Daniel Swift

What the sonnets tell us about Shakespeare

Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson demonstrate how the sonnet becomes a fluid form in Shakespeare’s hands, revealing, among other things, his bisexuality

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  • All the Sonnets of Shakespeare

    Edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells

    CUP, pp. 299, £11

When Romeo and Juliet first meet at a party, their words to one another fall into the form of a sonnet: an exchange of 14 lines, expressing mutual love and ending with a neat rhyming couplet and a kiss. It is a touching, haunting moment, and like so much in Shakespeare, it also has an opposite.

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