The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint

by William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is a global icon for his plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, but his poetic meditations on love are among the most powerful and evocative poems ever written. This Penguin Classics edition of Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint is edited by John Kerrigan.'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'The language of Shakespeare's sonnets has become inseparable from the language of love in English; but the force and tenderness of these poems is undiminished by age. When this volume of Shakespeare's poems first appeared in 1609, he had already written most of the great plays that made him famous. The 154 sonnets - all but two of which are addressed to a beautiful young man, 'Mr W.H.', or a treacherous 'dark lady' - contain some of the most exquisite and haunting poetry ever written, and deal with eternal subjects such as love and infidelity, memory and mortality, and the destruction wreaked by Time. Also included is A Lover's Complaint, originally published with the sonnets, in which a young woman is overheard lamenting her betrayal by a heartless seducer.In his illuminating introduction, John Kerrigan examines how the sonnets are intertwined, the ways in which these works have been interpreted and the themes running through them. This edition also includes further reading, commentaries on each poem, a textual history, variant and further sonnets and an index of first lines.If you enjoyed Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, you might like John Milton's Paradise Lost, also available in Penguin Classics.'Shakespeare led a life of his works are the comments on it'John Keats

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Shakespeare, Fiction, Romance, Literature, 17th Century

Paperback

First published January 1, 1609

About the author

William 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".

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

my becoming-a-genius project, part 26!

the background:
i have decided to become a genius.

to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.

i'm meh about poetry, but i love complaining!

so i believe this will be fun.

let's get into it.

PROJECT 1: THE COMPLETE STORIES BY FLANNERY O'CONNOR
PROJECT 2: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
PROJECT 3: 18 BEST STORIES BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
PROJECT 4: THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES BY SHIRLEY JACKSON
PROJECT 5: HOW LONG 'TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH? BY N.K. JEMISIN
PROJECT 6: THE SHORT STORIES OF OSCAR WILDE
PROJECT 7: THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK BY ANDREW LANG
PROJECT 8: GRAND UNION: STORIES BY ZADIE SMITH
PROJECT 9: THE BEST OF ROALD DAHL
PROJECT 10: LOVE AND FREINDSHIP BY JANE AUSTEN
PROJECT 11: HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
PROJECT 12: BAD FEMINIST BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 12.5: DIFFICULT WOMEN BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 13: THE SHORT NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK
PROJECT 14: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
PROJECT 15: THE ORIGINAL FOLK AND FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM
PROJECT 16: A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN BY LUCIA BERLIN
PROJECT 17: SELECTED STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK
PROJECT 18: HIGH LONESOME: SELECTED STORIES BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
PROJECT 19: THE SHORT STORIES OF ANTON CHEKHOV
PROJECT 20: COLLECTED STORIES OF COLETTE
PROJECT 21: JABBERWOCKY AND OTHER NONSENSE: COLLECTED POEMS BY LEWIS CARROLL
PROJECT 22: COLLECTED STORIES BY GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
PROJECT 23: THE METAMORPHOSIS & OTHER STORIES BY FRANZ KAFKA
PROJECT 24: THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON
PROJECT 25: THE PAT HOBBY STORIES BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
PROJECT 26: THE SONNETS AND A LOVER'S COMPLAINT BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE


DAY 1: SONNETS 1-10
there are like, 152 sonnets, or something, and then there's a long complaint, which is relatable, so i'm going to do 10 sonnets a day and then see what happens.

nothing matters.

these are nice, though.


DAY 2: SONNETS 11-20
"Against this cumming end you should prepare"...huh?

celebrity sighting. it's shall i compare thee to a summer's day day.


DAY 3: SONNETS 21-30
they really didn't update the language at all, huh...we'd know this is from old times without every verb having an e on the end, guys.


DAY 4: SONNETS 31-40
i'll say it: i'm a sucker for celestial language. i'm no poetry fan, but throw a moon mention in there and suddenly i'm on board.


DAY 5: SONNETS 41-50
there is so much saucy gay love triangle content to be found in this lil collection...hbo, get on the phone with Bill asap.


DAY 6: SONNETS 51-60
sometimes i call books written, like, 40 years ago "classics," and then i read WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE writing ABOUT THE ILIAD and i'm like. maybe i need to learn new words.


DAY 7: SONNETS 61-70
a self-love sonnet! the instagram infographic girls wish they got here as early as the man himself.


