Reading List

General

Atkins, Carl D., ed. 2007. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Find in a library. This item on Amazon.

Vendler, Helen. 1997. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. This item on Amazon.

Booth, Stephen, ed. 1977. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press. This item on Amazon. Find a used copy..

Evans, Maurice, ed. 1994. Elizabethan Sonnets. Rev. Roy J. Booth. London: J. M. Dent. This item on Amazon.

Ferry, Anne. 1975. All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. This item on Amazon.

Lever, J. W. 1956. The Elizabethan Love Sonnet. London: Methuen. This item on Amazon.

Ovid, 16 BC, Amores, trans. Christophe Marlowe, c. 1580s A. H. Bullen, ed. The Works of Christopher Marlowe, 3 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1885, 3:103-140. Available online courtesy of the Gutenberg Project.

Ramsey, Paul. 1979. The Fickle Glass. A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.  New York: AMS Press. Find in a library. Find a used copy.

Rosenbaum, Ron. 2006. The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups. New York: Random House. This item on Amazon.

Shapiro, James. 2010. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? New York: Simon and Schuster. This item on Amazon. View list of other excellent titles by this author on his website.

Sixteenth Century Bibliography

Atkins, Carl D. 2003. “The Application of Bibliographic Principles to the Editing of Punctuation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Studies in Philology 100:493-513.

McKerrow, Ronald B. 1994. An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press. This item on Amazon.

Language

Onions, C. T. 1986. A Shakespeare Glossary. 3d ed. Enlarged and revised by Robert A. Eagleson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This item on Amazon.

Abbott, E. A. 1870. A Shakespearian Grammar: An Attempt to Illustrate Some of the Differences between Elizabethan and Modern English. 3d ed. London: Macmillan. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1966. This item on Amazon.

Atkins, Carl D. 2007. “The Importance of Compositorial Error and Variation to the Emendation of Shakespeare’s Texts: A Bibliographic Analysis of Benson’s 1640 Text of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”  Studies in Philology 104:306-339.

Blake, N. F. 2002. A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Houndmills: Palgrave This item on Amazon. Find in a library.

Hope, Jonathan. 2003. Shakespeare’s Grammar. London: Thomas Learning. This item on Amazon. Find in a library.

Meter

Wright, George T. 1988. Shakespeare’s Metrical Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. This item on Amazon.

Pronunciation

Cercignani, Fausto. 1981.  Shakespeare’s Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This item on Amazon. Find in a library.

Crystal, David. 2013. “Early Interest in Shakespearean Original Pronunciation.” Language and History 56:5-17. View PDF.

Rhetoric

Joseph, Miriam. 1947. Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language. New York: Columbia University Press. This item on Amazon.
See also, Ramsey under General.