Six years back I started reading Shakespeare again, as my children were being introduced to it in High school. Then four years ago my son who is now 18 found he had a love for the Bard and for his plays, much as I did at that age. We had been sticking to the
Oxford School Shakespeare editions as those were the versions they were reading in school, but my son decided to collect these Pelican editions because they are all available as individual volumes. We loved that the Pelican has the complete works of Shakespeare in individual volumes, and we have been picking those up to read, he gets the physical and I grab the eBooks. I loved that there are eBooks for all volumes in this series, because of a
dual form of dyslexia. This year we picked up tickets for three Shakespeare plays at
The Stratford Festival, we did three of the Bards plays each of the last few years well. So I decided it was time to reread the Sonnets.
The Pelican Classics were among my favourite editions of the plays when I was a youth myself. I often hunted used bookstores for the hard cover edition. I think the last time I read this would have been about 35-40 years ago. The description of this edition states:
“Together with A Lover's Complaint' and little-known alternative versions of four of the sonnets. Edited with an introduction by Stanley Wells. ...the most beautifully printed text available.'”
The back of the physical edition states:
“Each sonnet is presented with guidance to assist the reader to make his or her own personal response. Help is given with imagery and other features of language, and the editor has included a wide range of classroom-tested activities for individual and group work. This edition aims to give students access to the multiple meanings and responses which each sonnet can evoke, and so discover Shakespeare's delight in language and exploration of personal feeling.”
About the editors and contributors we are informed:
“A. R. Braunmuller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has written critical volumes on George Peele and George Chapman and has edited plays in both the Oxford (King John) and Cambridge (Macbeth) series of Shakespeare editions. He is also general editor of The New Cambridge Shakespeare.”
And
“Stephen Orgel is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University and general editor of the Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. His books include Imagining Shakespeare, The Authentic Shakespeare, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England and The Illusion of Power.”
The section in this volume are:
Publisher’s Note
Shakespeare: The Life and the Texts
William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon, Gentleman
The Question of Authorship
The Texts of Shakespeare
Introduction
Note on the Text
The Sonnets
Index of First Lines to the Sonnets
The publishers note states:
“THE PELICAN SHAKESPEARE has served generations of readers as an authoritative series of texts and scholarship since the first volume appeared under the general editorship of Alfred Harbage over half a century ago. In the past decades, new editions followed to reflect the profound changes textual and critical studies of Shakespeare have undergone. The texts of the plays and poems were thoroughly revised in accordance with leading scholarship, and in some cases were entirely reedited. New introductions and notes were provided in all the volumes. The Pelican Shakespeare was designed as a successor to the original series; the previous editions had been taken into account, and the advice of the previous editors was solicited where it was feasible to do so. The current editions include updated bibliographic references to recent scholarship.
Certain textual features of the new Pelican Shakespeare should be particularly noted. All lines are numbered that contain a word, phrase, or allusion explained in the glossarial hyperlinked notes; click on the line number to reveal the note. In addition, for convenience, every tenth line is also numbered, in italics when no annotation is indicated.”
And the introduction begins with:
“IN THE WINTER of 1609 a seventeen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate sent two sonnets to his mother as a New Year’s gift. They were addressed to God. The first one asked “doth poetry / Wear Venus’ livery, only serve her turn? / Why are not sonnets made of thee? and lays / Upon thine altar burnt?” The second one, answering it, expressed the resolve of the young poet (it was George Herbert) to retune his poetic instrument to a sacred mode. That year was not a particularly fashionable one for sonnets. The vogue of sonnet sequences written in the wake of Sir Philip Sidney’s remarkable Astrophil and Stella, written in the earlier 1580s but first published posthumously in 1591, was already a thing of the past. But 1609 also saw the publication of the sonnets of William Shakespeare, a most problematic book containing some of the greatest short lyric poems in our language. Herbert might have been sympathetic to the concerns of only one of the whole collection, “Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,” Sonnet 146, with its closing paradox (“And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then”), similar to that at the end of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Death be not proud” (“Death, thou shalt die”). But even in Shakespeare’s poem the speaker never appeals to God for assistance or counsel, and addresses the appeal to his own soul – the poem is charged with autonomy, in the way in which it speaks for a mind with cognitive power over both the soul and the body of the person it shares with them.”
