William Shakespeare: Poems

William Shakespeare: Poems PC MAC CD-ROM 154 sonnets personal lyrics history etc Type: Application Platform: Windows/Mac Publisher: Octavo Released: 2000 Media: CD The best-known and most enduring of William Shakespeare's poems, his 154 sonnets, were circulated in handwritten copies, "among his private friends," in the mid-to-late 1590s. Shakespeare wrote nearly all of these excruciatingly personal lyrics, in their tightly prescribed form, during the first decade of his theatrical career, and during a brief literary vogue for such fourteen-liners. The first attempt to collect Shakespeare's lyric verse came only in 1640, when an edition in small octavo format (a "pocket" style in keeping with other mid-century poetical volumes) was published by John Benson, a bookseller specializing in broadside ballads, popular literature, and music. It contains all but eight of the sonnets, a few songs from the plays and from The Passionate Pilgrim, "A Lovers Complaint," and "The Phoenix and the