The most famous collection of love poems in the English language,Shakespeare's Sonnetshave spoken to generations of readers who have turned to them again and again when searching for supreme expressions of love. Covering a 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 and includes a few little-known alternative versions.

Stanley Wells is Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, and Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, 1988-97, now Emeritus Professor. He is one of the foremost Shakespeare scholars of his generation. He has edited The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, An Oxford Anthology of Shakespeare, and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, amongst others.