DAY 8: SONNETS 71-80
big "if i die, just forget about me immediately so you're not even accidentally sad for one second" day. pretty rad.

"So are you to my thoughts as food to life" = the original no thoughts, head empty.


DAY 9: SONNETS 81-90
just got a phantom sense that i not only read one of the poems in today's set before, but wrote about and/or analyzed it at length for an assignment max 5 years ago.

i used to be smart. i promise.


DAY 10: SONNETS 91-100
saying someone's beauty grows like eve's apple...call me crazy but seems like a backhanded compliment.


DAY 11: SONNETS 101-110
love the poem that's like "you can never be old to me, because i will always remember how young and full of life you were when i saw you for the first time (checks notes) 3 years ago."

i guess that's kind of a while when the average lifespan is like 17 and a half.


DAY 12: SONNETS 111-120
there's one sonnet in here that very elaborately and beautifully describes my preferred style of conflict resolution, which is just like "eh, we were both assholes, let's just move on."


DAY 13: SONNETS 121-130
another celebrity encounter: that one poem that is basically "sure, my gf is stinky and her lips aren't that red and nobody and i mean NOBODY would confuse her with a goddess...but i like her <3"


DAY 14: SONNETS 131-140
wow, today's set opening up with ANOTHER sonnet being like you're not that hot. but this one is also like in addition to that, you're evil and bad. so that's fun. back-to-back.

STOP EVERYTHING. WILL/WILL PUN SEX JOKE POEM


DAY 15: SONNETS 141-154
"Two loves I have of comfort and despair"—this is so me. obsessed with being either cozy or distraught.


DAY 16: A LOVER'S COMPLAINT
this title is so me...

the poem itself: straight up nothing to do with me. none of my business, even. but that title, wow. so relatable.


OVERALL
i'm a bigger fan of shakespeare's plays — more tomfoolery, more wordplay, more d*ck jokes — but these are obviously exceptional and have lasted a bajillion years through a time period when books were greeting card-level durable and life was 99% mud for a reason.
rating: 3.5

[Leonard Gaya · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is very little we know about William Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker from Stratford-upon-Avon. Oddly enough, this ordinary middle-class gentleman wrote the most enthralling plays in the past and possibly the future history of literature. Perhaps, for this reason, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, one of his rare works of straightforward poetry, have long been considered a key to its author’s biography.

Was Shakespeare obsessed with a “Fair Youth”, did he ever feel for a “Dark Lady”? Or are the Sonnets a sort of mannerist exercise, in the style of Petrarca or Ronsard, the author of Hamlet devoted himself to, for the sheer purpose of honing his lyrical skills? These questions have given rise to a rather copious amount of commentary without providing any decisive answer.

It might be the absence of dramatic pull or the ever returning subjects of the fair and foul lovers, the fickle and perishable nature of beauty, the inexorable and destructive passage of time. Whatever the case may be, the Sonnets are probably, on first reading, the most difficult and most challenging work to fathom in the entire Shakespearean corpus. It takes a fair amount of gnawing and chewing to start to appreciate the throbbing beauty of these poems.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are quite beautiful poems, but what perhaps you didn't know or didn't remember, is that they actually tell a story of two loves both lost by the protagonist "Will", that of a young man and that of a "dark lady". Despite lots of research, no one has yet convincingly determined whether this was autobiographical (although most critics insist that it must be) and no one has convincingly found who, if it was autobiographical, Shakespeare was talking about. Sexually speaking, it is very ambiguous in describing the love of "Will" for his best friend to whom he loses the lady with "dun" (dark) colored skin and spikey black hair. The poems describe with exquisite (and complex!) poetry the evolution of the three-way relationship and the feeling of loss and emptiness that fills "Will" at its conclusion. Definitely some of the extraordinary poetry if somewhat difficult to understand with all the inversions of subjects and objects and so forth, but so worth a read!

