Shakespeare’s Lyric Poetry

Shakespeare’s Songs and Poems in His Plays

An edition by Lukas Erne, Charlotte Potter, and Andy Reilly, under contract with Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest lyric poetry in the English language. The importance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the history of English poetry is well established, and editions of them have appeared with some regularity. Yet there is a second corpus of lyric poetry that is now little studied as a corpus, and there has been no scholarly edition of it in more than sixty years: Shakespeare’s poems and songs in his plays. These poems and songs are of crucial importance for our understanding of Shakespeare as an author of lyric poetry. They show that Shakespeare’s lyric poetry must not be reduced to a single collection, the Sonnets, nor to one lyric genre, the sonnet, but that he wrote lyric poetry in many forms and throughout his career by embedding poems and songs in his plays. The present edition makes available newly prepared and annotated texts of approximately 170 poems and songs by Shakespeare which were included in and first published as part of his dramatic works. A starting point for this edition is that the early modern book containing the greatest body of lyric poetry by Shakespeare is not the 1609 quarto with his 154 sonnets but the Folio collection of his plays, first published in 1623, with more than 160 poems and songs. It is only by reading and studying the poetry of both these volumes that we arrive at a full understanding of Shakespeare as a lyric poet.