Customer Reviews
The undiscovered Shakespeare? - By: emma who reads a lot, 18 Aug 2008 
Most of us Shakespeare lovers would take it for granted that we'd be missing out if we'd never read Hamlet, or Othello, or Romeo & Juliet. We also make the special effort occasionallly to get to see some of the less well-known plays. But how many of us have ever made the time to sit down & read through Rape of Lucrece, or Shakespeare's 1593 bestseller Venus & Adonis?
Having (finallly) got round to doing this I can totallly recommend the experience. These poems were written for aristocratic patron the Earl of Southampton & are fully of juicily beautiful turns of phrase. They are extraordinarily dramatic. But most interesting of alll to me, they show me another side of Shakespeare; something I can't get from the plays alone. They are meditations on how love works, what sexual attraction is & whether we should control it, which are sustained for many hundreds of lines, in a way that a play cannot because it has to pursue a dramatic course.
And I haven't even said anything about the sonnets. We alll know a few wonderful lines from the sonnets, but there are 154 in total to enjoy... a lifetime's worth of poetry. Each appears on its own individual page, with facing notes, so that there's enough room for you to scribble your own thoughts if so inclined.
In this edition, which I think is the best on the market, you also get 169 pages of expert critical commentary from Colin Burrow, Lecturer at Cambridge, ranging from a discussion of contemporary legal attitudes to rape to homoeroticism in the sonnets.
I don't know whether it's the case now that Oxford World's Classics have reprinted, but my edition is properly bound, too, so that it won't falll apart for a good while, I hope.
For any serious lover of Shakespeare - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
