Songs. Sonnets. Poems

This collection of the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in translations by various writers includes one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, thirty-seven songs, and five poems: "The Phoenix and the Dove," "The Lover's Complaint," "Venus and Adonis," "Lucretia," and "The Passionate Pilgrim." The edition is decorated with bookplates, splash pages and illustrations by British artist Charles Robinson (1870-1937).
In Russia the interest to Shakespeare's works began to grow in the first half of the XIX century due to the staging of his comedies such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Twelfth Night", "The Taming of the Shrew". With no less success were tragedies: "Romeo and Juliet", "Macbeth", "King Lear", "Hamlet", "Othello". By the beginning of the twentieth century in Russian there were already more than a hundred translations of various works of the English classic In 1902, the publishing house "Brockhaus and Ephron" as part of the series "Library of Great Writers" released a complete collection of works by Shakespeare. It included the sonnets, which are the most famous part of Shakespeare's poetic legacy. The editor of the entire series was the famous literary historian and literary critic Semyon Afanasyevich Vengerov. To work on translations of Shakespeare's sonnets he not only attracted such first-class poets and writers of his time as Valery Yakovlevich Brusov, Tatiana Lvovna Schepkina-Kupernik, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kholodkovsky, Alexander Mitrofanovich Fedorov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Mazurkevich, and other talented writers, but also paid tribute to the translators of earlier years: Nikolai Vasilievich Gerbel and Count Ivan Andreevich Mamun (the first translator of Shakespeare's sonnets into Russian). All one hundred and fifty-four of Shakespeare's sonnets are printed in their translations and in this collection. The book also includes thirty-seven songs and five poems of the English classic: "The Phoenix and the Dove", "The Lover's Complaint", "Venus and Adonis", "Lucretia" and "The Passionate Pilgrim".
The edition is adorned with bookplates, splash pages, and color drawings by British artist Charles Robinson. He illustrated the Shakespeare sonnets included in the book in 1915. Robinson was 45 years old at the time and had long and deservedly been known as a prolific artist. It could be said that Charles became a hereditary illustrator, for his father also did drawings for books. Both of Charles's brothers also became artists. In 1892 Charles Robinson received a place at the Royal Academy, but could not graduate because of lack of money. This did not prevent him in 1896 to receive an order for the design of "Children's Garden of Poems" by Robert Lewis Stevenson. Robinson did more than a hundred pen and ink drawings for this collection. Stevenson's book with his illustrations was a success. Later Charles sometimes illustrated several books each year. Aesop's Fables, The Adventures of Odysseus, Perrault's fairy tales, Mother Goose's poems, Omar Khayyam's rubaii, and dozens of other books were regularly reprinted with his drawings.