The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. viii + 295. Paper £ 15.99.

• Frank Erik Pointner

With the publication of Colin Burrow’s Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford World’s Classics, 2002) Shakespeare studies entered a new phase of criticism, as Burrow became the first editor since the nineteenth century to print the full corpus of Shakespeare’s poems in a single volume. Similarly, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry does not only tackle Shakespeare’s narrative poems, but also The Sonnets and, most laudably, the “Poetry in Shakespeare’s plays”, a chapter in which Patrick Cheney investigates the “detailed network of discourse on the poet and his art” in what he calls “meta-conversations” (p. 228), and the poems and songs per se which form a part of Shakespeare’s plays. This aspect of Shakespeare’s poetry has hitherto been almost completely neglected, and, as Cheney makes clear, undeservedly so.

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