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Summary: A dazzling critical work and vigorous defense of The Sonnets
Review: This is a work of scholarship of the highest order. Vendler appreciates, for our benefit, each of Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets in mini-essays of three to six pages. Before each essay is the original folio text and Vendler's own modernization of the text, since the spelling and printing conventions of Shakespeare's day can obscure common words.But this is not all. In a lengthy introduction, Vendler surveys critical reception of The Sonnets through the present day and argues persuasively for her own methods of interpretation. Her interpretations examine the poems on a multitude of lingiustic levels, from the phonological (sound) to the semantic (meaning, content). She avoids detailed analysis of imagery and socio/psychological implications, for the most part, since they can be had elsewhere. Her aim is to show Shakespeare's poetic choices and illuminate the thought patterns that structure the poems. Sometimes she goes as far as to show possible lines Shakespeare could have written, but didn't. The effect of this analysis is that I finally feel I can approach these poems on a level that truly respects them. Thanks to Vendler, I understand why such lines as-- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes --and so so many more stick in my head, and have stuck in the heads of the generations before me. As accessible as it is for modern criticism, THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS is not an entry-level work. Vendler assumes not only familiarity with The Sonnets, but also with certain linguistic concepts such as "speech acts" and "deixis". It's nothing a bright person with a good dictionary can't get through. Those who order the hardback edition will get the added bonus of an audio CD (which Amazon mistakenly lists as a CD-ROM) of Vendler reading several of the Sonnets. Unsurprisingly, her readings stress what she says should be stressed in the essays and are in the American accent of a Harvard professor, not in the phonologically reconstructed accent of Shakespeare's day (to hear this, try ACCENTS by Robert Blumenfeld which features a reading of Sonnet 29). For English majors, poets, and people who love poetry (I hope the categories overlap) I cannot recommend this book highly enough. People turned off by Harold Bloom, Vendler's esteemed colleague at Harvard, would do well to look at Vendler's less self-important and more textual approach to literary criticism. As far as I'm concerned, this is the definitive edition of The Sonnets, not likely to be surpassed in the near and not-so-near future.
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Summary: i just don't get the whole Shakespeare thing!
Review: Why does everyone think he is so wonderful! personally, I think all of this is just a bunch of words that don't mean anything...this is coming from a 17 year old, but I can have my opinion to. I find it boring and I along with other teens that I know dread reading anything that has to do with him! I had to use this book for reference to do a report...thats why I'm writing this here!
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