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
Or the expression of regret at a certain inescapable pleasurable pain:
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Many of these Sonnets have endured because of the poignance of the language, the poetic and emotional truth, the lovely images, the flow, the way they speak to enduring truths and passions that change expression but never quite change their essence. By using the language of such fields as nature, law, religion, spirituality, money, trade, royalty, mythology, and theater, Shakespeare and his poetic speaker both use the wide range of the English language to create a musical sequence that is composed of individually compelling poems that have remained in the memory and heart of the listener and reader. Many of these are as memorable as the great speeches of Shakespeare’s greatest characters, partly because they come from a speaker who is both authoritative in his emotion and passion and voice and who is very personal and dramatic in his expression and cadence and form.
And yet despite the overall brilliance of the Sonnets as a sequence and as part of Shakespeare’s work, they have sometimes received short shrift. Understandably. For they are not the plays. Some considered John Milton the greater sonneteer. Understandably, for there is a more personal feel and voice in Milton’s poetry than in Shakespeare’s, and that presence may be more desirable for the sonnet as a form, for the sonnet depends very much on personal presence as it does on assumed form. Other lyric poets in the 17th century moved to a more devotional poetry, something of the sort that Shakespeare did not do. Donne and Herbert and Milton might have more access to a certain spiritual profundity and richness that Shakespeare deliberately or instinctively does not access. Edmund Malone, George Steevens, and others thought the Sonnets were morally questionable. William Wordsworth was uneasy about the sonnets.
And yet the Sonnets did receive love and appreciation from careful and thoughtful people such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Oscar Wilde, both of them exquisite writers who had a certain care for language and a love of poetic and aesthetic luxuriance.
The Sonnets as a sequence had a very interesting critical and reception history, and they are still interesting in that regard, in addition to the merit and beauty of its individual poems. We might never get to the bottom of what these poems are about, but we can always appreciate them as wonderful poems that speak to us and speak to us in such a beautiful, resonant, and eloquent language.
The complex enigmas of the Sonnets, of course, are little in comparison to the enigma that is “The Phoenix and Turtle.” It appeared in a little collection called Loves Martyr, and there it was untitled. Full of terms from the scholastic and philosophical lexicon, there is a certain mythic resonance, a stately grandeur, that makes the poignant emotion of love so powerful. Whereas the Sonnets, as I said earlier, sometimes seem conversational and colloquial, this poem is full of the grand majesty that the glover’s son and the Stratford-born theatrical businessman was capable of. Those readers who see in Shakespeare a poet of the natural and the conversational could instructively compare their impression to the majesty and the high style present not only in some of his plays but in poems like this. To begin it will be best to present the poem as a whole:
Though Shakespeare shunned overt religiosity as such in his work, compared to some writers such as John Donne or John Milton, this love poem is also a very religious work, full of religious language such as “obsequy,” “chastity,” and “prayer,” so as to evoke something holy about the phoenix and the turtledove that have passed away, either to return or to remain forever lost.
I have not figured out what this poem means, nor do I think will any other reader figure out or fully unlock it. James P. Bednarz’s book on The Phoenix and Turtle is a helpful and valuable resource to getting a better understanding of the poem. I can get a small picture of what is going on. There is a certain dramatic presence to a congregation of animals and birds weeping for this loss, and the voice of Reason trying to make sense of this mystery. Whether this Reason succeeds or not in the threnos depends on what the reader’s perspective is. I am not sure if Reason succeeds in mastering the meaning of it all. I am not sure if we can master the meaning. In any case, I am happy to say that such mastery is not required for an enjoyment of and acceptance of the majesty, seriousness, and gorgeousness of this poem. It’s seriously incomparable, and it rivals the greatest sonnets for a claim as Shakespeare’s greatest non-dramatic poem.
I can best close this review by closing with the last of the Sonnets, Sonnet 154, a poem of a certain poignance and hazy vividness, which hints to both the dark and the enduring power of love:
The little love-god, lying once asleep,
Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,
Whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep
Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand
The fairest votary took up that fire,
Which many legions of true hearts had warmed;
And so the general of hot desire
Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed.