Fino's Reviews of Shakespeare and Shakespearean Criticism
Comedies
The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593
The Taming of the Shrew (1593-1594)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594-1595)
Love's Labour's Lost (1594-1595)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-1596)
The Merchant of Venice (1596-1597)
Much Ado About Nothing (1598-1599)
As You Like It (1599-1600)
Twelfth Night (1599-1600)
The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600-1601)
All's Well That Ends Well (1602-1603)
Measure for Measure (1604-1605)
Cymbeline (1609-1610)
A Winter's Tale (1610-1611)
The Tempest (1611-1612)
Two Noble Kinsmen (1612-1613)

Histories
Henry VI Part I (1589-1590)
Henry VI Part II (1590-1591)
Henry VI Part III (1590-1591)
Richard III (1593-1594)
Richard II (1595-1596)
King John (1596-1597)
Edward III (1596-1597)
Henry IV Part I (1597-1598)
Henry IV Part II (1597-1598)
Henry V (1598-1599)
Henry VIII (1612-1612)

Tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1592-1593)
Romeo and Juliet (1594-1595)
Julius Caesar (1599-1600)
Hamlet (1600-1601)
Troilus and Cressida (1601-1602)
Othello (1604-1605)
King Lear (1605-1606)
Macbeth (1605-1606)
Anthony and Cleopatra (1606-1607)
Coriolanus (1607-1608)
Timon of Athens (1607-1608)
Pericles (1608-1609)

Shakespearean Criticism
The Wheel of Fire by Wilson Knight
A Natural Perspective by Northrop Frye
Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber
Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background by M W MacCallum
Shakespearean Criticism 1919-1935 compiled by Anne Ridler
Shakespearean Tragedy by A.C. Bradley
Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy by Hugh M. Richmond
Shakespeare: The Comedies by R.P. Draper
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro

Collections of Shakespeare
Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece and Other Poems
Shakespeare's Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint
The Complete Oxford Shakespeare

[P.E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love Journey

'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-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. [...]'


'Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view [...]'


'O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument,
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.'


'My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear.
That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.'


'This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.'

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have thoughts about the gayness of Shakespeare's sonnets, but they're not as clear as Sandra Newman's are in this wonderful essay. tl;dr there are a variety of conclusions you can draw from the sonnets, but it's silly not to start from the position that they're gay.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sonnet #29 is a perfect example of why these poems are really not for schoolchildren: "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes/I all alone beweep my outcast state ..." Of course a teenager beweeps plenty and likely feels outcast often enough, but there is something very adult about the weary despair in the first two quatrains of this sonnet.

I thought they were quite pretty, back when I was a lit major in college. Now I find them entirely devastating, and contemplate which ones I'd read at whose funeral.

Currently, Goodreads has granted this volume four and a half stars. My dear Goodreaders: if you will give four and a half stars to the sonnets of William Shakespeare, what are you out there giving five stars to?

Always love these Arden editions.

[angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Ay me! i fell; and yet do question make
What should i do again for such a sake”

sigh~ shakespeare can be so dreamy sometimes, when he’s not rambling about youth and virginity!

i had a hard time choosing my favorite sonnet but sonnet 116 is my fav for now..

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

From having a friend whisper the words out in a public library or bookshop so I may copy them down, to carrying a small battered copy of my own, the sonnets have long been a poetic staple of my life.

[Lewis Isbell]

absolutely lost the plot

[gloria .☆ﾟ. · Rating 3 out of 5]

➥ 3 Stars *:･ﾟ✧

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
— Sonnet 94

━━━━━━━━━━━ ♡ ━━━━━━━━━━

Admittedly I did not read through every poem, but Shakespeare is such a breath of fresh air when it comes to sifting through other Renaissance poetry. I've grown very fond of him as a writer.

I read and wrote about some of his sonnets for my IGCSEs, but hadn't revisited them in a while. Some of his sonnets are classically concerned with an unattainable woman. Others go rather homo. And others appear entirely abstract and indecipherable. Sonnet 94 falls into the latter category.

Surprisingly few scholars attempt to strip this poem town to a single moral of the story, because the sonnet acts contradictory at times. Perhaps it's a personal projection, but my interpretation is one concerned with the danger of disingenuously nice people. We all know how some teenage girls can be.

I tend to find the footnotes and edits of these Arden editions to be very helpful. Here, they did help with some contextualisation, however the meanings it attempted to derive were all quite scattered and incoherent, which made it less helpful in clarifying a central takeaway.

Overall, I've enjoyed Shakespeare's other work —sonnets and plays alike— a bit more. Writing on 94 was interesting at best. Uninspired at worst. Somewhat forgettable, yet incessantly a part of my curriculum.

━━━━━━━━━━━ ♡ ━━━━━━━━━━

[leynes · Rating 1 out of 5]

This only my review of A Lover's Complaint. If you're interested in my review for The Sonnets you can check it out here.

