A review by risky_oak
Complete Sonnets and Poems: The Oxford Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Κριτική και στα ελληνικά στις βιβλιοαλχημείες


750 pages of Shakespearean language. It's almost a herculean labour.
My ocd was glad last year when on Shakespeare's day (April 23) I visited his Globe theatre in London and bought this book.

It took me ten days to finish it but for a subject like this it was a fast pace.

This volume contains all of Shakespeare's poetry. His two epic/narrative poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Then we have an anthology of 20 poems mainly sonnets that was published in 1599 and was attributed to Shakespeare even though 5 of them are by Shakespeare, 11 of unknown authorship and the rest 4 to other poets including Christopher Marlowe.
Who was born 2 months before Shakespeare and died at the age of 29 producing only 6 plays and a few poems.
Shakespeare on the other hand, died at the ripe age of 52 with 39 plays and already an important playwright.

What made Shakespeare more well-known than Marlowe was not only his longer life and longer play production but also the fact that during the years of 1592/93 there was a plague epidemic which was the reason to shut off all theatres.
So the actor Shakespeare decided to spend his long free time writing plays.
So when in June of 1594 the theatres reopened they started producing his plays and from then on he was going to be the most well known playwright of all time.

Of course during the plague times along with the plays he was writing his two epic poems: Venus and Adonis with 1194 lines, and The Rape of Lucrece with 1855 lines.
The first poem tells the story of the passionate love (and lust let's not deny it) of Venus for the young beautiful Adonis.
To me her love for an almost underage Adonis felt like a rape from a milf/cougar.

Indeed Elizabethan poetry had none of the prudeness and the puritanical modesty of Victorian poetry. It would take at least 400 years for poetry to get rid of this black prude veil.

In the second poem we have a Roman aristocrat who as the title says is raped by Tarquinius and she commits suicide to save her name and atone her honour. Questionable act for today's standards.
Of course in the end we have the catharsis where we have the punishment of Tarquinius and his family.

After these two epic poems what follow are as I mentioned earlier the poetry anthology The Passionate Pilgrim and then probably the only poem by Shakespeare which is neither a sonnet or a narrative/epic one. It is a 67 lines poem that tells the love story between two birds; a phoenix and a turtle(dove).

Then we have the 154 sonnets of Shakespeare, and the collection ends with a narrative/bucolic poem of 329 lines, as well as 18 short poems and epitaphs attributed to Shakespeare in the 17th century.

Shakespeare's 154 sonnets are his most well known from his poetry. They were written between 1591-1604 and were published in 1609, and it's not known whether they were published with Shakespeare's permission or not.

126 of these sonnets are addressing a youth, sometimes giving an advice like father to son, sometimes with an homoerotic vibe, and some of them are about the youth's betrayal towards the poet by being seduced by the Dark lady. Some also have as their theme a rival poet.

Of course saying that this passion and love were bisexual or homosexual is a bit anachronistic since they didn't exist exactly as they exist nowadays.

Of course this is a long discussion that sometimes ruins the enjoyment of reading or listening to a poem.

All poems besides the sonnets have extensive footnotes where everything in the poem is analysed.
The sonnets have on the facing page their own extensive notes. Plus the 170 pages of introduction at the beginning, and the index at the end this is an ideal edition both for those who want to study Shakespeare's poetry in depth, and both for those who just want to enjoy it.