About Recommended Books and Articles
These books and essays
contain some
of the scholarship that I have found most useful in thinking about the
sonnets. I have tried to pick work that is largely accessible to
non-academic readers, though some of the works are
more academic in their language or argument than others. Two
books
in the list, Shakespeare'
Sonnets by Dympna Callaghan and Shakespare's Sonnets
by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells are, like my The World of Shakespeare's
Sonnets, introductory works written for non-specialist as
well as specialist readers. Two other books, Stephen Booth's Shakespeare's Sonnets
and Helen Vendler's The
Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
provide interesting and readable glosses on individual sonnets.
My favorite edition of the sonnets is the one by Katherine
Duncan-Jones, especially for its excellent introduction.
However,
non-academic readers probably won't need and may be annoyed by its
detailed annotations. General reader editions, such as the
ones
published by Bantam or the Folger Shakespeare Library, may be more
appropriate, and are less expensive.
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