The importance of shakespeare’s sonnets in english literature plan

2.2. Criticism and humanism in Shakespeare’s sonnets

The collection of 154 Shakespeare sonnets remains some of the most important poems ever written in the English language. Indeed, the collection contains Sonnet 18 – ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’ – described by many critics as the most romantic poem ever written.

It is strange that, considering their literary importance, they were never supposed to be published!

For Shakespeare, the sonnet was a private form of expression. Unlike his plays, which were written expressly for public consumption, there is evidence to suggest that Shakespeare never intended for his collection of 154 sonnets to be published.

Publishing the Shakespeare Sonnets

Although written in the 1590s, it wasn’t until 1609 that the Shakespeare sonnets were published. Around this time in Shakespeare's biography, he was finishing his theatrical career in London and moving back to Stratford-upon-Avon to live out his retirement.

It is likely that the 1609 publication was unauthorized because the text is riddled with errors and seems to be based on an unfinished draft of the sonnets – possibly obtained by the publisher through illegitimate means.

To make things even more complicated, a different publisher released another edition of the sonnets in 1640 in which he edited the gender of the Fair Youth from “he” to “she”.

A Breakdown of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Although each sonnet in the 154-strong collection is a standalone poem, they do interlink to form an overarching narrative. In effect, this is a love story in which the poet pours adoration upon a young man. Later, a woman becomes the object of the poet’s desire.

The two lovers are often used to breakdown the Shakespeare sonnets into chunks.

The Fair Youth Sonnets: Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to a young man known as the “fair youth”. Exactly what the relationship is, is unclear. Is it a loving friendship or something more? Is the poet’s love reciprocated? Or is it simply an infatuation? You can read more about this relationship in our introduction to the Fair Youth Sonnets.

The Dark Lady Sonnets: Suddenly, between sonnets 127 and 152, a woman enters the story and becomes the poet’s muse. She is described as a “dark lady” with unconventional beauty. This relationship is perhaps even more complex than the Faith Youth’s! Despite his infatuation, the poet describes her as “evil” and like a “bad angel”. You can read more about this relationship in our introduction to the Dark Lady Sonnets.

The Greek Sonnets: The final two sonnets in the collection, sonnets 153 and 154, are completely different. The lovers disappear and the poet muses on the Roman myth of Cupid. These sonnets act as a conclusion or summing up to the themes discussed throughout the sonnets.

Literary Importance

It is difficult to appreciate today how important Shakespeare’s sonnets were. At the time of writing, the Petrarchan sonnet form was extremely popular … and predictable! They focused on unobtainable love in a very conventional way, but Shakespeare’s sonnets managed to stretch the strictly-obeyed conventions of sonnet writing into new areas.

For example, Shakespeare’s depiction of love is far from courtly – it is complex, earthy and sometimes controversial: he plays with gender roles, love and evil are closely entwined and he speaks openly about sex.

For example, the sexual reference that opens sonnet 129 is clear:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action: and till action, lust.

In Shakespeare’s time, this was a revolutionary way of discussing love!

Shakespeare, therefore, paved the way for modern romantic poetry. The sonnets remained relatively unpopular until Romanticism really kicked in during the nineteenth century. It was then that the Shakespeare sonnets were revisited and their literary importance secured.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are some of the most fascinating and influential poems written in English. First published in 1609, in a small quarto edition (roughly the size of a modern paperback), almost nothing is known about the poems’ composition. But the Sonnets have been read, recited, reprinted and written about ever since their first appearance. They have inspired many creative works, including music and dance pieces as well as other poems. And they continue to intrigue those of us who watch, read and study Shakespeare’s plays, for the insight they might offer into the mind of the man who wrote our most beloved dramatic works. This piece will explore why the Sonnets are so important to the history of English poetry and why they continue to be enjoyed – and imitated – today.

Part of the reason Shakespeare’s Sonnets speak to us so directly is that they are written with their own afterlife in mind. These are poems designed to commemorate the poet’s beloved for all eternity. In the famous lines of Sonnet 18 Shakespeare suggests that his poem confers immortality: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (ll. 11.13–14). Long after his lover’s death, Shakespeare’s poem will continue to keep his lover alive. The Sonnets look to their own future, imagining the readers who will come to them hundreds of years after Shakespeare’s death. We continue to read the poems partly because of this sense of contact with Shakespeare as he reaches out into the future, a sense of presence as well as a reminder of his absence (a theme that will return later in this piece).

But we need to be careful about reading the poems autobiographically, or seeing them as a key to the themes of love, jealousy, anger and lust that pervade Shakespeare’s plays. The poetic persona who speaks through the sequence is not Shakespeare himself. While many readers of the poems have traced a love triangle between the ‘poet’ and two figures often called the ‘Young Man’ and the ‘Dark Lady’, the Sonnets themselves resist straightforward narrative. The poems seem to play with the reader in this regard, tempting us with hints of the kind of love story that underpinned other popular poetic sequences of the time, or the plot of a Shakespearean comedy. At the same time, the poems constantly frustrate our attempts to trace the exact moment at which the poet loses – or gains – the affection of his lovers, or to map the precise relationship between the two enigmatic figures that so preoccupy his attentions. It is also significant that one of the lovers is male; Shakespeare’s Sonnets do not give us a predictably heterosexual romance but rather a complex and intricate exploration of gender and sexuality that encourages ambiguity rather than resolution. Shakespeare likewise subverts the conventional imagery of early modern erotic verse; ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, begins Sonnet 130.

This toying with the idea of narrative and the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry is one way in which the Sonnets are both highly traditional and also highly experimental. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are aware of their own place within poetic history and unafraid to rewrite this history in startlingly modern terms. This aspect of the Sonnets partly derives from the fact that Shakespeare is writing them somewhat after-the-fact. The sonnet form had been imported into English from Petrarch’s Italian poems by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, earlier in the 16th century. The Elizabethan vogue for sonneteering reached its height in the 1590s with volumes by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel, but was already on the wane by the time Shakespeare's Sonnets were published. There is in his poems a strong component of nostalgia for the form as well as a desire to reinvent it.