Critical Appreciation of Shakespeare's To His Love Sonnet 106

Critical Appreciation of Shakespeare's To His Love Sonnet 106

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616, English dramatist and poet, b.

Stratford-on-Avon. He is considered the greatest playwright who ever

lived. He is also a sonneteer.

His father was John Shakespeare. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne

Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the

marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins,

Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585.

In 1594 Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord

Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's Men under

James I. Until the end of his London career Shakespeare remained with

the company; it is thought that as an actor he played old men's roles,

such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he

obtained a coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy

New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement

years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe

theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the Black friars theatre.

Shakespeare retired and returned to Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly

enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his career and in retirement,

although he was never a wealthy man.

Shakespeare's first published works were two narrative poems, Venus

and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Shakespeare's

sonnets are by far his most important non-dramatic poetry. They were

first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been

circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the

poems were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long d...

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...praise. The word tongue is symbolic of the poetry

written by the poets long ago.

Shakespeare has produced the image of time as it ages and continues to

age, he has also shown us through his words the beauty possessed by

the Earl, a kind of beauty that though he shows it to us, he

contradicts it by saying that his portrayal of that beauty is no

sufficient to that of the Earl.

My personal evaluation is that Shakespeare praises the Earl too much.

I personally believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and

even an ugly thing becomes beautiful when looked upon in the correct

way. And it is presumptuous of him to think that the Earl is so

beautiful that he demeans his ancestors by saying that they cannot

write. And I personally feel that to eulogize to such an extent bends

an imagination towards romanticizing.