• Introduction to Shakespeare & His Sonnet Sequence

What is a Sonnet?
• Italian Origin- word comes from Italian sonetto, literally "little song"
• A fourteen line poem usually Iambic pentameter in English
• Divided into Italian and English Sonnets
• Italian/ Petrarchan sonnet has the rhyme scheme abbaabba cdccdc
• Divided into two- Octave and Sestet with a volta in the middle
• Concerned about the theme of “love” (Unrequited)
• English sonnet divided into Shakespearean and Spenserian
• Both of them divided into three quatrains and one concluding couplet
• Spenserian follows the an interlinking rhyme of abab bcbc cdcd ee
• Shakespearean follows the rhyme of abab cdcd efef gg
Birth and Early life
• Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564
• Born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden
• Attended the Stratford grammar school
• Mr. John Shakespeare was granted a coat of arms in 1596
• Married Anne Hathaway in 1582
• Had three children Susanna (1583) and twins, Hamnet and Judith, (1585)
Later Life (25 years of acting playwrighting)
• He was in London working as an actor in 1592
• Associated with the most famous and successful troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men
• In 1599 they constructed their own theater, The Globe.
• Globe opened in 1599
• Shakespeare acted and written plays for Globe
• He was also a shareholder in Globe
Final years and Death
• Came back to Stratford 1611
• Written his will twice
• Died on April 23 1616 (52 years old)
• His first collection of all the plays came in only 1623
• Not many records are available to trace his life
• Works
• His first plays—Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, and The Comedy of Errors—performed in
1588 and 1594.
• Mythological love poem “Venus and Adonis” published in 1593
• “The Rape of Lucrece,” in 1594
• Shakespeare’s wrote his masterpieces Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and
Macbeth from 1599 to 1608
• 154 Sonnets published in 1609
• All together he has written 37 plays, 2 narrative poems, and 154 sonnets
What we Know of Shakespeare through his works?
• He was resistant to changes in the existing system of social organization
• He believed in heterosexual love and its culmination in marriage
• He loved country life
Afterlife
• Shakespeare captured what is permanent and universal to all human beings at all times in his
works
• We still study them
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets published in 1609
• Contains 154 sonnets and the long poem, A Lover’s Complaint
• a collection than a sequence
• is the longest by almost 50 per cent
Divided into three
• the first 126 addressed to a handsome young aristocrat
• Next 26 (numbers 127-152) about a "dark lady"
• The last two sonnets (153-154) concerns Cupid and a nymph
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature's power,
Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep:
A maid of Dian's this advantage found,
And his love-kindling fire did quickly steep
In a cold valley-fountain of that ground;
Which borrowed from this holy fire of Love,
A dateless lively heat, still to endure,
And grew a seething bath, which yet men prove
Against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
But at my mistress' eye Love's brand new-fired,
The boy for trial needs would touch my breast;
I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,
And thither hied, a sad distempered guest,
But found no cure, the bath for my help lies
Where Cupid got new fire; my mistress' eyes.
Themes in Shakespearean Sonnets
Love
• Sonnet as a fashionable vehicle for comments on love
• Offers different points of view about love
• Sexuality is also important
• Women as sites of biological reproduction
• Power of poetry to record love
Passage of Time and how to control it
• Death comes to all
• How to be immortal
• progeny (sonnets 1–14), poetry (sonnets 15–17, 54–5, 60), love (passim), memory (sonnets
1–18, 54, 64–5, 77, 107, 121–2), and beauty (sonnets 63–8).
• If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine. (2)
• So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee (18)
Identity
• The identity of the male lover, the dark lady, the rival poet is never revealed
• We also don’t know whether the poet is the speaker in the poems
• His sonnets are part of a tradition
• Many earlier works have influenced him in writing this collection
• It is a reflection of Shakespeare’s idea of life