shakespeare's sonnet

All about Shakespeare's sonnets

(Sonnet XVIII)

Giorgia Lomartire

All about William Shakespeare's life

William Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the greatest playwrights, admired and represented of all time for the universality of the themes and the exceptionally rich language. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of a successful tradesman, Shakespeare married an older woman with whom he had three children. At the age of 22, he went to London, where he became an actor and author of plays. Having achieved success, thanks to the support of the Duke of Southampton, he became in 1599 the owner of a theatre, the famous Globe, where he had his texts represented. Little is known about his private life: the only news was about minor legal events or the publication or representation of his works. The latter part of his life was spent in retirement in Straford.

In the first decade of his career as a poet and dramatist, Shakespeare penned 154 sonnets. These sonnets appeared together for the first time in 1609 in a complete edition published by Thomas Thorpe. They were dedicated to "W.H." whose identity remains a mystery.

Shakespeare's sonnets

The sonnet is a form of poetry, typical of Italy. Each sonnet is composed of 14 lines that , depending on the structure used, rhyme with each other. The origin of the term sonnet is attributable to the Provençal term sonet, which means sound, melody, usually used to define the lyrics of a song. As a model surely, Shakespeare uses that of Petrarch even if it differs for various points. The main feature of sonnets is precisely that of nonconformism compared to Italian sonnets.

The lovers

Sonnets 1 to 126 are dedicated to an unidentified young man, with excellent physical and intellectual characteristics. The author urges the young man to get married, so that he can revive his virtues, and be able to make them appreciated even in later generations.But there is something that can 'go beyond passing on from generation to generation their virtues',something much more perfect and lasting (or rather eternal): this is art . From sonnets 127 to 154 , the sonnets instead focus on a mysterious dark lady, the brunette lady, a sensual woman that the poet can not resist, but of dubious morality'.

Shall I compare thee

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 wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” In the sonnet 18 poet initially compares his friend to a summer day. but later he says that the friend is definitely better and because it is more beautiful, more temperate and above all eternal, his poetry and his fame will live long, as long as there is life on earth. the poet’s intent is clear: the immortalization of the friend through poetry, which will remove him from the dark cloak of death and give him life forever. A period of time is stopped, therefore, the summer, which metaphorically speaking would be the youth of the friend, or the best time of life.

Author's Name

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