Reviews for The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint

The average rating for The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-20 00:00:00 Mary Hamlin There is very little we know about William Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker from Stratford-upon-Avon. Oddly enough, this ordinary middle-class gentleman wrote the most enthralling plays in the past and possibly the future history of literature. Perhaps, for this reason, Shakespeare's Sonnets, one of his rare works of straightforward poetry, have long been considered a key to its author's biography. Was Shakespeare obsessed with a "Fair Youth", did he ever feel for a "Dark Lady"? Or are the Sonnets a sort of mannerist exercise, in the style of Petrarca or Ronsard, the author of Hamlet devoted himself to, for the sheer purpose of honing his lyrical skills? These questions have given rise to a rather copious amount of commentary without providing any decisive answer. It might be the absence of dramatic pull or the ever returning subjects of the fair and foul lovers, the fickle and perishable nature of beauty, the inexorable and destructive passage of time. Whatever the case may be, the Sonnets are probably, on first reading, the most difficult and most challenging work to fathom in the entire Shakespearean corpus. It takes a fair amount of gnawing and chewing to start to appreciate the throbbing beauty of these poems.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-09-20 00:00:00 Jack Minora These are quite beautiful poems, but what perhaps you didn't know or didn't remember, is that they actually tell a story of two loves both lost by the protagonist "Will", that of a young man and that of a "dark lady". Despite lots of research, no one has yet convincingly determined whether this was autobiographical (although most critics insist that it must be) and no one has convincingly found who, if it was autobiographical, Shakespeare was talking about. Sexually speaking, it is very ambiguous in describing the love of "Will" for his best friend to whom he loses the lady with "dun" (dark) colored skin and spikey black hair. The poems describe with exquisite (and complex!) poetry the evolution of the three-way relationship and the feeling of loss and emptiness that fills "Will" at its conclusion. Definitely some of the extraordinary poetry if somewhat difficult to understand with all the inversions of subjects and objects and so forth, but so worth a read!