This brand she quenchèd in a cool well by,
Which from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,
Growing a bath and healthful remedy
For men diseased; but I, my mistress’ thrall,
Came there for cure, and this by that I prove:
Love’s fire heats water; water cools not love.
But this review will mostly focus on the Sonnets, as well as “The Phoenix and Turtle.” The former is simpler, though no less complex in implication, than the latter, but both show Shakespeare as a great formal experimenter and a deep thinker about the emotions, psychology, and rationale of love and passion. The former is more conversational and colloquial at times, the latter much more majestic and heraldic. The former has one speaker in what sometimes appears as a dialogue of one; the second, though obviously controlled by one poetic narrator, incorporates at least two or three voices in its rich harmony. In both Shakespeare shows himself as much a master of non-dramatic poetry as he has shown himself a master creator of character and story mixed with eloquent and intelligent poetry and prose.
But to more fully grasp these inexhaustible Sonnets and the body of work that is called the Sonnets, it will help to get a picture of what exactly our poet is doing.
The broad divisions of the Sonnets involve the personae of a beautiful man the poet both adores and badgers to procreate, called the Fair Youth (1-126), and a mistress that seems to bring a more complex and erotic dimension to this whole picture of love, called the Dark Lady (127-154). Then there is this Rival Poet, who we do not fully know, but scholars sense there is someone out there, and “Rival Poet” is as good as any for a designation. When all else fails, labels will save you; if they cannot save, they can at least put a little light on.
Regarding this Fair Youth, so many of the greatest sonnets are dedicated to him, from the very first one:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But, as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory.
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be—
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
Though the sonnets will become more advanced, sophisticated, better, as the sequence goes on, already we see Shakespeare the poet accepting the form of the sonnet, taking its concerns with beauty and passion and more, and bringing his imagination into conformity with it enough to write a sonnet, and, as he grows and writes more, he advances and makes more complications. Of course, the sequence isn’t purely chronological; but the arrangement can provide some guidance, and some of that arrangement feels intentional.
In this, we have a contest between death and endurance, a perennial conflict enacted in poetry from the very beginning (though death exists, poetry will outlast it), between the decay and endurance of beauty, between the loss and the continued existence. The most conventional theme, one later enacted in some form in the other poems and plays of Shakespeare, is that the beautiful person must reproduce to produce that beauty, and to shun marriage and reproduction is to shun that task, to be a miser, to squander the gift of Nature. Rather conventional, and sometimes pedestrian in a way. But it is the way Shakespeare, or rather his speaker, expresses this, the way language and metaphor and simile work to create an emotional situation and speaker and hearer, the words and sentences, that most engages the reader.
Though the Sonnets sometimes descend to a kind of banality, there is always a rich complexity in many of them. Such as in here:
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.
Or a certain poignance mixed with hope, as in this:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste;
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since canceled woe,
And moan th’ expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
Or a celebration of that which endures:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Or an expression of a kind of emotional and spiritual dilemma connected to love:
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still.
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colored ill.
To win me soon to hell my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
Or the expression of regret at a certain inescapable pleasurable pain:
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Many of these Sonnets have endured because of the poignance of the language, the poetic and emotional truth, the lovely images, the flow, the way they speak to enduring truths and passions that change expression but never quite change their essence. By using the language of such fields as nature, law, religion, spirituality, money, trade, royalty, mythology, and theater, Shakespeare and his poetic speaker both use the wide range of the English language to create a musical sequence that is composed of individually compelling poems that have remained in the memory and heart of the listener and reader. Many of these are as memorable as the great speeches of Shakespeare’s greatest characters, partly because they come from a speaker who is both authoritative in his emotion and passion and voice and who is very personal and dramatic in his expression and cadence and form.
And yet despite the overall brilliance of the Sonnets as a sequence and as part of Shakespeare’s work, they have sometimes received short shrift. Understandably. For they are not the plays. Some considered John Milton the greater sonneteer. Understandably, for there is a more personal feel and voice in Milton’s poetry than in Shakespeare’s, and that presence may be more desirable for the sonnet as a form, for the sonnet depends very much on personal presence as it does on assumed form. Other lyric poets in the 17th century moved to a more devotional poetry, something of the sort that Shakespeare did not do. Donne and Herbert and Milton might have more access to a certain spiritual profundity and richness that Shakespeare deliberately or instinctively does not access. Edmund Malone, George Steevens, and others thought the Sonnets were morally questionable. William Wordsworth was uneasy about the sonnets.
