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Shakespeare Quarterly 54.3 (2003) 308-310



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The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Edited by Colin Burrow. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 750. $99.00 cloth, $13.95 paper.

Shakespeare's poems, as Colin Burrow aptly observes, have been "unthinkingly stigmatized by the dire privative prefix of 'the non-dramatic works'" (2). But if, as he suggests, the texts in his magisterial edition are often regarded by critics of the plays as their author's illegitimate children, in the past twenty-five years the gods have indeed stood up for bastards: paradoxically, during the same period when the long-standing marginalization of these poems was exacerbated by the privileging of drama in our field, the nondramatic works have benefited from a wealth of important editions, as well as some major critical studies.

Appearing in 1977, Stephen Booth's Shakespeare's Sonnets was not only a harbinger of this outpouring but also an often-unacknowledged precursor to the impact of poststructuralism on our field. In subsequent years influential editions by John Kerrigan (The Sonnets andA Lover's Complaint [1986]) and by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Shakespeare's Sonnets [1997]) pursued by precept and example the important revisionist agenda of linking the lyrics and Shakespeare's complaint; John Roe offered new insight into the narrative poems in his contribution to the New Cambridge Shakespeare The Poems (1992); in the same series Gwynne Blakemore Evans produced a scrupulous edition, The Sonnets (1996); Helen Vendler's Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997) approached both these lyrics and larger questions about that mode with her usual penetration and conviction; in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (1986), Joel Fineman, no less brilliantly than problematically, claimed for these lyrics a pivotal role in literary and cultural history, while in other writings he influentially theorized The Rape of Lucrece.

This very limited survey of significant publications on the nondramatic works demonstrates how crowded a field Burrow's edition enters; and not the least sign of its success is that it contributes so many new approaches and insights while also serving as culmination and critique of the editorial and critical work summarized above. Like the editions by Duncan-Jones and Kerrigan, Burrow's volume is polemical in its insistence on linkages among the nondramatic works; but where they emphasize the relationship between two of the texts, he is concerned to connect that entire oeuvre. Hence this book gathers under one roof all the canonical nondramatic poems as well as texts attributed to Shakespeare, such as poems in The Passionate Pilgrim and lyrics assigned to [End Page 308] him in the seventeenth century.1 Especially welcome is the layout of the book, with an entire recto page devoted to each sonnet and the preceding verso to its notes. The book also includes both the basic glosses students require and lengthy, detailed notes invaluable to the scholarly reader; on the other hand, predictably, its collation, though quite adequate to the purposes of most readers, is less comprehensive than the one in Gwynne Blakemore Evans's Cambridge edition, and its textual analyses are less detailed. Above all, Burrow's edition is graced by an incisive critical introduction that, at some 150 pages, is virtually a monograph in its own right and considerably more extensive than its counterparts.

Four characteristics in particular mark the many achievements of The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Burrow is generally balanced in his judgments; witness, among a host of other examples, his adjudication of the evidence about Southampton's relationship to Shakespeare (10-15) and his discussion of the putative republicanism of The Rape of Lucrece (50-54). In his critical methods he is capacious, uniting an unabashed concern for aesthetic and formal issues with an informed engagement with contemporary critical debates, notably on sexualities. Burrow is thorough, even exhaustive, in his research. And his style is exemplary: witty, lucid, engaging.

Burrow valuably emphasizes the connections among the poems, as well as their connections to the plays: demonstrating that the nondramatic texts tellingly juxtapose speech and narrative, he also argues that they...

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