A Lover's Complaint & The Phoenix and the Turtle

Written by William Shakespeare

William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic prose and verse read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly remastered stories are now available to download for the first time.

‘In thee hath neither sting, knot, nor confine, For thou art all, and all things else are thine.’

Two of Shakespeare’s most revered and elegiac poems.

In The Phoenix and the Turtle, the mythical phoenix consumes itself in fire, from the ashes of which another phoenix is born. In Shakespeare's poem, the phoenix is female and the turtle (that is, a turtledove) is male.

In A Lover’s Complaint, originally published with the sonnets, a young woman is overheard lamenting her betrayal by a heartless seducer.

All of the Shakespeare plays within the ARGO Classics catalogue are performed by the Marlowe Dramatic Society and Professional Players. The Marlowe was founded in 1907 with a mission to focus on effective delivery of verse, respect the integrity of texts, and rescue neglected plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and the less performed plays of Shakespeare himself. The Marlowe has performed annually at Cambridge Arts Theatre since its opening in 1936 and continues to produce some of the finest actors of their generations.

Thurston Dart, Professor of Music at London University and a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge, directed the music for this production.

The full cast includes: Joan Hart and William Squire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Nov 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780008442828

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and glove-maker, and Mary Arden, a woman from a wealthy family. Likely educated at the King’s New School, he would have studied Latin in his youth. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, then twenty-six. Together, they raised three children—Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. By 1892, several of his early plays had appeared on stage in London. These works, including Richard III and Henry VI, show the influence of Elizabethan dramatists Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe. He then found success with a series of comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. By the late 1590s, Shakespeare wrote two of his finest tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, proving his talent and thematic versatility. The beginning of the 17th century marked a turn in his work, ushering in an era often considered his darkest and most productive. Between 1600 and 1606, he produced such masterpieces as Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, all of which are undoubtedly some of the finest works ever written in the English language. In addition to his 39 plays, many of which were performed by his own company at the legendary Globe Theatre, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets and three long poems, many of which continue to be read around the world.