And yet the Sonnets did receive love and appreciation from careful and thoughtful people such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Oscar Wilde, both of them exquisite writers who had a certain care for language and a love of poetic and aesthetic luxuriance.
The Sonnets as a sequence had a very interesting critical and reception history, and they are still interesting in that regard, in addition to the merit and beauty of its individual poems. We might never get to the bottom of what these poems are about, but we can always appreciate them as wonderful poems that speak to us and speak to us in such a beautiful, resonant, and eloquent language.
The complex enigmas of the Sonnets, of course, are little in comparison to the enigma that is “The Phoenix and Turtle.” It appeared in a little collection called Loves Martyr, and there it was untitled. Full of terms from the scholastic and philosophical lexicon, there is a certain mythic resonance, a stately grandeur, that makes the poignant emotion of love so powerful. Whereas the Sonnets, as I said earlier, sometimes seem conversational and colloquial, this poem is full of the grand majesty that the glover’s son and the Stratford-born theatrical businessman was capable of. Those readers who see in Shakespeare a poet of the natural and the conversational could instructively compare their impression to the majesty and the high style present not only in some of his plays but in poems like this. To begin it will be best to present the poem as a whole:
Though Shakespeare shunned overt religiosity as such in his work, compared to some writers such as John Donne or John Milton, this love poem is also a very religious work, full of religious language such as “obsequy,” “chastity,” and “prayer,” so as to evoke something holy about the phoenix and the turtledove that have passed away, either to return or to remain forever lost.
I have not figured out what this poem means, nor do I think will any other reader figure out or fully unlock it. James P. Bednarz’s book on The Phoenix and Turtle is a helpful and valuable resource to getting a better understanding of the poem. I can get a small picture of what is going on. There is a certain dramatic presence to a congregation of animals and birds weeping for this loss, and the voice of Reason trying to make sense of this mystery. Whether this Reason succeeds or not in the threnos depends on what the reader’s perspective is. I am not sure if Reason succeeds in mastering the meaning of it all. I am not sure if we can master the meaning. In any case, I am happy to say that such mastery is not required for an enjoyment of and acceptance of the majesty, seriousness, and gorgeousness of this poem. It’s seriously incomparable, and it rivals the greatest sonnets for a claim as Shakespeare’s greatest non-dramatic poem.
I can best close this review by closing with the last of the Sonnets, Sonnet 154, a poem of a certain poignance and hazy vividness, which hints to both the dark and the enduring power of love:
The little love-god, lying once asleep,
Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,
Whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep
Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand
The fairest votary took up that fire,
Which many legions of true hearts had warmed;
And so the general of hot desire
Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed.
This brand she quenchèd in a cool well by,
Which from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,
Growing a bath and healthful remedy
For men diseased; but I, my mistress’ thrall,
Came there for cure, and this by that I prove:
Love’s fire heats water; water cools not love.
July 15, 2025
Venus and Adonis
✰✰✰✰
This long, narrative poem retells the mythical story of Venus, goddess of love, and the mortal youth, Adonis.
My golden line:
“If thou wilt deign this favor, for thy meed
A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know.”
The Rape of Lucrece
✰✰✰✰
This long, narrative poem retells the historical story of a Roman general who rapes Lucrece, the wife of his fellow warrior.
The poem is desperately sad and beautifully written. It doesn’t romanticize the story or dwell on the political aspects that the source material did. Instead, Shakespeare concentrates on the personal horrific tragedy of it.
My golden line:
“Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,
. . .
Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps,
And they that watch see time how slow it creeps;”
The Sonnets
✰✰✰✰
A lot has been written about the meanings of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, but more than anything I’ve read on the subject, I appreciate what Hallett Smith wrote (found in the introduction to the sonnets in The Riverside Shakespeare):
“The sonnets are not allegories to be translated or puzzled out; they are explorations of the human spirit in confrontation with time, death, change, love, lust, and beauty –remembrance of things past and the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come.”
My golden lines:
“If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.”
