INSTRUCTIONS * Read the notes on sonnets. * Read the sonnets and answer the questions that follow each. * Complete the writing assignment

Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The Mysteries of Love

Shakespeare. The name calls to mind the great plays whose characters have come to life on stages around the world: Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello. Yet had Shakespeare written no plays at all, his reputation as a poet, as the author of the Sonnets (1609), would still have been immense. There are 154 sonnets altogether; their speaker is male, and their chief subject is love. Beyond those three points, however, there is little agreement, only questions:

• Is the sonnets’ speaker a dramatic character invented by Shakespeare, like Romeo, Macbeth, or Hamlet, or is he the poet himself?
• If the sonnets are about the real man Shakespeare, then who are the real people behind the characters the sonnets mention?
• Is the order in which the sonnets were originally published (probably without Shakespeare’s consent) the correct or the intended sequence? Could they be arranged to tell a more coherent story? Should they be so arranged?

These and dozens of other questions about the sonnets have been asked and answered over and over again—but never to everybody’s satisfaction. We have hundreds of conflicting theories but no absolutely convincing answers.

About the individual sonnets, though, if not the whole sequence, agreement is perfect: They are among the supreme utterances in English. They say profound things about important human experiences, and they say them with great art.

The Sonnet in the Renaissance

The word sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto, meaning “little sound; song.” A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem that conforms to strict patterns of rhythm and rhyme.

In Italy the sonnet form was perfected by Francesco Petrarca, known in English as