1. William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Sonnets belong in a peculiar social and intellectual space in early modern England. They might
be addresses to particular individuals, and they might, like Biron’s ‘sonnet’ in Love’s Labour’s
Lost, be caught up in narratives about fidelity and authorship. They might raise questions about
the author and his or her gender and identity, and about the occasions on which they were
written, and about whether their mode of address is directly personal, private or public. But
they are not confessional narratives. It is the questions the Sonnets raise, rather than the
answers to those questions which make them important works. They stand after Shakespeare’s
name on the title page to the 1609 edition (‘SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS’); but are they testaments to
Shakespeare’s thoughts, or are they lyric experiments? Are they signs that eh wished to resume
his career as a printed poet after a gap of fifteen years, or are they works conceived for private
circulation and smuggled into print?

2. William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Perhaps the larger question which readers of Shakespeare’s work will want to
ask is how do the Sonnets relate to his work as a dramatist?
They do resonate with a wide range of tonalities from the plays in ways which may reflect
their (probably) extended genesis: the final sequence of sonnets 127 – 154, with their hard-
edged paradoxes of a black’ woman being considered ‘fair’, has suggestive connections with
Shakespeare’s dramatic work from the earlier 1590s; other poems to the young man have
flavours of the lordly and reserved Hal (Henry IV part I) from the mid-to-late 1590s; others
entangling energies of sexual desire seem to belong to the same landscape as Measure for
Measure and Trolius and Cressida, while Othello’s word-transforming jealousy never seems far
away from those sonnets which seem to be about a mistress. But the really deep relationship
between Shakespeare’s careers as playwright and poet goes far beyond either verbal parallels
or connections of theme and mood: in the Sonnets it seems as though Shakespeare wanted
to go beyond his own dramatic practice, to turn away from directly represented scene and
relationship into imagined scene and relationship, and as a result to allow words to come as
close as possible to bearing an unrelieved and total burden of social meaning – where every
theoretically possible sense for every word seems also to be a practical possibility. The
Sonnets were not widely read in their own period, and this is usually put down to the fact that
they appeared after the main popular fashion for the sonnet sequence had died down.

3. The original Petrarchan sonnet was composed of two main
sections – an octave and a sestet. The octave had a rhyme
pattern of a b b a a b b a
and the sestet rhymed c d e c d e.
The break a the end of the octave is called the volta and this
usually indicates a turning point in the thought of the poem.
Shakespeare altered the pattern to three quatrains and a
couplet
rhyming a b a b c d c d e f e f g g as he found this allowed
more freedom of rhyme. This was necessary as the English
language is not as rich in rhyme as Italian.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

4. Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

5. 1. Compare and contrast Shakespeare’s two
sonnets Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s
Day? and My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the
Sun.
Focus on:
• link observations of rhythm and rhyme, and patterns of imagery and language, to
the meaning of the poems
• draw connections between ostensibly different objects or concepts
• compare and contrast the way Shakespeare explores the subjects of 'Beauty' and
'Love', in Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 116.

6. Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

7. Understand and explore ‘Sonnet 116’.
1. What does English poet William Shakespeare (1564 –
1616) say about love in lines 3 and 4? Make reference to
the sonnet in your discussion.
2. How is love like a star? (lines 5 to 8) Find two ways.
3. How does love outwit time? (lines 9 to 12)
4. Shakespeare’s sonnets end with a rhyming couplet. Can
you think of a modern way of expressing the sentiment of
lines 13 and 14? How is this couplet particularly suited to
Shakespeare himself?
5. Back to the beginning. What do you think ‘the marriage of
true minds’ in the first line refers to? Define marriage and
true minds as described by the poem.

8. My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun
SONNET 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

9. Understand and explore ‘Sonnet 130’
1. Explore the ways in which Shakespeare creates a ‘tongue in cheek’
effect in Sonnet 130. Your discussion should refer to the following
features:
 form
 metaphor
 similes
2. What does Shakespeare reveal in the couplet about the subject of
this poem?
3. Although the sonnet has a fairly rigid form, poets have often used it
as a vehicle for expressing intense personal feelings. Write a
Shakespearean sonnet in which you apparently insult somebody but
reveal the ‘truth’ in the couplet.