Shakespeare's Non-Dramatic Poetry

In this study, completed shortly before the poet's death in 1998, Martin Seymour-Smith sheds fresh light on two very different groups of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems: the early and conventional Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and the highly personal Sonnets. He explains the genesis of the first two in the genre of Ovidian narrative poetry in which a young Elizabethan man of letters was expected to excel, and which was highly popular. In the Sonnets (his 1963 old-spelling edition) he traces the mental journey of a man going through an acute psychological crisis as he faces up to the truth about his own unconventional sexuality. It is a study which confronts those 'disagreeables' in the Sonnets which most critics have ignored.

90  pages

ISBN: 978-1-871551-22-8