[2] Shortly before this, Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare's Sonnets in his handbook of Elizabethan poetry, Palladis Tamia, or Wit's Treasurie, published in 1598, which was frequently talked about in the literary centers of London taverns.

It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form abab cdcd efef gg and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions.

The 8th line exhibits a common metrical variation, an initial reversal; it potentially also features a rightward movement of the fourth ictus (resulting in a four-position figure, × × / /, sometimes referred to as a minor ionic): Shakespeare's frequent implied emphasis of pronouns may render the second half of this line regular.

[4] Michelle Burnham adopts the nineteenth century theories that Shakespeare's sonnets contain autobiographical information about him, in order to explore the novel Ulysses.

[8] He uses a less edited version of the sonnet to assert that the first line of the poem makes a clear distinction between passions rather than lovers.

[11] To explain the presence of the "dark lady", Stanborough asserts that she is the good self's exact opposite: "The first was masculine, so this one is necessarily characterized as feminine; the first was 'faire,' or light, so this one is 'colour'd ill.'"[12] The entire argument is based in the fact that Stanborough believes that, in order to have creative insight, an artist has mental divisions between depression and joy.

[13] Clara Longworth de Chambrun writes, "None who hears the cry of remorse and anguish in Shakespeare's poems can doubt that their author traversed a period of great moral suffering.

[19] The Southamptonites, who date them from 1592 to 1596, believe the first 125 are in chronological order, the dark lady is Elizabeth Vernon, and the rival poet is Drayton.

[21] Gray believed, following Sir Sidney Lee, that the sonnets are literary exercises, it is important to identify the dark lady, W.H.

Scholars debate the nature of Shakespeare's relationship with his male companion and question whether it was a close friendship or a romantic love.

Critics have also wondered about the woman who came between Shakespeare and the boy: "And of course there is the dark lady, identified alternatively as a nameless aristocrat, a commoner, Queen Elizabeth, her maid of honor Mary Fitton, the London prostitute Lucy Negro, the poet Aemilia Lanyer, and so on.

Sethna holds: "The problem, of course, is the two main characters round whom Shakespeare's Sonnets exult and agonize with a passionate quixotism of friendship and a frantic fever of love- or, as G. Wilson Knight sums up in the current jargon, "homosexual idealism and heterosexual lust.

'"[29] John Berryman, on the other hand, understands the first line of Sonnet 144 to be Shakespeare's way of confessing his romantic relationship with the boy and the dark lady: "This is the sonnet of which the poet John Berryman remarked, in his comments on Lowell in The Freedom of the Poet, 'When Shakespeare wrote ["Two lovers I have"] reader, he was not kidding.

Wilde believed in the theory that the young man addressed in the sonnets was an actor in Shakespeare's troupe named Willie Hughes.

Wilde writes, "[Shakespeare] finds that what his tongue had spoken his soul had listened to, and that the raiment that he had put on for the disguise is a plague-stricken and poisonous thing that eats into his flesh, and that he cannot throw away.

Then comes Desire, with its many maladies, and Lust that makes one love all that one loathes, and Shame, with its ashen face and secret smile.

"[34] In Sonnet 144, the second quatrain is full of dislike toward the Dark Lady, "To win me soon to hell, my female evil / … / and would corrupt my saint to be a devil.

Today this legal term for homosexual intercourse offends our ears, but its use draws attention to the abhorrence with which many Christians of the time (and since) regarded physical intimacies between men.

In these circumstances it's difficult to believe that Shakespeare would not only participate in an active homosexual relation with a handsome young man, but broadcast this affair to the world in sexually explicit sonnets pass round among his friends.

In his poems to the youth he may be using sexual innuendo as a kind of joke, a playful but at times almost serious hint that his affection may even extend to physical desire.