ABSTRACT
Undertaking to discuss several of the scholarly monographs and edited collections published about William Shakespeare in the last year has been a fascinating and inspiring experience. Within the last year, two new volumes were released that focus on Shakespeare's poetry: a creative new anthology, and a companion. The Sonnets, which were not internationally popular until the nineteenth century, are now translated all over the world, though in many international cultures, they were translated as much as a century after the plays. Michael Schoenfeldt's enthusiastic admiration of the poems coupled with his rigorous close readings evokes an equal enthusiasm in his readers. Interest in Shakespeare's characters migrated away from the concept that they "were best understood as mimetic representations of imagined persons," to the idea that people should "explore human nature through an analysis of Shakespearean character". Lina Perkins Wilder considers the gendered aspects of memory, pointing out the distinction between the rhetorical understanding of recollection and memory.
