The Complete Poems of Shakespeare / Edition 1

The editors present his non-dramatic poems in the chronological order of their print publication: the narrative poems and ; the metaphysical ‘Let the Bird of Loudest Lay’ (often known as ); all 154 . In headnotes and extensive annotations to the texts, Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne elucidate historical contexts, publication histories, and above all the literary and linguistic features of poems whose subtleties always reward careful attention. Substantial appendices trace the sources for Shakespeare’s narrative poems and the controversial text , as well as providing information about poems posthumously attributed to him, and the English sonnet sequence. Shrank and Lyne guide readers of all levels with a glossary of rhetorical terms, an index of the poems (titles and first lines), and an account of Shakespeare’s rhymes informed by scholarship on Elizabethan pronunciation. With all these scholarly resources supporting a newly edited, modern-spelling text, this edition combines accessibility with layers of rich information to inform the most sophisticated reading.