Comprehensive Guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Roland Weidle is Professor of English Literature at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He was Vice-President of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft from 2011 to 2023. His publications include two monographs on Shakespeare and the textbook Early Modern English Literature: An Introduction (2013) (German).

'Shakespeare’s Sonnets dazzle' begins Roland Weidle’s excellent book on these brilliant but also difficult poems. To read his Comprehensive Guide is to see them come into steadier focus. Weidle illuminates the aesthetic, historical, dramatic and topical aspects of the Sonnets, as well as how they have been understood in past and present criticism. This is a supremely useful book, but it is also much more than a crib or a primer. Reading the Sonnets comprehensively turns out to involve actively participating in their subtle and shifting meaning-making processes, and with real implications for big subjects such as desire, gender and race.

• List of IllustrationsList of TablesPrefaceIntroductionI CONTEXT AND FORMS1. Sonnet Tradition2. The TextDateThe 1609 QuartoEarly Editions of the SonnetsThe Sonnets as Biography?3. The Sequence, Dramatis Personae and FormThe SequenceDramatis PersonaeThe Shakespearean SonnetII THEMES4. PreservationProcreationThe Limits of Procreation5. WritingImitatio vs. InventioUses of PoetryThe Rival Poet and the MarketplacePetrarchism6. DesireIrrational and Contagious DesireDesire for the YouthDesire for the MistressTriangular Desire7. DeceptionDeceptive DesireDeception: Speaker and YouthDeception: Speaker and MistressPoetry as Deception8. ImaginationThe Imagined YouthThe Imagined Mistress9. By Way of a ConclusionAppendix1. Pairs, Sequences, Groups and Theme Clusters 2. Conjectured Dates of Composition for the Sonnets 3. Addressees of the Sonnets 4. A step-by-step Approach to Sonnet 75 5. Model Interpretation of Sonnet 106References and Commentary on Key WorksIndex