Chandos Portrait of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnets

William Shakespeare1609
Poets

Read this if you…

  • have already read Shakespeare's best plays

Skip this if you…

  • are expecting it to be as good as his great plays

The Groblé Take

Excellent Shakespearean poetry, but nothing that will stay with me forever

Connections

The lineage through Shakespeare's Sonnets

Built Onwhat came beforeShakespeare's Sonne…CanzoniereMetamorphoses

  • Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca. Shakespeare's Sonnets built on it. - The tradition Shakespeare is pushing against — Petrarch's *Canzoniere* founded the Petrarchan sonnet and its idealizing conventions - Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") is a direct mockery of the *Canzoniere*'s stock metaphors — eyes-like-the-sun, lips-like-coral - Read Petrarch first and the subversion lands: you can't hear Shakespeare's joke without the idiom he's deflating
  • Metamorphoses by Ovid. Shakespeare's Sonnets built on it. - When Shakespeare promises his verse will outlive marble and gilded monuments (Sonnets 55, 60, 65), he's standing on Ovid — the poetry-outlasts-time idea comes straight from the close of *Metamorphoses* Book 15 - He knew Ovid intimately: in Latin from grammar school, and in Golding's 1567 translation, the version he read and lifted from - Read Ovid's ending first and you'll hear Shakespeare progressively transforming the boast across the sequence — same claim, made personal and obsessive
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Gallery

Depicted in Art

Oil portrait of a bearded man with dark hair, a single gold earring, and an open collar against a plain dark ground.

John Taylor, 1610

Letterpress title page reading SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS Neuer before Imprinted, with Thomas Thorpe's imprint below.

1609

A young woman seated on a riverbank reads a sonnet while the courting youth beside her looks down, blushing self-consciously, hand to chin.

William Mulready, 1839

Bust-length engraved portrait of Shakespeare in a starched lace collar, balding above a high domed forehead, facing the viewer.

Martin Droeshout, 1623

Editions

Recommended Editions

#1Top Pick$17.19

Arden Shakespeare

2010

Katherine Duncan-Jones's Arden is the working scholarly edition. Her introduction takes the Fair Youth and Dark Lady questions seriously without getting lost in them, and the per-sonnet commentary is unusually generous.

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Notable Quotes

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Sonnet 18
Adaptations

Screen & Stage

Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)

AcclaimPraised by 9 notable voices
  • William Wordsworth, English Romantic poet, 1770–1850: "Scorn not the Sonnet … with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart."
  • W. H. Auden, English-American poet, 1907–1973: "The best touchstone I know of for distinguishing the sheep from the goats — those who love poetry for its own sake."
  • John Keats, English Romantic poet, 1795–1821: "I neer found so many beauties in the Sonnets — they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally."
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English Romantic poet and critic, 1772–1834: Proof of the sweetness of temper of 'our myriad-minded Shakespeare.'
  • Patrick Stewart, actor & audiobook narrator, b. 1940: "Performing all 154 of his sonnets has been one of the most rewarding creative endeavors of my career."
  • Laurence Olivier, actor & filmmaker, 1907–1989: "Shakespeare—the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God."
  • Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, 1874–1965: "The Bible and Shakespeare stand alone on the highest platform."
  • Helen Vendler, Harvard literary critic, 1933–2024: A poetic imagination, in its formal invention and command of metaphor, that has never yet found its equal.
  • Harold Bloom, American literary critic, 1930–2019: The strongest of the Sonnets rank among the supreme shorter poems in the English language.

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