I don't know what to say. This didn't woe me at all. It wasn't memorable and the language and rhymes seemed super clumsy. I didn't plan on reading this in the first place, but my new copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, had this narrative poem as an appendix, and so I thought I might as well...

The authorship of this poem has been the topic of the critical debate over the centuries. I have a feeling that no one wants to admit that the Bard himself wrote such trash, and so scholars say that it was only partly written by him... Okaaaaay, but I'm glad that we all agree: A Lover's Complaint is definitely of inferior quality. It's just shit.

The poem consists of forty-seven seven-line stanzas written in the rhyme royal (with the rhyme scheme ababbcc), a metre and structure identical to that of Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece. After a scene-setting introduction, the poem takes the form of a lengthy speech by an abandoned young woman, including a speech within her speech, as she recounts the words by which she was seduced.

The poem begins with the speaker describing seeing a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, into which she throws torn-up letters, rings, and other tokens of love. An old man nearby approaches the woman and asks the reason for her sorrow. She responds by telling him of a former lover who pursued, seduced, and finally abandoned her. She recounts in detail the speech her lover gave to her which seduced her. She concludes her story by conceding that she would fall for the young man's false charms again:

O that infected moisture of his eye,
O that false fire which in his cheek so glow'd,
O that forc'd thunder from his heart did fly,
O that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow'd,
O all that borrowed motion seemingly ow'd,
Would yet again betray the fore-betray'd,
And new pervert a reconciled maid!

So basically, what we learn from this poem is that we will never learn from our mistakes, and that when a ripped bonus man (who treated us like shit before) shows up at our porch, we'll let him fuck us over again. Great.

[Jessie Pietens · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say? I just love Shakespeare. This cloth bound edition makes my heart flutter. I have a whole list of sonnets that I really enjoyed (for example: 17, 18, 20, 45, 61, 72, 109, 116, 130, . There were some that didn’t really speak to me and “The Lover’s Complaint” wasn’t really my thing either. Overall, this was a succes and I’m happy I finally got to Shakespeare’s sonnets after having studied some of them at uni. The introduction was interesting, but a bit long and sometimes a bit complex for an introduction to a popular edition like this. Nevertheless I would recommend it!

[bea ☭ · Rating 4 out of 5]

nearly 160 poems a bater mal com merdas hes so real for that

[Clover Youngblood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Shakespeare, especially his sonnets. But between the long-winded and confusing introduction and the printing of the book in general, I did not enjoy this reread as much as I had expected. I prefer Barnes and Noble's clear and to the point printing of the Sonnets. As for the lover's complaint, I guess I'll just find a seperate printing.

In regards to the sonnets themselves, I couldn't love them more. As I am not scholar, I dont entirely understand the exact meaning of each and every sonnet. But I love the imagery; the sonnets have the beauty of clear, fresh water. As I read them, I can feel forest ground beneath my feet and roses bluming in my heart.

[tanjaa]

ja, naja, also gelesen hab ichs, verstanden hab ichs halt nicht. aber ich bin mir sicher es is ein gutes buch… wenn mans halt versteht

[Kaitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some sonnets were better than others, however it was thematically interesting to read them together in a collection.

[Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cant beat the bard!

[Sofja · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5*

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

shakespeare is the og romantic, fun to read his sonnets and the lover’s complaint for the month of february

[Paula Josina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe.... Shakespeare is not the right thing for me

[Amy Layton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Honestly, I will never not be in love with Shakespeare. I'd read mostly his plays and less of his poetry, so I decided that it was high time to change that. And was I glad I did. His sonnets are some of the most stunningly beautiful pieces of poetry that I've ever read. I'm not kidding. I want to write some of my own poetry now. I want to study sonnets and read all of his other works of poetry. I want to get married solely to use Sonnet #91 as my wedding vows.

If you're new to Shakespeare, don't fret! Give yourself a little free time, some quiet, and his words will course through your body like it's your own blood. In all honesty, I was a little daunted by A Lover's Complaint, since it was a lengthier poem--but, I'm pleased to tell you all that it was fairly easy to read and decipher. So, please, if you're worried that Shakespeare is too hoity-toity and upper-class, don't be! His works are true pieces of art that deserve to be shared with everybody.

