All the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells

Abstract

This new edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets both expands upon what is normally collected in such editions and presents the poems in a new way. First, the book does indeed include “all the sonnets” of Shakespeare, fulfilling the promise of the title, as it includes passages that appear in sonnet form in the plays. Love’s Labour’s Lost, it turns out, has the highest number of embedded sonnets, although the most famous dramatic instance is perhaps the exchange between Juliet and Romeo where their dialogue comprises a sonnet. Second, this new volume prints the familiar collection of 154 sonnets not in the order in which they first appeared in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Never Before Imprinted (1609) but in the order in which the editors believed they were composed. Ultimately, the book collects 182 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, rather than the familiar 154 of what was once widely thought of as a sequence. The...