Introduction

Abstract

Aside from a handful of sonnets, William Shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry has seldom received the same adulation as his plays. This neglect caused Colin Burrow in his 1997 Chatterton Lecture on Poetry to complain that ‘Shakespeare’s poems and Sonnets have rarely been considered together as a group and are even more rarely treated as a major part of Shakespeare’s works’. Since ‘the poems and Sonnets tend to moulder at the back of collected editions of his work, and lurk unobtrusively in multiple editions’, he urged his audience at the British Academy to put ‘the poems at the front of our thinking about Shakespeare, and perhaps even at the front of collected editions of his works’. This book is part of a wider movement that responds to his challenge.1 Its purpose is to introduce readers to the pleasure of reading ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, a ‘rare and irreplaceable possession’ that has currently become so neglected by general readers that it might almost be called a lost masterpiece.2