Shakespeare became famous as a dazzling poet before most people even knew that he wrote plays. His sonnets are the English language's most extraordinary anatomy of love in all its dimensions--desire and despair, longing and loss, adoration and disgust. To read them is to confront morality and eternity in the same breath. Produced under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, The Sonnets and Other Poems includes all of Shakespeare's sonnets, the long narrative poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece," and several other shorter works. Incorporating definitive texts and authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works, this unique volume also includes an expanded Introduction by Jonathan Bate that places the poems in literary and historical context and illuminates their relationship to Shakespeare's dramatic writing. Also featured are key facts about the...

Sonnets are fourteen-line lyric poems, traditionally written in iambic pentameter - that is, in lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summerʼs day?’. Sonnets originated in Italy and were introduced to England during the Tudor period by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Shakespeare followed the more idiomatic rhyme scheme of sonnets that Sir Philip Sydney used in the first great Elizabethan sonnets cycle, Astrophel and Stella (these sonnets were published posthumously in 1591). Sonnets are formal poems and consist of 14 lines (3 quatrains and a couplet) Poems may be accessed by clicking the above  Poems link for texts of the poems of William Shakespeare — Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrece, Lover's Complaint and Phoenix and the Turtle.

First published to sensational scandal amidst accusations that the novel was hedonist, unclean, and depicted distorted views of morality, The Picture of Dorian Gray was a hit back in the day. In 1890, the Daily Chronicle wrote that Wilde's novel "will taint every young mind that comes in contact with it." Well, Victorian critics, gird your loins and prepare to meet Audrey Ember's Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray: hotter, lewder, sexier, steamier, and more morally corrupt than Oscar Wilde's original story! Rediscover this celebrated novel as it traces the moral degeneration of a beautiful young Londoner seduced by art and beauty into a cruel and reckless pursuer of pleasure.Meet artist Rosemary Hall and follow her inevitable downfall brought by her lust for the famous Dorian Gray—a tale both familiar and new in this brilliant erotic mash up of one of the world's most beloved novels. With a mix of old-fashioned Victorian debauchery and erotic 21st century lust this cleverly...

'And when I shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars.'This collection of Shakespeare's soliloquies, including both old favourites and lesser-known pieces, shows him at his dazzling best.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.