Ten Shakespeare sonnets

The essays in this volume on ten of Shakespeare’s sonnets are intended to help the reader experience some of the pleasures and the problems, the difficulties and some of the solutions, in reading and rereading one of the greatest poetic works of European literature, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets of 1609. The essays are encounters, intense and sudden, between some distinguished and very able critical minds and their chosen single poems: the scholars and critics in this book have all a longstanding knowledge of the whole collection, as of the Elizabethan and Jacobean literary milieu in which it was composed and published—but however well one thinks one knows a poem or other short work, when one is asked to write (or teach) intensively on it, one discovers new readings, new thoughts, new enthusiasms in what seemed well known and understood.