As for Kerrigan's introduction--also wow. I learned so much by reading the part that people normally skip. He discusses the themes of Shakespeare's work--love, death, Time, Will--as well as places it in context to the other poems of the time. He discusses some of Shakespeare's history, along with London's history, and argues for not reordering the sonnets to make them more "coherent."

All in all, this edition of Shakespeare's sonnets and A Lover's Complaint is well worth the purchase. It's beautiful, academic, awe-inspiring. But be warned: this book is best read with a highlighter or underlining tool so that you can mark your favorite passages. If, you know, you're into that sort of thing.

Get the full review here!

[Diego Carvalho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok, before starting the review I want to make a statement:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid   
Under a star-ypointing pyramid? 
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame, 
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment 
Hast built thyself a live-long monument. 
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,   
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart   
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book 
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,   
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,   
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving; 
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

THE SONNETS

Whatever, poems. Tenth muse is a man, dark lady may be white and all smiles are tears. FUCK IT, or, with a pomp, thou shall not read a sonnet, as the sonnet resonates in this empty chamber thou call body. I see nothing -- I'd whisper a tomb.

*

LOVER'S COMPLAINT

I'm ALONE, ALL ALONE ON THE TOP OF A MOUNTAIN, LISTEN TO MY CRIES, louder and louder, AS I WISH THEY WERE MOANINGS, soft, sweet, MY MOANINGS, oh so sweet, WHILE WE FUCK, BUT WE, was there a we? to begin with, DONT FUCK, never did, MY LOVE, CUS, MY LOVE, oh darling love, THOU ART NOT, AND, there is more, more for you, always more, DESERVES THE LEAST I CAN GIVE, THE MISERABLE COMMON PART OF ME: SH-

IT is all have to say.
*
By the way, quoted Milton, that makes the review smarter now, doesn't it? I hope not.

Read it!

[Meem Arafat Manab · Rating 3 out of 5]

আহামরি লাগলো না। এ লাভারস কমপ্লেইন্ট ভালোই লাগলো, যদিও এই ছন্দে দীর্ঘক্ষণ একই মন্তব্য পড়তে একটু ক্লান্তি চলে এসেছিলো।
সনেটগুলিও কেমন ক্লান্তিকর। অনেকগুলো সনেট পড়তে ভালো লাগলেও কিছুক্ষণ পর ভুলে গেছি, পংক্তিগুলি হৃদয়গ্রাহী হইলেও তেমন স্মরণযোগ্য হয় নাই। ভালো লাগাদের পরিসংখ্যানও বাজে, কথিত ডার্ক লেডির উদ্দেশ্যে লেখাগুলি আর তার আগেরগুলিতে আমি বিষয়ের কিঞ্চিত ভিন্নতা দেখে থাকলেও আমার ভালো লাগা কোনো ভিন্নতা বজায় রাখতে পারে নাই।
এই সবই অবশ্য, ঐ, আমি যে কবিতার ব্যাপারে একটু উদাসীন, তার সরাসরি ফল হিসেবে তালিকাভুক্ত করা যায়। এই কথা সত্য যে আমার এই কারো উদ্দেশ্যে লেখা কবিতার চেয়ে ভালো লাগে এই লোকের নাটক, যেইখানে তার চরিত্রদের মুখে ঘোড়ার পায়ের প্রতিধ্বনির মত বাণী টগবগায়। এইসব কবিতা আমাকে মুগ্ধ করেছে, হ্যাঁ, ছান্দিক দিক থেকে যেমন, কীভাবে যে মানুষ লিখে এত এত সনেট, তেমনি দৃশ্যের দিক থেকেও, কিন্তু তবুও আমাকে যদি জিজ্ঞেস করেন, আমি অস্বীকার করবো না, কিছু ঘটলে কিছু ঘটালে আমার ভালো লাগে আরো অনেক অনেক বেশি।

আমার হাতের সংস্করণটা একটু পুরনো, ঊনিশশো আটত্রিশের। এইরকমটাও অবশ্য আনন্দাদায়ক।

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a perfect example of how I've been using the ratings system. Everyone everywhere is agreed that the Sonnets are some of the best literature ever created. Thus its rating should be off the charts: it should take a small constellation of stars. And yet, the little stars themselves talk about not how intrinsically good the material is, but how much the reader enjoyed it, thus making the rating system subjective rather than objective. This is acceptable, in that it is the job of English departments to argue about some hypothetical objective rating system, but does get me unhappy when I necessarily give something eminently wonderful less than five stars.
The sonnets: eminently wonderful. But they are a chore. Not the easiest pleasure reading, to be sure. I should, by all rights, memorize about six of them.

