Student Guide to Shakespeare's Non-dramatic Poetry (Student Guides)

The purpose of this series is to promote the study of writing in the English language. It does this through the introduction of the major figures writing in English throughout the ages. Each book is written by an expert of the major writer concerned. In this study, the author sheds fresh light on two very different groups of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems: the early and controversial "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece", and the highly personal "Sonnets". He explains the genesis of the first two in the genre of Ovidian narrative poetry, in which a young Elizabethan man of letters was expected to excel, and which was extremely popular. In the "Sonnets" he traces the mental journey of a man going through an acute psychological crisis as he faces up to the truth about his own unconventional sexuality. It is a study which confronts these "disagreeables" in the "Sonnets" which most critics have ignored.