Shakespeare's sonnets comprises a collection of 154 poems in the sonnet form by William Shakespeare, published in 1609 under conditions that cannot be judged too clearly; above all, there is a mysterious dedication in front of the text wherein a certain "Mr. W. H." is mentioned as "the begetter" of the poems by the publisher Thomas Thorpe, but we do not know at all who this gentleman was. Nor do we know, either, if Shakespeare handed an authorized manuscript to the publisher, or if the book was a bootleg production.

The poems themselves are genuine Shakespeare's beyond doubt. Their themes are love, beauty, poetry, politics and the effects of time on all of them. They were probably written over a period of several years. They are composed in iambic pentameter, a metre that stems from the Italian "endecasillabo": a line composed of five beats with anacrusis (an upbeat or unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line that is no part of the first foot), or five iambic metrical feet. Shakespeare uses the same kind of verse in most of his plays; they are called blank verse there, because they do not rhyme. The sonnets have four stanzas: three quatrains are followed by a final couplet which provides a pointed aphoristic summary - all in a tight rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. See Shakespearean sonnet.

Most of them deal with a beautiful "Young Man" (the Fair Lord), a rival poet, and a Dark Lady whose identities have been the subject of much debate. Some have suggested that the young man is the same as the "Mr. W. H." referred to in the publisher's dedication, possibly William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a patron of the stage. The rival poet is sometimes identified with Christopher Marlowe or George Chapman. However, there is no hard evidence whatsoever that any of the sonnets' characters have real-life counterparts. The narrator himself could even be a fictional device and not a reflection of Shakespeare's own feelings.

Shakespeare's repeated declarations of love for the "Young Man" are charged with passion. Some commentators see sonnet 20 as clear evidence against physical desire. However, other sonnets addressed to the youth, such as 52, where the friend is compared to a 'sweet up-locked treasure' are drenched in sexual punning and undertones. Nevertheless, much of the language used to address the "Young Man" differs from the explicitly physical language used in sonnets addressed to the so-called Dark Lady. It is possible to interpret this as a deliberate contrast between ideal Platonic love, and 'dark' carnal lust. But this depends to a considerable extent on whether you believe the affair with the "Young Man" remained unconsummated, and therefore interpret the sonnets as records of real events and feelings, or, at the other extreme, as fictional literary constructions.

On the other hand, one might suppose, too, that Shakespeare pastiched and parodied the three centuries-long tradition of Petrarchan sonneteering on love to bring this business to an end - e.g. by exchanging the "madonna angelicata" for a "young man", or the "fair lady" against a "black lady", whatever "black" really meant (was she a negress)? He also violates many sonnet rules hitherto strictly obeyed by his fellow poets: he speaks on human evils that do not have to do with love (66), he comments on political events (124), he makes fun of love (128), he parodies beauty (130), he plays with gender roles (20), he speaks clearly about sex (129) and even introduces witty pornography (151). However, there is no work of poetry in his time that equals his lyrical standards and his deep insight into the character of love - or rather the expert love-discourse of his time, "passion's discipline" as it has been recently called. That is why at the very end of three centuries of conventional sonneteering since Petrarch, his sonnets can also be seen as a prototype, or even the start, of a new kind of "modern" love poetry. When Shakespeare was re-discovered during the 18th century - not only in England - the sonnets, beside the plays, became particularly important. In the German-speaking countries alone, they have had 65 complete translations so far since 1784, and there is no major written language - including Latin [1] (http://www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/languages/classical/latin/tchmat/pedagogy/latinitas/dv/dv.html), Turkish, Japanese, Kiswahili, Esperanto [2] (http://www.kapaza.be/detail/499684/) and Klingon [3] (http://services.tos.net/text/klingon/kli-sonnets.txt) - these sonnets have not been translated into, thus still maintaining their outstanding importance, greatly influencing the various literatures, inside of which they have been fermenting for some time now - and even contributing to linguistic projects.

External links

• The Sonnets (http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/) – full text and commentary.
• The Sonnets (http://william-shakespeare.classic-literature.co.uk/the-sonnets/) – HTML version of this title.
• Shakespeare Sonnets with search capabilities (http://www.elook.org/literature/shakespeare/sonnets/)
• The Sonnets (http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/1041) – plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg