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70-451: The classical tradition was slow to use capital letters for initials at all; in surviving Roman texts it often is difficult even to separate the words as spacing was not used either. In late antiquity ( c.  4th –6th century) both came into common use in Italy, the initials usually were set in the left margin (as in the second example below), as though to cut them off from the rest of

140-524: A quarto in 1609. 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 . There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III . Shakespeare's sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept through the Renaissance from Petrarch in 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-century England by Thomas Wyatt and

210-636: A final couplet . The sonnets are composed in iambic pentameter , the metre used in Shakespeare's plays. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Sonnets using this scheme are known as Shakespearean sonnets, or English sonnets, or Elizabethan sonnets. Often, at the end of the third quatrain occurs the volta ("turn"), where the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a turn of thought. The exceptions are sonnets 99 , 126 , and 145 . Number 99 has fifteen lines. Number 126 consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked with italic brackets; 145

280-591: A former lover who pursued, seduced, and finally abandoned her. She recounts in detail the speech her lover gave to her which seduced her. She concludes her story by conceding that she would fall for the young man's false charms again. 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. In his plays, Shakespeare himself seemed to be

350-524: A historiated initial. Both the size and the ostentatiousness of a manuscript reflect both on the status of the manuscript and on its owner. Manuscripts meant for everyday use, typically by friars or university students, often had little illumination, and hardly any elaborate historiated initials or flourishes. Manuscripts commissioned by wealthy patrons or for a wealthy monastery were often illuminated, and in gold or silver rather than pen and ink. Classical tradition The Western classical tradition

420-432: A mystery. If Shakespeare's patron and friend was Pembroke, Shakespeare was not the only poet who praised his beauty; Francis Davison did in a sonnet that is the preface to Davison's quarto A Poetical Rhapsody (1608), which was published just before Shakespeare's Sonnets . John Davies of Hereford , Samuel Daniel , George Chapman , Christopher Marlowe , and Ben Jonson are also candidates that find support among clues in

490-425: A new section of a text or a particularly noteworthy section might receive more flourishes and space. They would also provide a visual point of reference, "marking the division of the text into books, chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even verses" since, due to the cost of parchment, the modern convention that a new section will begin on a new page had not emerged. In luxury manuscripts an entire page might be devoted to

560-456: A possessive form in its title, which is followed by its own assertion of the author's name. This time the possessive word, "Lover's", refers to a woman, who becomes the primary "speaker" of the work. "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. An old man nearby approaches her and asks the reason for her sorrow. She responds by telling him of

630-400: A satiric critic of sonnets—the allusions to them are often scornful. Then he went on to create one of the longest sonnet-sequences of his era, a sequence that took some sharp turns away from the tradition. He may have been inspired out of literary ambition, and a desire to carve new paths apart from the well-worn tradition. Or he may have been inspired by biographical elements in his life. It

700-502: A sonnet, which serves as proof that they have fallen in love. In All’s Well that Ends Well , a partial sonnet is read, and Bertram comments, "He shall be whipp'd through the army with this rhyme in's forehead." In Henry V , the Dauphin suggests he will compose a sonnet to his horse. The sonnets that Shakespeare satirizes in his plays are sonnets written in the tradition of Petrarch and Sidney, whereas Shakespeare's sonnets published in

770-627: A subject. Both sorts became very common and elaborate in luxury illuminated manuscripts . These illustrated initials were first seen in the Insular art of the early 8th century. The earliest known example is in the Saint Petersburg Bede , an Insular manuscript of 731–46, and the Vespasian Psalter has another. The size and decoration of the initial further gives clues to both its importance and location. Letters that began

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840-532: A word or passage has a concrete meaning or an abstract meaning; laying that kind of perplexity in the reader's path for the reader to deal with is an essential part of reading the sonnets—the reader doesn't always benefit from having knots untangled and double-meanings simplified by the experts, according to Hammond. During the eighteenth century, The Sonnets ' reputation in England was relatively low; in 1805, The Critical Review credited John Milton with

910-465: A young man. He also introduces the Dark Lady . Shakespeare explores themes such as lust, homoeroticism, misogyny, infidelity, and acrimony. The primary source of Shakespeare's sonnets is a quarto published in 1609 titled Shake-speare's Sonnets. It contains 154 sonnets, which are followed by the long poem " A Lover's Complaint ". Thirteen copies of the quarto have survived in fairly good shape. There

980-430: Is aggressively repudiated by scholars; however, the title of the quarto does seem to encourage that kind of speculation. 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. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for the young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and

