![]() These poems of advice modulate into a set of sonnets which urge the poet’s love for the young man and which claim that the young man’s beauty will be preserved in the very poems that we are now reading. W.H.” himself) to marry and produce a child in the interest of preserving the family name and property but even more in the interest of reproducing the young man’s remarkable beauty in his offspring. The narrative goes something like this: The poet (i.e., William Shakespeare) begins with a set of 17 sonnets advising a beautiful young man (seemingly an aristocrat, perhaps “Mr. W.H.” have become inevitably entangled with the narrative that insists on emerging whenever one reads the Sonnets sequentially as they are ordered in the 1609 Quarto. The 154 sonnets were published in 1609 with an enigmatic dedication, presumably from the publisher Thomas Thorpe: “To The Onlie Begetter Of These Insuing Sonnets. Individual sonnets have become such a part of present-day culture that, for example, Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) is a fixture of wedding ceremonies today, and Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”), Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”), and Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)-to name only a few-are known and quoted in the same way that famous lines and passages are quoted from Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth. Yet it is not just the beauty and power of individual well-known sonnets that tantalize us, but also the story that the sequence as a whole seems to tell about Shakespeare’s love life. ![]() Almost all of them love poems, the Sonnets philosophize, celebrate, attack, plead, and express pain, longing, and despair, all in a tone of voice that rarely rises above a reflective murmur, all spoken as if in an inner monologue or dialogue, and all within the tight structure of the English sonnet form. Few collections of poems-indeed, few literary works in general-intrigue, challenge, tantalize, and reward as do Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
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