Later we are informed:
“The most haunting problem has been, at least from the eighteenth century on, the matter of fact and fiction in these sonnets. The relation of these two terms is, for literature, itself problematic. In poetry, can a fiction be “true to” fact without literally reporting it? Of how much fact and how much fiction are complex fictions composed? And how much might Shakespeare have wanted to do with all levels and sorts of lyric conventions in these poems what he does with dramatic conventions in the plays (as perhaps Chaucer does with late medieval narrative conventions in the Tales)? From Petrarch’s Laura on, sonnet Ladies had been enigmatically compounded, and writers can easily set up what Dante called in La Vita Nuova “schermo della veritade” – a screen for the truth – by doing just the opposite of what a literal-minded person might think: protecting a private muse dwelling in the spaces of one’s imagination by putting it out that she is merely a coded version of one’s Mistress.”
The introduction concludes with:
“But in the end it is not that we are put off by all these enigmas, made impatient by how much about these poems will seem ever to be left up for grabs. It is rather that there is so very much poetic stuff there. The question that opens the great Sonnet 53 – “What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” – is asked of the Young Man: what is it in him that attracts so many representations, images, fictions of and about him? But we may ask it as well, with respect to the myriads of kinds and instances of interpretation that hang about it, keep crowding toward it, of the book called Shake-speares Sonnets. Answering for ourselves that we can never know the substance is only an easy and vulgar pseudo-pragmatic escape if it causes us to abandon rereading and rethinking the vast question as well as the minute particulars of this remarkable poetry. A genuinely Keatsian negative capability does not stultify, but rather prevents intellectual paralysis.
In 1630 the young John Milton, having bought a copy of the Italian poet Giovanni della Casa’s sonnets the year before, and having perhaps experimented with writing sonnets in Italian, in that revisionary mode composed his first sonnet to the nightingale in an appropriately Italian convention. It asked whether the song of the bird was a call to love or to poetry for the young virginal poet hearing it, as if heralding one or another of two modes of life that the Petrarchan sonnet tradition had brought metaphorically together. Perhaps he lacked sufficient experience, as well as temperament, to have learned that between Love and Poetry there is no either/or relation, but rather one, which Shakespeare’s sonnets explore, of mutual and living begetting.”
A few sample sonnets from this edition are:
7
Lo, in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage;
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract and look another way:
So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,
Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.
13
O, that you were your self, but, love, you are
No longer yours than you yourself here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give.
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Your self again after yourself’s decease
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honor might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
O, none but unthrifts, dear my love, you know,
You had a father – let your son say so.
24
Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective it is best painter’s art.
For through the painter must you see his skill
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazèd with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee.
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.
56
Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but today by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharpened in his former might.
So, love, be thou: although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyes even till they wink with fullness,
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.
Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that, when they see
Return of love, more blessed may be the view;
As call it winter, which, being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome thrice more wished, more rare.
My son(18) and I have been reading the Pelican Classics editions of Shakespeare’s plays for a few years now. Typically we read the plays we plan on seeing that season at the Stratford Festival. This year I picked up this volume because it had been several years since I had read through the sonnets. This is an excellent reading edition, even as an eBook. Each Sonnet is presented on a separate page. The note numbers are on the far right. And the ends are endnotes in the volume. Thus making it a wonderful edition to read. I picked the book up and read for or 5 a day on a number of weeks. It was a great way to end the day over a final cup of tea.
I loved the Pelican Classic Edition when I was a teen myself. I have started collecting the eBook versions now. If you are looking for a good copy of the sonnets to read or study I can easily recommend this edition.
