The Sonnets

At some point in the early 1590s, Shakespeare began wring a compilation of sonnets. The first edition of these appeared in print in 1609. However, Frances Meres mentions Shakespeare sharing at least some of them among friends as early as 1598, and two (138 and 144) appear as early versions in the 1599 folio The Passionate Pilgrim. Shakespeare's seeming ambivalence toward having the sonnets published stands in remarkable contrast to the poetic mastery they demonstrate.

Why sonnets? The sonnet was arguably the most popular bound verse form in England when Shakespeare was writing. Imported from Italy (as the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet), the form took on a distinctive English style of three distinctively rhymed quatrains capped by a rhymed couplet comprising 14 total lines of verse. This allowed the author to build a rising pattern of complication in a three-act movement, followed by the terse denouement of the final two lines. Conventional subject matter of the Elizabethan sonnet concerned love, beauty, and faith.

Shakespeare as a poet could hardly have ignored the sonnet as a verse form. He appears to have written a sequence of them, dedicated to a "Master W.H.," and the sequence as a whole appears to follow a loose narrative structure. Of the 154 sonnets, there are three broad divisions:

• Sonnets 1-126, which deal with a young, unnamed lord, the "fair youth" of the sonnets
• Sonnets 127-152, which deal with the poet's relationship to a mysterious mistress, the "dark lady" of the sonnets
• Sonnets 153-154, which seem to be poetic exercises dedicated to Cupid
• The sonnets are poignant expressions on love, beauty, mortality, and the effects of time. They also defy many expected conventions of the traditional sonnet by addressing praises of beauty and worth to the fair youth, or by using the third quatrain as part of the resolution of the poem.

The first edition of 1609 could very well have been an unauthorized printing. Shakespeare's did not write the dedication, and the sonnet by that time had waned in popularity. Whether or not Thomas Thorpe's 1609 edition was published with Shakespeare's blessing, the sonnets as they are printed comprise the foundation for all later versions. Points of debate have ensued ever since as to:

Summary was taken from: http://www.bardweb.net/plays/index.html


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