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What do Shakespeare's sonnets have in common?
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Shakespeare’s sonnets are poems of expressive ideas and thoughts that are layered with multiple meanings, and always have two things in common: 1. All sonnets have fourteen lines. 2. All sonnets are written in iambic pentameter. Read more about what a sonnet is, and iambic pentameter.
- Sonnet 2
Development of the Sonnet Form: Sonnets in Context;...
- Iambic Pentameter
Why Do Poets Use Iambic Pentameter? Iambic pentameter is...
- Sonnet 2
The Shakespearean sonnet, the form of sonnet utilized throughout Shakespeare’s sequence, is divided into four parts. The first three parts are each four lines long, and are known as quatrains, rhymed ABAB; the fourth part is called the couplet, and is rhymed CC.
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.
The English sonnet is often called a Shakespearean sonnet since the poet William Shakespeare was the most prolific (and famous!) English sonnet-writer during the sixteenth century. You might even hear this type of poem called an Elizabethan sonnet, since Queen Elizabeth I loved them!
About Shakespeare's Sonnets. By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions. Few collections of poems—indeed, few literary works in general—intrigue, challenge, tantalize, and reward as do Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
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- From fairest creatures we desire increase.
- When forty winters shall besiege thy brow.
- Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest.
- Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend.
The vast majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 126 of the 154 are dedicated to a young man. This young man is referred to as “the Fair Youth” and to this day his identity is unknown. Scholars have suggested several different possibilities for who this person is and what their relationship was to the Bard.
