Shakespeare's Poetry All Love's Pleasure will Never Match its Pain: Shake Hand and Make a Friend for Life

Shakespeare's Poetry: All Love's Pleasure will Never Match its Pain is a translation of the poetry that Shakespeare wrote. The translations stand on their own without the original text so that they may be read quickly and easily eliminating the need to search for the meaning of every second word. They are also supplemented by notes specific to each poem about the world in which Shakespeare lived. Shakespeare's poetry includes three long narrative poems, a short elegy and 154 sonnets. All three narrative poems have a central female character who suffers from the treatment of a man. In A Lover's Complaint a young woman relates the story of her seduction by a charming priest. The Rape of Lucrece relates the traditional story of the rape of Lucrece, the wife of a Roman General by one of the sons of King Tarquin that was believed to have caused the Romans to throw out the Tarquin kings and to establish the republic. Venus and Adonis tells the story of Venus's unrequited love for Adonis and explains why love is so unsatisfactory. I have reworked the sonnets into groups of themes that tell a love story of attraction that eventually leads to disillusionment but grouping the sonnets in this way also reveals the many big ideas Shakespeare was thinking about. This new translation has been written to bring Shakespeare's ideas and stories in poetry form to life for twenty first century people.