[1] However, there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost.

With few exceptions, Shakespeare's sonnets observe the stylistic form of the English sonnet—the rhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and the metre.

[2] Instead of expressing worshipful love for an almost goddess-like yet unobtainable female love-object, as Petrarch, Dante, and Philip Sidney had done, Shakespeare introduces a young man.

[2]: 85 The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to the young man—urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation.

George Eld printed the quarto, and the run was divided between the booksellers William Aspley and John Wright.

The upper case letters and the stops that follow each word of the dedication were probably intended to resemble an ancient Roman lapidary inscription or monumental brass, perhaps accentuating the declaration in Sonnet 55 that the work would confer immortality to the subjects of the work:[6] Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme The initials "T.T."

Thorpe usually signed prefatory matter only if the author was out of the country or dead, which suggests that Shakespeare was not in London during the last stage of printing.

[9] Though Thorpe's taking on the dedication may be explained by the great demands of business and travel that Shakespeare was facing at this time, which may have caused him to deal with the printing production in haste before rushing out of town.

In addition, Shakespeare had been away from Stratford and in the same month, May, was being called on to tend to family and business there,[11] and deal with the litigation of a lawsuit in Warwickshire that involved a substantial amount of money.

[2]: 60 Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton), with initials reversed, has received a great deal of consideration as a likely possibility.

[citation needed] Other suggestions include: The sonnets are almost all constructed using three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet.

Number 126 consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked with italic brackets; 145 is in iambic tetrameters, not pentameters.

[29] The "Fair Youth" is the unnamed young man addressed by the devoted poet in the greatest sequence of the sonnets (1–126).

Then comes a set of betrayals by the young man, as he is seduced by the Dark Lady, and they maintain a liaison (sonnets 133, 134 & 144), all of which the poet struggles to abide.

One popular theory is that he was Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton; this is based in part on the idea that his physical features, age, and personality might fairly match the young man in the sonnets.

Here are the verses from Venus and Adonis:[34] A problem with identifying the fair youth with Southampton is that the most certainly datable events referred to in the Sonnets are the fall of Essex and then the gunpowder plotters' executions in 1606, which puts Southampton at the age of 33, and then 39 when the sonnets were published, when he would be past the age when he would be referred to as a "lovely boy" or "fair youth".

[41] John Davies of Hereford, Samuel Daniel, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson are also candidates that find support among clues in the sonnets.

[2]: 85 "A Lover's Complaint" begins with a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, into which she throws torn-up letters, rings, and other tokens of love.

As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.[49]In his plays, Shakespeare himself seemed to be a satiric critic of sonnets—the allusions to them are often scornful.

[57] Besides the biographic and the linguistic approaches, another way of considering Shakespeare's sonnets is in the context of the culture and literature that surrounds them.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare and Milton seemed to be on an equal footing,[60] but critics, burdened by an over-emphasis on biographical explorations, continued to contend with each other for decades on this point.

[61] They differ from the 154 sonnets published in the 1609, because they may lack the deep introspection, for example, and they are written to serve the needs of a performance, exposition or narrative.

[2]: 44–45 In the play Love's Labour's Lost, the King and his three lords have all vowed to live like monks, to study, to give up worldly things, and to see no women.

Ironically, when proclaiming this he demonstrates that he can't seem to avoid rich courtly language, and his speech happens to fall into the meter and rhyme of a sonnet.

("O, never will I trust to speeches penned…")[71][72] The epilogue at the end of the play Henry V is written in the form of a sonnet ("Thus far with rough, and all-unable pen…").

If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

[77] Scholars who have supported this attribution include Jonathan Bate, Edward Capell, Eliot Slater,[78] Eric Sams,[79] Giorgio Melchiori,[80] Brian Vickers, and others.

[79] The king, Edward III, has fallen in love with the Countess of Salisbury, and he tells Lodowick, his secretary, to fetch ink and paper.

The king then expresses and dictates his passion in exuberant poetry, and asks Lodowick to read back to him what he has been able to write down.

When the countess enters, the poetry-writing scene is interrupted without Lodowick having accomplished much poetry—only two lines: More fair and chaste than is the queen of shades, More bold in constance ... Than Judith was.