Reading Room - Poems and Sonnets

Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (1987) – very good on oxymoronic language

Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare's Sonnets – sane introductory study

William Empson, numerous passages in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and the essay on Sonnet 94 ('They that have power to hurt') in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) remain unsurpassed as readings of the sonnets

There are hundreds more fine books on Shakespeare, but anyone who reads The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works from cover to cover and then devours a reasonable proportion of the above will have earned the right to consider themselves an exceptionally highly informed Shakespearean.