Volume 25, Number 5 · April 6, 1978
'Full to Overflowing'
By C.L. Barber
Shakespeare's Sonnets
edited with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth
Yale University Press, 578 pp., $25.00
This edition of the sonnets is a heroic enterprise. Facsimiles of the 154 poems from the 1609 Quarto, printed opposite tactfully modernized versions, are followed by 403 densely packed pages of 'analytic commentary.' The amount of attention that has been given to Shakespeare's slim volume is staggering. Hyder Rollins assembled all the commentary and theories up through the early 1940s in his huge Variorum Edition;[1] Since then, editions and 'solutions to the riddle of the sonnets' have continued to appear at a rate almost equaling studies of Hamlet. Professor Stephen Booth knows all this commentary, and credits appropriately glosses proposed since Rollins. But for the most part he is going it alone, determined to do justice to all that is going on in these poems.
Review, 6276 words
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