Shakespeare's sonnets are poems written by William Shakespeare on a variety of themes.
When discussing or referring to Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609. However, there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
Shakespeare's sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept through the Renaissance from Petrarch in 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-century England by Thomas Wyatt and was given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains by Henry Howard. With few exceptions, Shakespeare's sonnets observe the stylistic form of the English sonnet-the rhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and the metre. But Shakespeare's sonnets introduce such significant departures of content that they seem to be rebelling against well-worn 200-year-old traditions.
Instead of expressing worshipful love for an almost goddess-like yet unobtainable female love-object, as Petrarch, Dante, and Philip Sidney had done, Shakespeare introduces a young man. He also introduces the Dark Lady, who is no goddess.
Shakespeare explores themes such as lust, homoeroticism, misogyny, infidelity, and acrimony in ways that may challenge, but which also open new terrain for the sonnet form.
The primary source of Shakespeare's sonnets is a quarto published in 1609 titled Shake-speare's Sonnets.
It contains 154 sonnets, which are followed by the long poem A Lover's Complaint. Thirteen copies of the quarto have survived in fairly good shape from the 1609 edition, which is the only edition; there were no other printings. There is evidence in a note on the title page of one of the extant copies that the great Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn bought a copy in June 1609 for one shilling.
The sonnets cover such themes as the passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty and mortality. The first 126 are addressed to a young man; the last 28 are either addressed to, or refer to, a woman. Sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim.
More information: No Weat Shakespeare
The title of the quarto, Shake-speare's Sonnets, is consistent with the entry in the Stationer Register. The title appears in upper case lettering on the title page, where it is followed by the phrase Neuer before Imprinted.
The title also appears every time the quarto is opened. That the author’s name in a possessive form is part of the title sets it apart from all other sonnet collections of the time, except for one -Sir Philip Sidney's posthumous 1591 publication that is titled, Syr. P.S. his Astrophel and Stella, which is considered one of Shakespeare's most important models.
Sidney's title may have inspired Shakespeare, particularly if the W.H. of Shakespeare's dedication is Sidney's nephew and heir, William Herbert. The idea that the persona referred to as the speaker of the Shakespeare's sonnets might be Shakespeare himself, is aggressively repudiated by scholars; however, the title of the quarto does seem to encourage that kind of speculation.
The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to the young man -urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for the young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticize the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the little love-god Cupid.
The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, entered the book in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609.
Whether Thorpe used an authorized manuscript from Shakespeare or an unauthorized copy is unknown. George Eld printed the quarto, and the run was divided between the booksellers William Aspley and John Wright.
The sonnets are almost all constructed of three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet.
The sonnets are composed in iambic pentameter, the metre used in Shakespeare's plays.
The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
Sonnets using this scheme are known as Shakespearean sonnets, or English sonnets, or Elizabethan sonnets. Often, at the end of the third quatrain occurs the volta (turn), where the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a turn of thought.
More information: Shakespeare's Sonnets
There are a few exceptions: Sonnets 99, 126, and 145. Number 99 has fifteen lines. Number 126 consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked with italic brackets; 145 is in iambic tetrameters, not pentameters. In one other variation on the standard structure, found for example in sonnet 29, the rhyme scheme is changed by repeating the second (B) rhyme of quatrain one as the second (F) rhyme of quatrain three.
Apart from rhyme, and considering only the arrangement of ideas, and the placement of the volta, a number of sonnets maintain the two-part organization of the Italian sonnet. In that case the term octave and sestet are commonly used to refer to the sonnet’s first eight lines followed by the remaining six lines. There are other line-groupings as well, as Shakespeare finds inventive ways with the content of the fourteen line poems.
When analysed as characters, the subjects of the sonnets are usually referred to as the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. The speaker expresses admiration for the Fair Youth's beauty, and -if reading the sonnets in chronological order as published- later has an affair with the Dark Lady, then so does the Fair Youth.
Current linguistic analysis and historical evidence suggests, however, that the sonnets to the Dark Lady were composed first (around 1591–95), the procreation sonnets next, and the later sonnets to the Fair Youth last (1597–1603).
It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical; scholars who find the sonnets to be autobiographical have attempted to identify the characters with historical individuals.
In his plays, Shakespeare himself seemed to be a satiric critic of sonnets -the allusions to them are often scornful. Then Shakespeare went on to create one of the longest sonnet-sequences of his era, a sequence that took some sharp turns away from the tradition.
The critical focus has turned instead, through New Criticism and by scholars such as Stephen Booth and Helen Vendler, to the text itself, which is studied and appreciated linguistically as a highly complex structure of language and ideas.
There are sonnets written by Shakespeare that occur in his plays. They differ from the 154 sonnets published in the 1609, because they may lack the deep introspection, for example, and they are written to serve the needs of a performance, exposition or narrative.
More information: Shakespeare MIT
William Shakespeare
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