INTRODUCTION

1.1 Overview

Sonnet is “a lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in
English”. It originated in Italy, and Petrarch was the most renowned Italian sonneteer of that
time. Sonnet was introduced to England by Henry Howard & Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th
century. By the end of the 16th century, sonnet has become the most popular genre of poetry
in Britain, and it was in full flourish through artistic endeavors of some eminent poets such as
Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and so forth. As regards the literary accomplishment of
composing sonnets throughout the world, Shakespeare’s sonnets are a summit. Shakespeare’s
sonnets are usually pentameter in each line. The sonnets can be divided into four parts, which
are the first four lines, the middle four lines, the back four lines and the final two lines, and
the rhyme is “abab, cdcd, efef, gg”, which is later known as the “Shakespearian form”.
Shakespeare totally wrote 154 sonnets throughout his lifetime. His sonnets break the
restriction of Petrarch’s sonnets, in that he did not merely praise the love to a beauty, in
actuality, most of his sonnets are devoted to his male friend. There are many themes in
Shakespeare’s sonnets that were popular in the Renaissance works such as time, friendship,
love, beauty and so on.1

The themes of Shakespeare’s sonnets are of rich implications. They not only reflect the
humanistic spirit of that era, but also contain some philosophical value that transcends the
era. In 1609, the first academically acknowledged edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets came into
being. Yet over the next two centuries, these sonnets were not duly appreciated in the literary
arena due to their unconventionality. They came to be eulogized by some romanticists as
Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Goethe with the rise of Romanticism at the end of the
18th century and the early 19th century. It is from the end of the 19th century that
Shakespeare’s sonnets have attracted extensive attention, and literary critics mainly

1
Yuan Shen and Fang Liu,”Thematic Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, English Language and Literature
Studies(2016),p.102

1
 concentrated on the complex feelings therein, diverse images, exquisite poetics, and some
controversial issues as the archetype of the “dark lady”, the real identity of Mr. W. H to
whom the sonnets were dedicated, and the original sequence of all the 154 sonnets, etc.
These sonnets have been analyzed in both form and content. In terms of content, thematic
studies of the sonnets are fundamental, and fruitful: Horst Breuer maintains that the “golden
lad” theme is alike in the story lines of both Shakespeare’s sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray, which underlines that selfishness and debauchery will collusively
ruin a person’s charm. Ronald Levao penetrates into the theme of futility through meditation
on Shakespeare’s philosophical thinking of “nothing will come of noting”. Sean Keilen
penetrates into the truth-and-doubt theme, and suggests that “Shakespeare comes to imagine
poetry not as a method for establishing new certainties but as an art of coping with the
downfall of tradition”. Malabika Sarkar draws attention to the themes of love and time
through analyzing the image of “magic” . Michael Mccanles penetrates into the larger theme
of “losing oneself by keeping oneself”. These above interpretations inspire readers to gain
new insights into the themes of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Apart from these thematic studies, the
prominent themes of time, beauty, and love have drawn constant attention of critics, but
there’s still room for rendering a more detailed and comprehensive interpretation based on
textual reading and the historical context of the Renaissance.2

2
Raymond M.Eden, “An outline of the content of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, www.shakespeare-
online.com/sonnets/sonnetgroupanalysis.html

2
1.2 Literature Review

1. Sunil Kumar Sarker, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Atlantic Pulishers & Distributors(P)

Ltd.,New Delhi, 2011

In this book the author has summarized the crux of the sonnets of William Shakespeare
for layman to understand in an easy manner. The author believes Shakespeare to be the greatest
Sonneteer of the Elizaebethan period of English Literature and tells the reader about the sonnet,
its features,about the sonnets of Shakespeare, their themes, criticisms, appreciations and the
summary of the sonnets.

2. The Oxford Shakespeare, The complete works, second edition by John Jowlett,
William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, second edition, published by:
Oxford University Press – New York., 2005

This book gives an insight about the various works of Shakespearian writings, describing
every play in a elaborate and descriptive manner, using plane English. It helps in better
understanding of the works of Shakespeare and also has a section dealing with the Sonnets of
Shakespeare. The book puts forward an analogy of Shakespeare’s different plays and how the
different genres of each play can be understood distinctly. This book has each play and sonnet
of Shakespeare in original form.

