Shakespeare And Sonnets Analysis

William Shakespeare’s wrote for twenty years composing millions of words of poetry and drama, his career is the product of a perfect match between his talents and the time. A time in England of relative political stability, ruled by a woman, Queen Elizabeth I who acknowledged the importance of art to life and the legacy of her nation. The Renaissance, an era in the use of developed rhetoric, allowed Shakespeare to prosper and succeed. As a master of grammar and one who loved language, Shakespeare included irony, hyperbole, and over 200 schemes in his plays to express powerful feelings of his characters. Shakespeare is one of the few playwrights to have success in writing both tragedy and comedy, combining the best traits of Elizabethan

His first poem, Venus and Adonis was written in 1592 and in 1593, he wrote The Rape of Lucrece, both are dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (“William Shakespeare” 1333). Shakespeare wrote 156 sonnets from the 1590s to the early 1600s, which were not published until 1609, long after most were written. Sonnets are very different from Shakespeare’s plays as they contain dramatic elements, personal themes, and each can be taken on its own or in relation to the poems around it. Sonnets do not tell stories, but focus on emotional experiences. Shakespeare’s preoccupation with ideal love, and how it should stand up to the passages of time has been known to overwhelm the reader with questions and contradictions, putting the reader’s mind to work

Summer and death are personified suggesting death is an adversary for the poet’s love.

The couplet of Sonnet 18 summarizes the theme, the ability of art to preserve the romantic beauty through the ages, and gives a more optimistic idea, using words such as “lives” and “life”, combating death, that he morphs his lover into an eternal summer, one that does not end, preserving him forever. The speaker finds a way for the young man’s legacy and beauty to endure through poetry, like the couplet promises stating, “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.” Sonnet 18 is a heartwarming, touching example of endless love that was simply written, easy to read, and interpret.

Sonnet 129 is a typical Shakespearean sonnet in iambic form, but it is structured as a single run-on sentence except for the closing couplet making it distinctive. This sonnet is not addressed to any particular person, but directed as a sermon to the audience about the dangers of sexual lust. Sonnet 129 is rare due to its impersonal tone listing the kinds of experiences offered by lust. The element of time and one of results are present within the sonnet, as Shakespeare portrays lust before action, in action, and after action, in order to show the discrepancy between expectation, realization, and results or between desire, experience, and memory