From Shakespeare - With Love: The Best of the Sonnets
by William Shakespeare, David Tennant, Juliet Stevenson, Anton Lesser, Alex Jennings, Roy McMillan, Tom Mison, Anne-Marie Piazza, Hugh Ross, Benjamin Soames, David Timson, Trevor White, Maxine Peake, Stella Gonet, Bertie Carvel, Gunnar Cauthery, Jonathan Keeble
Why You'll Love This
Four centuries after they were first published, these 80 sonnets still hit like they were written about someone you know.
- Great if you want: Shakespeare's emotional range distilled into essential, handpicked poems
- The experience: Intimate and unhurried — each sonnet is its own small world
- The writing: Shakespeare's compression is unmatched: devastating truths in fourteen lines
- Skip if: You want the complete 154 sonnets without editorial curation
About This Book
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and yet only a handful tend to follow most readers through their lives. This carefully chosen collection of 80 poems cuts through the full sequence to deliver what the title promises — the best of them. Desire, jealousy, the terror of aging, the strange alchemy of beauty and time: these are not historical preoccupations but urgent ones, and Shakespeare addresses them with a directness that still startles. The selection moves between the celebrated and the overlooked, reminding readers that the familiar sonnets earned their fame for good reason while the lesser-known ones have been waiting patiently to be discovered.
What distinguishes this volume is the quality of curation. Rather than presenting the sonnets as a scholarly project to be completed, it treats them as poems to be experienced — an important distinction. The sequencing allows themes to accumulate and resonate across the page, and the range of voices represented in the editorial vision keeps the collection feeling alive rather than monumental. This is Shakespeare stripped of intimidation, presented with the quiet confidence of people who genuinely love the work.