3. John T. Nichol, Reader’s Guide to William Shakespeare, Centrum Press, New Delhi,
2009

This book provides readers information and analysis on the works of William
Shakespeare. This book provides facts on the sequence of the sonnets and essays on the
sonnets. Furthermore, this book has vivid details on all the important literature of

3
 Shakespeare which are read by the masses.

1.3 Research Questions

1. What is the history of the sonnet in English literature?

2. What is the relation between Shakespeare and sonnet?
3. What are the themes of sonnets of Shakespeare ?
4. What is the relevance of the sonnets in present day?
5. What are the universal truths given by Shakespeare in his sonnets?

1.4 Scope and Objective

 Scope
The scope of the project is to study in detail the sonnets of William Shakespeare,
their themes and understanding their importance in present day.

 Objective
1. To study and understand ‘Sonnets of William Shakespeare’.
2. To clarify and identify the themes of the sonnets.
3. To overview the criticism and appraisal of the sonnets.

1.5 Research Methodology:

In this project doctrinal research was involved. Doctrinal Research is a research in which
secondary sources are used and materials are collected from libraries, archives, etc. Books,
journals, articles, websites, web journals, were used while making this project.

4
5
 CHAPTER- 2

SHAKESPEARE: LIFE AND WORKS

William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright and
actor, widely regarded as both the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-
eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant
works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two
long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been
translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other
playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age
of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and
twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in
London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's
Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to
Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this
has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his
sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by
others. Such theories are often criticised for failing to adequately note the fact that few records
survive of most commoners of the period.3

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.  His early plays were
primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in
these genres. Then, until about 1608, he wrote mainly  tragedies, among
them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in
the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote  tragicomedies (also known
as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in
editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and

3
Biography.com Editors, “William Shakespeare Biography”, https://www.biography.com/people/william-
shakespeare-9480323

6
friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text
known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that
included all but two of the plays now recognised as his. The volume was prefaced with a poem
by Ben Jonson, in which the poet presciently hails the playwright in a now-famous quote as "not
of an age, but for all time".4

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Shakespeare's works have been continually adapted and
rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly
popular and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted through various cultural and
political contexts around the world.

4
Ibid.

7
8
 CHAPTER-3

WHAT IS A SONNET

3.1 Definition

The dictionary defines sonnet as ‘a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal
rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.’

A sonnet is a special form of poetry that takes its name from the Italian word sonetto, which
means “little song" or “little sound." Although English poet William Shakespeare is famous for
his plays, he also wrote 154 sonnets (not including the ones that appear within his plays).Sonnets
are lyrical poems of 14 lines that follow a specific rhyming pattern. Sonnets usually feature two
contrasting characters, events, beliefs or emotions. Poets use the sonnet form to examine the
tension that exists between the two elements. Several variations of sonnet structure have evolved
over the years. The most common — and the simplest — type is known as the English or
Shakespearean sonnet.5

3.2 Shakespearean Sonnets

Shakespearean sonnets contain 14 lines, which each have 10 syllables and are written in iambic
pentameter. Iambic pentameter  is a pattern in which an unstressed syllable is followed by
a stressed syllable repeated five times.The da-DUM sound of the human heartbeat is sometimes
used as an example of iambic pentameter: da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.
The opening line of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 12" provides a good example of the da- DUM rhythm
of iambic pentameter : When  I  do  count  the  clock  that  tells  the  time…

Shakespearean sonnets follow a specific rhyme pattern — a-b-a-b / c-d-c-d / e-f-e-f / g-g — and
the last two lines form a rhyming couplet. Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" — sometimes called "Shall
I compare thee to a summer's day?" — is one of his most famous sonnets:

