The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint

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Cambridge University Press, 2006 - Literary Collections - 309 pages
"This is a fully annotated edition of all the poems which can be confidently assigned to Shakespeare, excluding the Sonnets. It contains Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, and A Lover's Complaint. John Roe's introduction to the two long narrative poems examines their place within the classical and Renaissance European traditions, comparing Shakespeare's poetry with that of Ovid, Livy, Chaucer, Ariosto, Marlowe, and Daniel in the light of Neoplatonic influences and courtly style." "Some of these issues extend into the discussion of the various ways of reading The Phoenix and the Turtle. The Passionate Pilgrim is a miscellany of twenty sonnets and lyrics, containing only five poems which are certain to be Shakespeare's. John Roe analyses the interesting enigma of the publisher's role in preparing the collection and the conditions in which it was produced. Evidence for and against Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint is weighed. A reassessment of the much-debated question of the poem's genre concludes that it is best treated as a narrative in the 'complaint' mode."--BOOK JACKET.

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