[rebecca ☂ · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stunningly beautiful poems delineate love, time, beauty and lust in the darkest, rawest, most fluid nature. Its fair to say the Bard has officially won my heart.

Some favourites include sonnets 17, 18, 27, 49, 54, 55, 60, 93, 99, 130, 139, 147, 152.

[Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

After I graduated high school I dated a boy from out of state and we would see each other over weekends. Since we were a few hours apart, we spoke on the phone regularly and he would leave me voicemails (I’m well aware that I’m dating myself here and what’s extra shocking is we didn’t text message either! Gasp!). He wrote poetry and would regularly leave poems he wrote for me on my answering machine. Cute? Romantic? Yuck. We didn’t last long. I couldn’t handle the mushiness. To me, it feels so disingenuous. I ended it when it was time to leave for college.

Later in college I needed a class to satisfy my English requirements so - despite my issues with mushiness - I signed up to study Shakespeare. Big mistake. Huge. I passed with a C and patted myself on the back for enduring to the end.

I share these details because 1) I’ve experienced being woo’d via poetry and 2) I’ve studied it. So when I picked this up I knew what I was getting myself into. However, the glutton for punishment that I am, thought perhaps I’d done some maturing and could find some merit in these sonnets.

Well, I didn’t mature much.

I’m not anti romance. In fact I love a good love story. Even love letters. But poetry just does absolutely nothing for me.

That said, I’ll give myself a smidgen of credit for maturing because there were two sonnets that I really did like. Two. Out of over 150. So that means I’ve matured in my taste for poetry 1.33%. Progress is progress so I’ll call that a win.

Peace out Shakespeare. Till we meet again.

(And, in case you’re curious, the two sonnets I did enjoy are 43 and 116.)

[Katie]

I only read the sonnets themselves, not the annotations or any of the introduction/appendix. However, I feel that evaluating the quality of an Arden Shakespeare after only having read the poems themselves would not be fair, so I'm not going to give it a rating.
I'm not generally a big fan of Shakespeare's plays. Although I usually find the language to be beautiful, the plots are never really my cup of tea. However, I'd read and liked a few of the sonnets before reading this entire collection and they gave me the impression that I was going to really like Shakespeare's poetry. Well, I didn't. While I highlighted many single verses or perhaps even just a few words here and there, it was rare that an entire sonnet really spoke to me. Out of all 154 sonnets, I page marked a total of six that I liked enough to eventually re-read.
But, hey: If you like a genre, it's never a bad thing to be familiar with the classics. ;)

[Tori · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5
Uh so yeah. I didn’t read the intro.

SORRY I’m a busy girlboss, I don’t have time or energy to spare on dull introductions.

But onto the book.

It’s only 2.5 stars because I couldn’t understand half of it. Like if it was written in modern english it would’ve been higher but I’m stupid and lazy and couldn’t understand anything.

THAT BEING SAID-

Sonnet 17 could literally stab me it was so good:

“Who will believe my verse in time to come […] which hides your life and shows not half your parts”

WHAT?! God it was so good.

There were some other gems too but it did feel repetitive at times and very metaphysical (which I don’t like).

All in all tho, it was a funky read and it made me feel smart even though I understood like 2% of it.
Onwards and upwards now my friends.
Oh. And… ps.

Taylor Swift did it better xx

Okay baiiiii

[Meenakshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“O, learn to read what silent love hath writ;
To, hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.”

A beautiful set of carefully constructed sonnets, exploring love and lust, exploring lovelessness and lost love. It’s simultaneously technically, metrically precise, whilst still retaining space for “humanness”, for examining the full range of the emotional palate. So many of the sonnets stuck with me, particularly Sonnet 23, to an inexplicable degree. Definitely picked this collection up at the ‘right’ time of my life.

[David]

Perhaps the 14-line limit on the sonnet imposes a demand to be concise and precise which Shakespeare seemed to thrive on. As much as I find his longer poems to be overblown and prone to losing the sympathetic contract, I find the sonnets wholly engaging.

And that's a review of Shakespeare in my 64th year: read it all again, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Those who argue he has no place in modern study of English literature are missing a lot.