With a DVD, edited by Manfred Pfister and Jürgen Gutsch. By 2009, "Shakespeares Sonnets Neuer before Imprinted (1609), the most successful volume of poetry next to King David?s Psalms, have been with us four centuries. The initial impact of this modest and enigmatic quarto and its 154 sonnets was not overwhelming and also for the following almost two centuries Shakespeare?s sonnets slept in the limbo of cultural forgetfulness. But then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, they began to explode on the world with an extraordinary sleeper effect, the shockwaves reaching out from England to the Continent and from Europe on to the rest of the world. Now, after another two centuries, it is time to celebrate this extraordinary canonical career. It is time to build a global monument to remind the world of this quatercentenary and to celebrate the power of these sonnets to move their readers across the centuries and continents, in states unborn and accents yet unknown. Following Shakespeare?s own instructions, a book shall be this monument - a mighty tome, an anthology of translations of his sonnets quite literally "from China to Peru?. For this, Jürgen Gutsch and Manfred Pfister, the only begetters of this project, have assembled a team of more than seventy contributors from all over the world to report on the fortunes of Shakespeare?s sonnets and their cultural presence in all the major and many of the minor languages of the world.