Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are the most famous and controversial love poems in the English language. This book is both an edition of these poems and a guide to how to read them. It provides an original-spelling text, and prints the poems as they appeared in the first edition, Shake-speares Sonnets (1609), preserving the spelling, punctuation, italics, and capitalization of the original. The advantages of reading an original-spelling text are explained, and detailed help is provided in order to assist readers who may be unfamiliar with the conventions of early-modern spelling and punctuation. The introduction discusses the sonnet tradition within which Shakespeare was writing, and the richly suggestive language which he used. The forms of sexuality evoked in the Sonnets are fully charted, but readers are steered away from biographical speculation. The annotation which accompanies the text provides detailed and carefully-targeted glosses which help the reader construct their own understanding of the poems. Appendices on Shakespeare’s rhetoric and vocabulary enable the modern reader to appreciate the rich verbal play of the poetry.