Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint

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The most famous collection of love poems in the English language, Shakespeare's Sonnets have spoken to generations of readers who have turned to them again and again when searching for supreme examples of expressions of love. Covering the whole range of emotions from joy to anguish, these sonnets reveal the beauty, power, inventiveness, and originality of Shakespeare's verse. The collection depicts in beautiful, poignant, and intriguing language the poet's celebration of his passionate friendship with a young man, his grief over a friend's seduction by his own mistress, his chagrin at the friend's relationship with a rival poet, and, in the final group of poems, his own humiliating infatuation with "a woman colored ill"--the Dark Lady who has tempted his "better angel" from him. Lyrically beautiful and psychologically fascinating, the sonnets both appeal as individual poems, and as an intricately related sequence. This volume presents all the sonnets in a freshly edited text, along with Shakespeare's wry, touching portrait of a forsaken maiden in A Lover's Complaint, a poem first printed with the sonnets in 1609. It also includes little-known alternative versions of four of the sonnets.