A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse - by Hughes (Paperback)

About the Book

A selection of Shakespeare's dramatic speeches, plus many of his sonnets and songs.

Book Synopsis

Shakespeare's best as chosen by the great English poet

"According to most anthologies, [Shakespeare] wrote only sonnets and songs for his plays. The reason for this [is the] reluctance of anthologists to break into the sacred precincts of his drama and start looting portable chunks . . . Yet when he great speeches of his plays are taken out of context they are no more difficult to understand and appropriate than those by other great poets."

This clear, compact, inviting selection of Shakespeare's verse opens the door to new readers of our greatest writer and deepens lifelong readers' understanding of his work. Ted Hughes spent his life considering Shakespeare's works and drawing on them for his own poetry; his book-length account of Shakespeare's development, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, was one of the most distinctive works of literary criticism of recent years.

For this selection, Hughes deliberately took strong, relatively self-contained passages of Shakespeare's verse out of the plays and arranged them in a pattern, like beads on a string, including the best-known songs and sonnets. The result is at once a revealing sequence of Shakespeare's verse and an anthology of his greatest bits--"read in less than a minute, learned in less than five," Hughes remarks in the introduction, and always "capable of striking up a life of their own in the general experience of the reader."

Review Quotes

"Admired since the 1950s for the primal force of his own verse, former British poet laureate Hughes (1930-1998) also won praise in his home country for numerous projects of editing, literary criticism and translation, among them this enlightening selection (first published in 1971) of favorite passages from the Bard's sonnets, narrative poems, and (especially) his plays. Familiar and unfamiliar sonnets ("Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme") mingle with great speeches and lengthy passages, famous and not-so-famous, taken from most of the plays: "Once more into the breach, dear friends" (Henry V), "the great image of authority: a dog's obey'd in office" (King Lear) and over a hundred more." - Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Ted Hughes (1930-98) produced more than forty books of poetry, prose, drama, translation, and children's literature, including, in his last decade, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Tales from Ovid, and Birthday Letters.