The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well, and of Shakespeare'sinfluence as a poet on later generations of writers in English and beyond. Focusing on a broad set of interpretive concerns, the volume tackles general matters of Shakespeare's style, earlier and later; questions of influence from classical, continental, and native sources; the importance of words, line, and rhymeto meaning; the significance of songs and ballads in the drama; the place of gender in the verse, including the relationship of Shakespeare's poetry to the visual arts; the different values attached to speaking 'Shakespeare' in the theatre; and the adaptation of Shakespearean verse (as distinct from performance) into other periods and languages. The largest section, with ten essays, is devoted to the poems themselves: the Sonnets, plus 'A Lover's Complaint', the narrative poems, Venus andAdonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. If the volume as a whole urges a renewed involvement in the complex matter of Shakespeare's poetry, it does so, as the individual essays testify, by way of responding to critical trends and discoveries made during the last threedecades.

Jonathan Post: Preface; Part I: Style and Language; 1 Gordon Teskey: Shakespeare's Styles; 2 Goran Stanivukovic: Shakespeare's Style in The 1590s; 3 R. Braunmuller: Shakespeare's Late Style; 4 Sophie Read: Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition; 5 Margaret Ferguson: Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples: Economies of Wordplay in Some Shakespearean Numbers; Part II: Inheritance and Invention; 6 Colin Burrow: Classical Influences; 7 Anthony Mortimer: Shakespeare and Italian Poetry; 8 Anne Lake Prescott: Du Bellay and Shakespeare's Sonnets; 9 Linda Gregerson: Open Voicing: Wyatt and Shakespeare; 10 Alysia Kolentsis: Grammar Rules in the Sonnets: Sidney and Shakespeare; 11 Catherine Nicholson: Commonplace Shakespeare: Value, Vulgarity, and the Poetics of Increase in Shake-speares Sonnets and Troilus and Cressida; 12 Marion Wells: Philomela's Marks: Ekphrasis and Gender in Shakespeare s Poems and Plays; 13 John Kerrigan: Shakespeare, Elegy, and Epitaph: 1557-1640; Part III: Songs, Lyrics, and Ballads; 14 Gavin Alexander: Song in Shakespeare: Rhetoric, Identity, Agency; 15 Steven Newman: Shakespeare's Popular Songs and The Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric; Part IV: Speaking on Stage; 16 Abigail Rokison: Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse Line; 17 Paul Edmondson: Shakespeare's Word Music; 18 Bruce R. Smith: Finding Your Footing in Shakespeare's Verse; 19 Jeremy Lopez: From bad to verse: poetry and spectacle on the modern Shakespearean stage; 20 Alison Findlay: Make my image but an alehouse sign : The Poetry of Women in Shakespeare s Drama; V. Reading Shakespeare s Poems; 21 Charlotte Scott: To show. . .And so to publish: Reading, Writing, and Performing in the Narrative Poems; 22 Subha Mukherji: Outgrowing Adonis, outgrowing Ovid: the disorienting narrative of Venus and Adonis; 23 Joshua Scodel: Shame, Fear, and Love in The Rape of Lucrece; 24 David Sofield: The Sonnets in the Classroom: Student, Teacher, Editor-Annotator(s), and Cruxes; 25 L. E. Semler: Fortify yourself in your decay: Sounding Rhyme and Rhyming Effects in Shakespeare's Sonnets; 26 David Schalkwyk: The Conceptual Investigations of Sonnets; 27 Russ McDonald: Pretty Rooms: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Elizabethan Architecture, and Early Modern Visual Design; 28 Melissa Sanchez: The Poetics of Feminine Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Sonnets and 'A Lover's Complaint'; 29 Katharine Craik: Poetry and Compassion in Shakespeare's `A Lover's Complaint'; 30 John Kerrigan: Reading 'The Phoenix and Turtle'; VI: Later Reflections; 31 Michael O Neill: Shakespearean Poetry and the Romantics; 32 Herbert F. Tucker: Shakespearean Being: The Victorian Bard; 33 Peter Robinson: Shakespeare's Loose Ends and the Contemporary Poet; 34 James Longenbach: The Sound of Shakespeare Thinking; 35 Judith Hall: Melted in American Air; VII: Translating Shakespeare; 36 Efrain Kristal: Yves Bonnefoy and Shakespeare; 37 Christa Jansohn: Glocal Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Poems in Germany; 38 Belen Bistue: Negotiating the Universal: Translations of Shakespeare s Poetry In (Between) Spain and Spanish America