The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above...

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

Shakespeare’s ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun...