From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's much-loved sonnets and poems. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Other Poems, providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. Ideal for students and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere, the RSC editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

In his own time, Shakespeare was best known to the reading public as a poet, and even today copies of his Sonnets regularly outsell everything else he wrote. For this new edition, Stephen Orgel offers a warmly personal and original introduction to Shakespeare's best-loved and most widely read poems. Careful readings emphasize their sexual and temperamental ambiguity, their textual history and the special perils an editor faces when modernizing the original quarto's spelling, punctuation, and even layout. The edition retains the text of the Sonnets prepared by Gwynne Evans, together with his detailed notes on each, and a line-by-line commentary. Throughout, the 'voices' of the sonnets appear in all their intricacy and dramatic power.