A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's The Sonnets

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "The Sonnets," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Shakespeare for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Shakespeare for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535839709

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The Sonnets

William Shakespeare

1592

Introduction

Historians and scholars are uncertain as to when Shakespeare composed his sonnets; he may have written them over a period of several years, beginning perhaps in 1592 or 1593. Some of the fourteen-line poems were being circulated in manuscript form among the author's acquaintances as early as 1598, and in 1599 two of them—Sonnets 138 and 144—were published in The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of verses by several authors. The sonnets as modern readers know them were certainly completed no later than 1609, the year they were published in a quarto by Thomas Thorpe under the title Shake-speares Sonnets. While many scholars have expressed the belief that Thorpe acquired the manuscript on which he based his edition from someone other than the author, modern critics generally see little reason to doubt the text's authenticity. On the other hand, few believe that Shakespeare directly supervised the publication of the manuscript, as the text is riddled with errors—and Thorpe, not Shakespeare, authored the dedication. Regardless, Thorpe's 1609 edition is the basis for all modern texts of the sonnets.

With only a few exceptions—Sonnets 99, 126, and 145—Shakespeare's verses follow the established English form of the sonnet. Each is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter, comprising four sections: three quatrains, or groups of four lines, followed by a couplet of two lines. Traditionally, different, though related, ideas are expressed in each quatrain, and the argument or theme of the poem is summarized or generalized in the concluding couplet. Many of Shakespeare's couplets do not have this conventional structure or effect. However, the poet did consistently employ the traditional English sonnet rhyme-scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. Where Shakespeare incorporates feminine rhymes, or rhymes of two syllables with the second unstressed, the last syllable constitutes an added eleventh syllable in the line in question.

Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, taken together, are frequently described as a sequence, and this is generally divided into two sections. Sonnets 1-126 focus on a young man and the narrator's intimate friendship with him, and Sonnets 127-152 focus on the narrator's relationship with a woman. (The narrator is often referred to as the poet.) However, in only a select number of the poems in the first group can the reader be certain that the person being addressed is male; in fact, most of the poems in the sequence as a whole are not directly addressed to another person. The two concluding verses, Sonnets 153 and 154, are adaptations of classical verses about Cupid; some critics believe they serve a specific purpose—though they disagree about what this may be—but many others view them as providing the collection with perfunctory closure.

The English sonnet sequence reached the height of its popularity in the 1590s, when the posthumous publication of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella (1591) was widely celebrated and led other English poets to put forth their own sonnet collections. In turn, all of these sequences, including Shakespeare's, are indebted to some degree to the literary conventions established by the Canzoniere, a sonnet sequence composed by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch. By the time Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, anti-Petrarchan conventions had become established, whereby traditional motifs and styles were satirized or exploited. Commentators on Shakespeare's sonnets frequently compare them to those of his predecessors and contemporaries, including Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Samuel Daniel, and Edmund Spenser.

The principal topics of twentieth-century critical commentary on the sonnets are their themes and poetic style. Analyses of formal elements in the poems include examinations of the rhetorical devices, syntax, and diction Shakespeare employed throughout. The multiple and indefinite associations of his words and phrases have proved especially intriguing—and problematic—for scholars as well as for general readers. The complexity and ambiguity of Shakespeare's figurative language is also a central critical issue, as is the sequence's remarkable diversity of tone and mood. Shakespeare's departures from and modifications of the poetic styles employed by other sonneteers have also drawn a measure of critical attention.

Many of Shakespeare's themes are conventional sonnet topics, such as love and beauty, and the related motifs of time and mutability. Yet Shakespeare treats these themes in his own distinctive fashion, most notably by addressing the poems of love and praise not to a fair maiden but to a young man and by including a second object of passion: a woman of questionable attractiveness and virtue. Critics have frequently called attention to Shakespeare's complex and paradoxical representations of love in the sonnets. They have long discussed the poet's claim that he is immortalizing the young man's beauty in his verses, thereby defying the destructiveness of time. The themes of friendship and the betrayal of friendship are also significant, as is the nature of the relationship between the poet and the young man. The ambiguous eroticism of the sonnets has elicited varying responses, with some commentators asserting that the relationship between the two men is platonic and others contending that it is demonstrably sexual.

Because Shakespeare's lyrics are passionate, intense, and emotionally vivid, over the centuries many readers and commentators have grown convinced that they must have an autobiographical basis. However, little concrete evidence indicates that this is so. Still, biographers have produced endless speculation about what the sonnets may tell us about their creator, and various scholars