(from Sonnet #17)
“Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,
But then begins the journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired.”
(from Sonnet #27)
“When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You shall live (such virtue hath my pen)”
(from Sonnet # 81)
A Lover’s Complaint
✰✰✰
This poem, a story within a story, is either unfinished or a unique frame for the time.
My golden line:
“I might as yet have been a spreading flower
Fresh to myself, if I had self-applied
Love to myself, and to no love beside.”
The Passionate Pilgrim
✰✰✰
“The Passionate Pilgrim” is a collection of poems by various authors, known and unknown. According to Hallett Smith, “Five poems in the book are certainly by Shakespeare, as we know from their appearances elsewhere.” Two of the poems are variations of Sonnets 138 and 144. The other three appeared in Love’s Labor’s Lost.
My golden line:
“When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her (though I know she lies).”
The Phoenix and Turtle
✰✰✰
A phoenix and a turtledove passionately love one another. When they die, a flock of a variety of birds hold a funeral, overseen by a swan. It is a death of a perfect and loyal love.
My golden line:
“Beauty, Truth, and Rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos’d, in cinders lie,
Death is now the Phoenix’ nest,
And the Turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.”
**Sir Thomas More: The Additions Ascribed to Shakespeare
✰✰✰✰
** I don’t believe this is included in the Folger edition, but it is in The Riverside Edition and so I will review it here.
This play was written by several people, and it seems Shakespeare contributed to it later in the process. It is unknown why he would have been asked to help revise the play. Although this is not the complete play, I give Shakespeare’s speech about the treatment of foreigners four stars.
My golden line:
“Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit, as kings in your desires . . .
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail.”
✰✰✰✰
This long, narrative poem retells the mythical story of Venus, goddess of love, and the mortal youth, Adonis.
My golden line:
“If thou wilt deign this favor, for thy meed
A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know.”
The Rape of Lucrece
✰✰✰✰
This long, narrative poem retells the historical story of a Roman general who rapes Lucrece, the wife of his fellow warrior.
The poem is desperately sad and beautifully written. It doesn’t romanticize the story or dwell on the political aspects that the source material did. Instead, Shakespeare concentrates on the personal horrific tragedy of it.
My golden line:
“Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,
. . .
Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps,
And they that watch see time how slow it creeps;”
The Sonnets
✰✰✰✰
A lot has been written about the meanings of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, but more than anything I’ve read on the subject, I appreciate what Hallett Smith wrote (found in the introduction to the sonnets in The Riverside Shakespeare):
“The sonnets are not allegories to be translated or puzzled out; they are explorations of the human spirit in confrontation with time, death, change, love, lust, and beauty –remembrance of things past and the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come.”
My golden lines:
“If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.”
(from Sonnet #17)
“Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,
But then begins the journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired.”
(from Sonnet #27)
“When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You shall live (such virtue hath my pen)”
(from Sonnet # 81)
A Lover’s Complaint
✰✰✰
This poem, a story within a story, is either unfinished or a unique frame for the time.
My golden line:
“I might as yet have been a spreading flower
Fresh to myself, if I had self-applied
Love to myself, and to no love beside.”
The Passionate Pilgrim
✰✰✰
“The Passionate Pilgrim” is a collection of poems by various authors, known and unknown. According to Hallett Smith, “Five poems in the book are certainly by Shakespeare, as we know from their appearances elsewhere.” Two of the poems are variations of Sonnets 138 and 144. The other three appeared in Love’s Labor’s Lost.
My golden line:
“When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her (though I know she lies).”
The Phoenix and Turtle
✰✰✰
A phoenix and a turtledove passionately love one another. When they die, a flock of a variety of birds hold a funeral, overseen by a swan. It is a death of a perfect and loyal love.
My golden line:
“Beauty, Truth, and Rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos’d, in cinders lie,
Death is now the Phoenix’ nest,
And the Turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.”
**Sir Thomas More: The Additions Ascribed to Shakespeare
✰✰✰✰
** I don’t believe this is included in the Folger edition, but it is in The Riverside Edition and so I will review it here.
This play was written by several people, and it seems Shakespeare contributed to it later in the process. It is unknown why he would have been asked to help revise the play. Although this is not the complete play, I give Shakespeare’s speech about the treatment of foreigners four stars.