5
Editors, “What is a Sonnet” https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a-sonnet ; (October22 , 2018)

9
a Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

b Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

a Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

b And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

c Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

d And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

c And every fair from fair sometime declines,

d By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;

e But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

f Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,

e Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,

f When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

g So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

g So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Another key element of the sonnet  is the volta — or “turn" — which is the point in the sonnet
where there's a change from one rhyme pattern to another that signals a change in subject matter.
In the example above, the volta occurs in the ninth line when the word “But" signals a subject
change and the rhyme pattern changes to e-f-e-f. In addition to the English or
Shakespearean sonnet, two other popular types of sonnets are the Spenserian sonnet (named after
poet Edmund Spenser) and the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. These types of sonnets can be
identified by their unique rhyming patterns. There are also more obscure types of sonnets, some

10
of which have no recognizable rhyming pattern.Over the years, many poets and writers have
written sonnets. Some of the more famous sonnet authors include John Donne, John Milton, Ezra
Pound, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edna St. Vincent Millay. 6

3.3 Italian Sonnets

The Petrarchan sonnet is a sonnet form not developed by Petrarch himself, but rather by a

string of Renaissance poets. Because of the structure of Italian, the rhyme scheme of the
Petrarchan sonnet is more easily fulfilled in that language than in English. The original Italian
sonnet form divides the poem's 14 lines into two parts, the first part being an octave and the
second being a sestet. The rhyme scheme for the octave is typically ABBAABBA. The sestet is
more flexible. Petrarch typically used CDECDE or CDCDCD for the sestet. Some other
possibilities for the sestet include CDDCDD, CDDECE, or CDDCCD This form was used in the
earliest English sonnets by Wyatt and others. For background on the pre-English sonnet, see
Robert Canary's web page, The Continental Origins of the Sonnet.In a strict Petrarchan sonnet,
the sestet does not end with a couplet (since this would tend to divide the sestet into a quatrain
and a couplet). However, in Italian sonnets in English, this rule is not always observed, and
CDDCEE and CDCDEE are also used.7

The Petrarchan sonnet is so named for Francesco Petrarca, who popularized the form through
366 sonnets that he wrote about his love for a woman named Laura, who never returned his love.
The Petrarchan sonnet is most well-known for its subject matter of ideal love, but it also has a
specific form and other features. A key characteristic of Petrarchan sonnets is the blason, which
can be either elaborate praise for the subject or excessive blame or scorn. In most cases, it is the
former. The poem achieves the blason detail by detail. For example, in Petrarch's Poem 292, he
says that Laura's smile would "make a paradise on earth" and he calls her "the light I loved so
much." Metaphor is also used to describe how he feels after her passing, as "In a great storm on
an unprotected raft." Metaphor and simile are heavily used in the blason, but they can be used

6
Ibid.

7
Mellisa J.Sites, “The Sonnet”, http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/RCOldSite/www/rchs/sonnet.htm

11
anywhere throughout the sonnet.8

8
Maria Magher, “What are the main features of Petrarchan Sonnet”, https://education.seattlepi.com/main-features-
petrarchan-sonnet-5367.html

12
 CHAPTER-4
THE SONNET TRADITION

The sonnet is a traditional poetic form that most poets try at least once in their life, and many cut
their poetic teeth on it. The sonnet is a fourteen line lyric poem, usually with lines of 10 syllables
and a set rhyme scheme. The name of the form derives from the Italian word sonetto, meaning
little song, which in turn is derived from the Latin word sonus meaning sound. 9

The sonnet is said to have been developed and the rules set by Guittone D’Arezzo (d1294). It
was used extensively by Francesco Petrarca, usually known in English as Petrarch (1304-74), its
major and most famous practitioner. A Petrarchan sonnet was structured as a group of eight lines
(octave) in which a proposition or problem is stated, followed by a major break and then six lines
(sestet) in which a solution is proposed: abba, abba, cde, cde. That is, a quartet, a quartet, and
two triplets. However, after Petrarch there are many variations of this structural arrangement. It
was found that in English it was hard to follow Petrarch’s original rhyme scheme because there
are said to be fewer rhyming words than in Italian. What emerged over time is often referred to
as ‘the English Sonnet’, where the standard rhyme scheme is: abab, cdcd, efef, gg (three quartets
and a couplet. 10

