'Shakespeares Sonnets dazzle' begins Roland Weidles excellent book on these brilliant but also difficult poems. To read his Comprehensive Guide is to see them come into steadier focus. Weidle illuminates the aesthetic, historical, dramatic and topical aspects of the Sonnets, as well as how they have been understood in past and present criticism. This is a supremely useful book, but it is also much more than a crib or a primer. Reading the Sonnets comprehensively turns out to involve actively participating in their subtle and shifting meaning-making processes, and with real implications for big subjects such as desire, gender and race. * Ewan Fernie, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK * Roland Weidles book is everything an introduction should be: richly informative, clearly structured and lucidly written. An excellent guide to the texts and contexts of Shakespeares sonnets, it unravels their complexities in a way that will appeal to both students and experts. Highly recommended. * Andreas Höfele, University of Munich, Germany *