My golden line:
“Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit, as kings in your desires . . .
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail.”
August 27, 2026
I used this book for class to read all of Shakespeare’s sonnets- it was a lovely sonnet sequence.
December 28, 2020
All 154. Utterly adolescent. Took me a month, but such a great warm up for our current binge on Bridgerton (albeit 200 years earlier).
Must be read with really good notes, like Folgers or The Norton Shakespeare's Essential Play/Sonnets. Getting the slang, historical allusions really helps.
1-17 procreation poems (you're gorgeous, have a child to immortalize you.)
18-shifts to: you're gorgeous, my poems will immortalize you.
19-126 torrid obsession with a gorgeous young man, and the threat of a rival
127-154 dark lady, love triangle, even more self deprecation and focus on disease (bad poems)
This from Don Patterson's review:
"Like most poets, Shakespeare uses the poem as way of working out what he's thinking, not as a means of reporting that thought. Often he'll start with nothing more than a hangover, a fever and a bad night spent being tormented by the spectre of his absent lover. Then he'll use the sonnet as a way of making sense of it all – a way, first, to extract a logic from pain, and then a comfort from that logic, however warped it might be. Form, in other words, allows him to draw some assuagement from the very source of the agony itself."
Perfectly adolescent.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Must be read with really good notes, like Folgers or The Norton Shakespeare's Essential Play/Sonnets. Getting the slang, historical allusions really helps.
1-17 procreation poems (you're gorgeous, have a child to immortalize you.)
18-shifts to: you're gorgeous, my poems will immortalize you.
19-126 torrid obsession with a gorgeous young man, and the threat of a rival
127-154 dark lady, love triangle, even more self deprecation and focus on disease (bad poems)
This from Don Patterson's review:
"Like most poets, Shakespeare uses the poem as way of working out what he's thinking, not as a means of reporting that thought. Often he'll start with nothing more than a hangover, a fever and a bad night spent being tormented by the spectre of his absent lover. Then he'll use the sonnet as a way of making sense of it all – a way, first, to extract a logic from pain, and then a comfort from that logic, however warped it might be. Form, in other words, allows him to draw some assuagement from the very source of the agony itself."
Perfectly adolescent.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
December 11, 2021
This collection contains the original Shakespeare on the right page with annotations on the left page to help the reader understand some of the archaic words and phrases. There also is a short, illuminating analytical article about each work. I didn’t know the sonnets address a man. Yes, sonnet 18’s opening “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” refers to a man. I particularly enjoyed the two epic poems, “Venus and Adonis”, in which the goddess Venus tries to seduce Adonis, and “Lucrece,” about her rape. Venus, with all her power, cannot force a man to mate with her, while Lucrece can’t stop a man from using his power to violate her. Shakespeare addresses these and other related modern issues in the two poems. Especially in Lucrece, Shakespeare anticipates his great plays, dwelling mostly on the thoughts and feelings in the characters’ minds. I can imagine devoting years to studying these complex, poetic creations.
August 20, 2020
This is a very thorough analysis of the sonnets and poems, with the full text and annotations to help you understand. It's not as nice as having a No Fear version of the text, but it does have helpful insights in the commentaries that accompany the texts.
Because I had already read the sonnets I concentrated my attention on the three poems that are provided. My take on them is this:
Venus and Adonis -- She's just not that into you. Have some dignity, girl!
The Rape of Lucrece -- Taking what other people have just because you want it means tearing a world apart.
The Phoenix and Turtle -- The two birds love each other. They die. I have no idea what it means, and neither does anyone else, apparently.
I have now read the complete works of William Shakespeare... or at least all the undisputed ones.
Because I had already read the sonnets I concentrated my attention on the three poems that are provided. My take on them is this:
Venus and Adonis -- She's just not that into you. Have some dignity, girl!
The Rape of Lucrece -- Taking what other people have just because you want it means tearing a world apart.
The Phoenix and Turtle -- The two birds love each other. They die. I have no idea what it means, and neither does anyone else, apparently.
I have now read the complete works of William Shakespeare... or at least all the undisputed ones.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews