Shakespeare on Love: Quotations from the Plays & Poems （William Shakespeare）

William Shakespeare is considered the greatest playwright and poet in history not merely for his extraordinary gift for language, but more because "he was also the world's greatest psychologist, with an uncanny ability to see and describe people's most subtle emotional states," as renowned author, psychologist, and Shakespearean scholar George Weinberg says in his introduction to this volume.
 
Nowhere are the Bard's insights more apparent than in his writings on that most sublime of human endeavors: love. No human being has ever captured the beauty, intensity, sadness, power, and magic of love so perfectly. All the wondrous guises of love are presented here, from courtship to parting, from passion to jealousy, from unrequited love to the kiss. Throughout, the special genius of William Shakespeare shines through.
 
 
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire and was baptised on 26 April 1564. Thought to have been educated at the local grammar school, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he went on to have three children, at the age of eighteen, before moving to London to work in the theatre. Two erotic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were published in 1593 and 1594 and records of his plays begin to appear in 1594 for Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI. Shakespeare's tragic period lasted from around 1600 to 1608, during which period he wrote plays including Hamlet and Othello. The first editions of the sonnets were published in 1609 but evidence suggests that Shakespeare had been writing them for years for a private readership.
 
Shakespeare spent the last five years of his life in Stratford, by now a wealthy man. He died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The first collected edition of his works was published in 1623.