Shakespeare's Sonnets

by Dympna Callaghan

This introduction provides a concise overview of the central issues and critical responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets, looking at the themes, images, and structure of his work, as well as the social and historical circumstances surrounding their creation.

Genres: Shakespeare, Criticism

176 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 2006

About the author

Dr. Dympna C. Callaghan is Professor of English at Syracuse University. Her expertise is in the playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance. She was President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2012-13.

Callaghan has held fellowships at the Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Libraries, at the Getty Research Centrer in Los Angeles, and at the Bogliasco Center for Arts and Humanities in Liguria, Italy. She is a member of the editorial team of A/S/I/A, the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive and and co-editor of the Palgrave Shakespeare book series.

Reviews

[Narengi · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a good book, but due to the fact that I didn't have any background knowledge about Shakespeare I couldn't get some points. It requires an understanding of literature and somehow history. So I guess in the future I'll come back to this and study it again because for me it was too soon to read it although I learned about Shakespeare.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is enlightening that the Bard’s Sonnets yet create such animated, state-of-the-art, and sometimes enthralling new commentary, although some of it is unsurprisingly abortive. Callaghan’s intellectual and succinct overview and, exclusively, Schoenfeldt’s all-embracing assortment, validate that Shakespeare’s Sonnets analysis is not exhausted at all, notwithstanding the inevitable repetitions in its exponentially increasing quantity.