Sonnets of William Shakespeare (World Classics in Large Print)

Product Description <br/>The Sonnets is the title of a collection of 154 sonnets accredited to William Shakespeare which cover themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. The first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man; the last 28 to a woman. The sonnets were first published in a 1609.This Large Print edition includes a new Index of First Lines.<br/> About the Author <br/>Shakespeare's Sonnets count amongst the wonders of the literary world. Like Debussy's piano preludes, or Shostakovitch's Preludes and Fugues for piano, the sonnets say huge amounts and cover huge themes within a small format. They are a distillation of many thoughts and many moods into just fourteen lines of text. We have made a selection for this album and added music of Shakespeare's period, using ancient instruments - lutes, viols and virginals - which produce a gentle sound quite unlike anything modern.<br/> The composers represented include some of the greatest figures of the Elizabethan age. William Byrd was a particular favourite of Queen Elizabeth, and Anthony Holborne was an industrious publisher of music for dancing. Shakespeare's sonnets were published in London in 1609. This fine volume is part of a long tradition of sonnet composition, and of publishing sonnets in collections, in the way that a composer might publish a volume of madrigals or dance suites. The sonnet form evolved during the high Italian Middle Ages. Its most famous exponents included Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-1374), two writers whose words were often set to music. The form spread North and West through Spain and France, where it was developed by the French 'Pléiade' poets Joachim DuBellay (1522-1560) and Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585). Publishing precedents for Shakespeare's volume could be found in the French sonnet cycles of Ronsard, Du Bellay, and the two short cycles of Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563).<br/> In England, Sir Philip Sydney (1554-1586) contributed famously to the genre and established the rhyme scheme which Shakespeare was to adopt in his own works. The earlier French and Italian poets used the 'Italian' sonnet form. This consisted of two groups of four lines, called quatrains, which always rhymed' a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a', followed by two groups of three lines, or tercets, which rhymed c-c-d, e-e-d or c-c-d, e-d-e). The five rhyming sounds make a marvellous music in themselves in the vowel rich Romance languages of French or Italian, but in the English language the scheme can start to sound contrived and monotonous, particularly in a series of sonnets on the same theme. Shakespeare followed the more idiomatic rhyme scheme that Philip Sydney used in the first great Elizabethan sonnet cycle, Astrophel and Stella (published posthumously in 1591). This scheme interlaces the rhymes of two pairs of couplets to make a quatrain, 'a-b-a-b'. Two differently rhymed quatrains follow, and the poem concludes with a rhyming couplet, making seven rhymes in all, two more than in the 'Italian' sonnet form. The artistic range of expression is thereby increased, and the poetic form is less likely to become predictable to the ear. Shakespeare can keep us wondering what will come next! The final couplet is often a summary of the preceding lines, sometimes with an added touch of humour, or irony.