Background Informations_Sonnets
The collection of poems called Shakespeare's Sonnets includes 154 short poems composed as sonnets. These were published, together with a poem called "A Lover's Complaint," in 1609. It seems clear, however, primarily on stylistic grounds, that many of the sonnets were written well before that date. There is very little direct evidence in the poems themselves which might point to a specific date (Sonnet 107 is sometimes held to refer to the coronation of James I in 1603), and we have no independent authorities to help us with the dates of composition. The range of styles and attitudes explored in the poems suggests that some of them must have been written during the so-called "problem" period (1600-1603), for there is a great similarity between some of the sonnets and the style of Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. Others seem much earlier than this.
The Sonnet Convention
The sonnet, as a poetic genre, began in Italy in the thirteenth century, and, under the later influence of the Italian poet Petrarch, became internationally popular. Petrarch established the basic form of the so-called Petrarchan sonnet: 14 lines divided into two clear parts, an opening octet (8 lines) and a closing sestet (6 lines) with a fixed rhyme scheme (abbaabba cdecde). Often the octet will pose a problem or paradox which the sestet will resolve. Petrarch also established the convention of the sonnet sequence as a series of love poems written by an adoring lover to an unattainable and unapproachable lady of unsurpassed beauty. The Petrarchan sonnet convention, in other words, established, not merely the form of the poem, but also the subject matter.
The sonnet form was brought into English poetry in the sixteenth century by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey). They introduced some modifications in the form, sometimes substituting for the traditional division into octet and sestet a division into three quatrains (4 lines each) and a closing couplet, with a different (but...
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