Sonnet writing is one of the great traditions of English literature. Sequences of sonnets were
particularly popular in England in the 15th and 16th centuries with imitators of Petrarch like Sir
Thomas Wyatt, and later Samuel Daniel, Sir Phillip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. A little later
Shakespeare’s ‘sugar’d sonnets’ appeared, and although they were probably never intended for
publication and just the latest sequence in a fashionable trend, his poems made some important
changes to the form.11

9
Carl Tighe,”The Sonnet Tradition”, http://www.carltighe.co.uk/pdffiles/29%20The%20Sonnet%20Tradition.pdf

10
Donna E. M. Denizé and Louisa Newlin,”The Sonnet Tradition and Claude McKay”,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40503338?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

11
Poets.org editors, “The Sonnet: Poetic Form”,https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/sonnet-poetic-form

13
Later still there were John Donne, John Milton, William Wordsworth and more recently W. H.
Auden and Seamus Heaney. Poets who wrote sonnets were always interested in and influenced
by what other writers of sonnets had produced. Knowing something about the form and its
history allows you to access some of the history of English poetry, but also the developing
history and tradition of this particular poetic form.

14
 CHAPTER- 5

SHAKESPEARE AND THE SONNET

5.1 Introduction

Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published as a collection by Thomas Thorpe in 1609; the title-page
declared that they were ‘never before imprinted’. Versions of two of them – 138 and 144- had
appeared in 1599, in The Passionate Pilgrim, as a collection ascribed to Shakespeare but
including some poems certainly written by other authors; and in the previous year Francis
Meres,in Palladis Tamia, had alluded to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private
friends’. The sonnet sequence had enjoyed a brief but intense vogue from the publication of Sir
Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591 till about 1597. Some of Shakespeare’s plays of this
period reflect the fashion: in the comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost the writing of sonnets is seen
as a laughable symptom of love and in the tragedy of Romeo and Julietboth speeches of the
Chorus and the lovers’ first conversation are in sonnet form. Later plays use it, too, but it seems
likely that most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were first written during this period. But there are
indications that some of them were revised; the two printed in The Passionate Pilgrim differ at
certain points from Thorpe’s version, and two other sonnets(2 and 106 ) exist in manuscript
versions which also are not identical with those published in the sequence.12

5.2 Shakespeare’s Sonnet Sequence

The order in which Thorpe printed the Sonnets has often been questioned, but is not entirely
haphazard: all the first seventeen, and no later ones, exhort a young man to marry; all those
clearly addressed to, or concerned with, one or more women(‘the dark lady’) follow. Some of the
sonnets in the second group appear to refer to events that prompted sonnets in the first group; it
seems likely that the poems were rearranged after composition.13

12
John Jowlett,et al., THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE: THE COMPLETE WORKS ,2nd ed. 2005,p. 504

13
Ibid.

15
5.3 The Dark Lady

The Dark Lady sequence (sonnets 127–154) Shakespeare is the most defiant of the sonnet
tradition. The sequence distinguishes itself from the Fair Youth sequence with its overt sexuality
(Sonnet 151). The Dark Lady is so called because she has black hair and dun coloured skin. The
Dark Lady suddenly appears (Sonnet 127), and she and the speaker of the sonnets, the poet, are
in a sexual relationship. She is not aristocratic, young, beautiful, intelligent or chaste. Her
complexion is muddy, her breath “reeks”, and she is ungainly when she walks. The relationship
has a strong parallel with Touchstone’s pursuit of Audrey in  As You Like It. The Dark Lady
presents an adequate receptor for male desire. She is celebrated in cocky terms that would be
offensive to her, not that she would be able to read or understand what’s said. Soon the speaker
rebukes her for enslaving his fair friend (sonnet 130). He can’t abide the triangular relationship,
and it ends with him rejecting her. As with the Fair Youth, there have been many attempts to
identify her with a real historical individual. Lucy Negro, Mary Fitton, Emilia Lanier, Elizabeth
Wriothesley, and others have been suggested.14

GeorgeBernald Shaw,”The Dark Lady of the Sonnets”

14

http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/pesquisa/DetalheObraDownload.do?
select_action=&co_obra=15178&co_midia=2

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 CHAPTER- 6

THE THEMES OF SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

6.1 The Theme of Time

The Renaissance plays an important role in the renewal and development of the culture of
ancient Greece and Rome. Along with the research on a large number of ancient books, the
problems of natural philosophy, movement, time and space discussed in Physics wrote by
Aristotle have gotten great affirmation. Aristotle holds the belief that time has dual implications,
because it is a unity of discontinuity and continuity. He thinks that time is as eternal as
movement. And this has become a classical time theory that long reigns over Western thoughts.
There is no doubt that almost all British poets of the Renaissance are influenced by this view of
time, and Shakespeare is no exception. Time is a major theme and keynote of Shakespeare’s
sonnets. Through the chain of time, Shakespeare expresses his attitude towards life, friendship,
beauty and art, which is filled with philosophy and implications. Time is cruel and merciless.
Man can only fight and conquer it through offspring, poetry and true love. 15

In Shakespeare’s sonnets, time is a significant theme. The word “time” has totally occurred 79
times, along with many other words about time, such as hour, week, day, month, season, winter,
spring and so on, frequently occurring in the sonnets. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, time is kinetic.

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls ensilvered o’er with white.

Sonnet 12 shows that the poet witnesses the passing of time, the constant alternation of day and
night, and the changes it brings about as violet has lost its color, black hair has turned white. The
poet visualizes the change of time

15
Sunil Kumar Sarker, SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS, 3rd ed.2011,p. 69-84

17
6.2 The Theme of Beauty

In Shakespeare’s sonnets, he praises human life and beauty with enthusiasm. In sonnet 106, he
claims that the beauty of his friend is incomparable. He believes that the young friend is the
embodiment of beauty, so he compares his friend to a summer’s day, the sun, spring, blooming
flowers, rich harvest, Helen, etc., however, his beauty is beyond all of this natural power, which
undoubtedly highlights the humanistic thoughts of the poet. With regard to beauty, it can be
reflected in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, taking sonnet 18 for example:

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 dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;

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.

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So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This sonnet was written for Shakespeare’s friend Mr. W.H. Through a series of sensory
descriptions, Shakespeare presents a vivid image of the beauty of his friend. In this sonnet, the
poet realizes from the transience and impermanence of life that everything in the universe is
changing, and the beauty of his friend will also die out with the lapse of time. However,
Shakespeare seizes something eternal, that is, the virtue of human beings. In Shakespeare’s
sonnets, he puts all the natural wealth on his friend, not only praising the beauty of his
appearance, but also eulogizing his moral virtues. As in his bad time, his friend offered him
assistance and put him under protection regardless of his low social status. A person with
benevolence is truly beautiful, just like his friend’s beauty is unrivaled.

6.3 Theme of Love

Love is another prominent theme of Shakespeare’s sonnets. During the Renaissance, men broke
through the mental slavery of the medieval age and passionately praised and eulogized love.
Lived in the great changing period of the Renaissance, Shakespeare also had his deep
understanding of the theme of love. In Shakespeare’s view, love means the treasure not only for
worldly love, but also for friendship, loyalty, sacrifice and tolerance.

Humanists hold the belief that love is established at the foundation of loyalty. There is the
concept of love all over Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare always believes that true love
should be perseverant, faithful and eternal. In the eyes of Shakespeare, love is the fundamental
power to resolve annoyance and pursue dreams, and love can bring great joy to human beings.
No matter what sorrows and frustrations the poet confronts, as soon as he thinks of his friend and
lover, all glooms will vanish into thin air. As Shakespeare said in sonnet 47, “Or if they sleep,
thy picture in my sight/ Awakes my heart to heart’s and eye’s delight”). As long as there is love
in the poet’s heart, he will feel great joy. It is love that brings the poet back from the edge of
destruction when the world treats him unkindly. Love is the center of his life and the sunshine on
a cloudy day. Take the sonnet 29 for example:

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When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least:

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings’.

