[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by Shaun J. Russell

There are many, though one of the real challenges of academic books that get into anything about Shakespeare's poetry is that there are many baked-in assumptions, based on those scholars' academic biases. For instance, whether a scholar believes that Shakespeare's expressed feelings toward the young man of the first 126 sonnets are fraternal, romantic, fictional, biographical, or [insert perspective here] will inevitably shape how that scholar talks about the sonnets overall. Likewise, for the so-called "dark lady sonnets" (which is a horribly reductive term that should be kicked to the curb), there was stodgy academic resistance against considering the woman appearing throughout sonnets 127-152 might have been Black. Naturally, a distinction like that can make a huge impact on how the poems are read (and discussed). There are many similar caveats that govern why I teach with a reader-response approach. I have my own set of entrenched scholarly opinions, but I never want to impose them on another person's fresh reading.

Those important disclaimers aside, I think Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is one of the better academic texts out there that truly gets into the form and function of the sonnets, with a lot of time spent exploring concatenation, consistent thematics, meter, and other like concerns. I can be quite critical of Vendler's readings, but I also acknowledge that she was one of the best in the past couple generations at actually looking closely at each poem both individually and as part of a broader collection.

I also bristle a bit at a lot of their baked-in assumptions and baseless claims, but in general, I think Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells's Oxford Shakespeare Topics: Shakespeare's Sonnets is a decent enough (and accessible) overview of everything related to the sonnets. Again, don't take everything there at face value, but it manages to be reasonably thorough, compact, and readable, which is a pretty good feat for that sort of text.

Would you consider these books to be relevant to his poetic style in his plays as well? I guess in an ideal world the perfect book would analyze his writing style across all of his texts, not just his sonnets, but we have to take what we can get.

Although the sense that I'm getting from this thread is that a lot his status comes from an intersection between his ability both as a poet and playwright. So maybe when we look at his poetic style alone the divergence between him and other writers isn't as great. In other words, there maybe isn't some kind of secret sauce to be found beyond him being a masterful writer who reached high acclaim with his plays.