The first quatrain of this sonnet focuses on a great deal of challenges and misfortunes and the
miserable situation of the poet. The second quatrain describes that the poet is envious of the
prosperity and companionship and talents of others and feels that he is good for nothing. His
miserable situation is thus pushed to the extreme. Then in the third quatrain, as soon as the poet
thinks of the love of his friend, all sorrows and pains vanish in a flash and the poet cheers up at
once. And then, the ending couplet sums up the theme of the sonnet: the thought of love brings
him such great joy that he “scorns to change his state with kings”. The couplet is an emotional

20
declaration that the possession of his friend’s love is more precious than fame, glory, and power,
and even if he is in adversity, the thought of his friend’s well-being turns misery into ecstasy.

CONCLUSION

During the Renaissance, the traditional themes of European sonnets were friendship and love.
Shakespeare not only inherited this tradition but also updated it. He especially observed the
erosion and destruction of time and gains insights into its counterforce—sustainable beauty and
love. Shakespeare not only exquisitely described his internal world, but also deeply expressed his
unique feeling on the external world. There are profound philosophical thoughts contained in the
plain language, and his thoughts have impressive social meanings and remarkable characteristics
of the era, which is exactly the charm of his sonnets and one of the important factors that make
his sonnets an immortal classic.

Shakespeare reveals a different face to different people at different times. Sonnets of

Shakespeare also provides us with revelations of his ideas and the universal truths of love, beauty
and time. 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.

He may have been inspired out of literary ambition, and a desire to carve new paths apart from
the well-worn tradition. Or he may have been inspired by biographical elements in his life. It is
thought that the biographical aspects have been over-explored and over-speculated on, especially
in the face of a paucity of evidence. 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”.

Besides the biographic and the linguistic approaches, another way of appreciating Shakespeare’s
sonnets is in the context of the culture and literature that surrounds them and precedes them. This
is exemplified to an extreme degree by the influential study “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15 and the
Art of Memory” by Raymond B. Waddington.

Gerald Hammond in his book The Reader and the Young Man Sonnets, suggests that the non-

21
expert reader, who is thoughtful and engaged, does not need that much help in understanding the
sonnets: though the reader may often feel mystified when trying to decide, for example, if a word
or passage has a concrete meaning or an abstract meaning, laying that kind of perplexity in the
reader’s path is something that sets Shakespeare apart, and dealing with it is an essential part of
reading the sonnets — the reader doesn’t always benefit from having knots untangled and
double-meanings simplified by the experts, according to Hammond.

During the eighteenth century, The Sonnets' reputation in England was relatively low; in

1805, The Critical Review credited John Milton with the perfection of the English sonnet.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare and Milton seemed to be on an equal
footing, but the critics, stymied by an over-emphasis of their biographical explorations, continued
to struggle for decades.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Books

Stanley Wells, et al., THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE, THE COMPLETE WORKS, 2nd ed.
2005, Clearendon Press,Oxford, New York

John T.Nichol, READER’S GUIDE TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1st ed.2009, Centrum

Press, New Delhi

Sunil Kumar Sarker, SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS, 3rd ed. 2011, Atlantic Publishers &
Distributors(P) Ltd, New Delhi

Yuan Shen and Fang Liu,”Thematic Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, English Language and
Literature Studies(2016)

List of Websites

Raymond M.Eden, “An outline of the content of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, www.shakespeare-

online.com/sonnets/sonnetgroupanalysis.html

Biography.com Editors, “William Shakespeare Biography”, https://www.biography.com/people/william-

shakespeare-9480323

Editors, “What is a Sonnet” https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a-sonnet

Mellisa J.Sites, “The Sonnet”, http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/RCOldSite/www/rchs/sonnet.htm

Maria Magher, “What are the main features of Petrarchan Sonnet”, https://education.seattlepi.com/main-features-
petrarchan-sonnet-5367.html

Carl Tighe,”The Sonnet Tradition”, http://www.carltighe.co.uk/pdffiles/29%20The%20Sonnet%20Tradition.pdf

Donna E. M. Denizé and Louisa Newlin,”The Sonnet Tradition and Claude McKay”,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40503338?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Poets.org editors, “The Sonnet: Poetic Form”,https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/sonnet-poetic-form

GeorgeBernald Shaw,”The Dark Lady of the Sonnets”

http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/pesquisa/DetalheObraDownload.do?
select_action=&co_obra=15178&co_midia=2

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