1050-415: Is an initial, an enlarged letter at the beginning of a paragraph or other section of text that contains an illustration of human or animal figures within the letter. It is similar to a historiated initial (see below); however, the figures in historiated initials show an identifiable scene or story, while the figures in inhabited initials do not show a narrative. Figures in inhabited initials may be related to

1120-688: Is an opening quotation mark before the first letter. The Chicago Manual of Style offers two options: leave out the opening quotation mark entirely; or have it be the same size as the initial, as shown below. orem ipsum dolor sit amet.” Consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. An inhabited initial

1190-482: Is evidence in a note on the title page of one of the extant copies that the great Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn bought a copy in June 1609 for one shilling. The sonnets cover such themes as the passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty and mortality. The first 126 are addressed to a young man; the last 28 are either addressed to, or refer to, a woman. (Sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in

1260-406: Is in iambic tetrameters , not pentameters. In one other variation on the standard structure, found for example in sonnet 29 , the rhyme scheme is changed by repeating the second (B) rhyme of quatrain one as the second (F) rhyme of quatrain three. Apart from rhyme, and considering only the arrangement of ideas, and the placement of the volta, a number of sonnets maintain the two-part organization of

1330-471: Is itself a modern label, articulated most notably in the post-World War II era with The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature of Gilbert Highet (1949) and The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries of R. R. Bolgar (1954). The English word "tradition", and with it the concept of "handing down" classical culture, derives from the Latin verb trado, tradere, traditus , in

1400-403: Is not written in the sonnet form, but is composed of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal . It is an example of a normal feature of the two-part poetic form, in which the first part expresses the male point of view, and the second part contrasts or complements the first part with the female's point of view. The first part of the quarto, the 154 sonnets, considers frustrated male desire, and

1470-678: Is one of a number of world cultures regarded as having a classical tradition, including the Indian , Chinese , and Islamic traditions. The study of the classical tradition differs from classical philology , which seeks to recover "the meanings that ancient texts had in their original contexts." It examines both later efforts to uncover the realities of the Greco-Roman world and "creative misunderstandings" that reinterpret ancient values, ideas and aesthetic models for contemporary use. The classicist and translator Charles Martindale has defined

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1540-465: Is said. Soon the speaker rebukes her for enslaving his fair friend (sonnet 133). He can't abide the triangular relationship, and it ends with him rejecting her. As with the Fair Youth, there have been many attempts to identify her with a real historical individual. Lucy Negro, Mary Fitton , Emilia Lanier , Elizabeth Wriothesley , and others have been suggested. The Rival Poet's identity remains

1610-401: Is the reception of classical Greco-Roman antiquity by later cultures, especially the post-classical West, involving texts, imagery, objects, ideas, institutions, monuments, architecture, cultural artifacts, rituals, practices, and sayings. Philosophy , political thought , and mythology are three major examples of how classical culture survives and continues to have influence. The West

1680-414: Is thought that the biographical aspects have been over-explored and over-speculated on, especially in the face of a paucity of evidence. The critical focus has turned instead (through New Criticism and by scholars such as Stephen Booth and Helen Vendler) to the text itself, which is studied and appreciated linguistically as a "highly complex structure of language and ideas". Besides the biographic and

1750-440: Is unknown. George Eld printed the quarto, and the run was divided between the booksellers William Aspley and John Wright . Shakespeare's Sonnets include a dedication to "Mr. W.H.": TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF. THESE.INSUING.SONNETS. Mr.W.H.   ALL.HAPPINESSE. AND.THAT.ETERNITIE. PROMISED. BY. OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET. WISHETH. THE.WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER.IN. SETTING. FORTH. The upper case letters and

1820-638: The First Folio . Thorpe would have been unlikely to have addressed a lord as "Mr", but there may be an explanation, perhaps that form of address came from the author, who wanted to refer to Herbert at an earlier time—when Herbert was a "younger man". There is a later dedication to Herbert in another quarto of verse, Ben Jonson's Epigrammes (1616), in which the text of Jonson's dedication begins, "MY LORD, While you cannot change your merit, I dare not change your title … " Jonson's emphasis on Pembroke's title, and his comment, seem to be chiding someone else who had

1890-559: 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. In Shakespeare's early comedies, the sonnets and sonnet-making of his characters are often objects of satire. In Two Gentlemen of Verona , sonnet-writing is portrayed cynically as a seduction technique. In Love's Labour's Lost , sonnets are portrayed as evidence that love can render men weak and foolish. In Much Ado About Nothing , Beatrice and Benedick each write

1960-516: The 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim .) The title of the quarto, Shake-speare's Sonnets , is consistent with the entry in the Stationers' Register . The title appears in upper case lettering on the title page, where it is followed by the phrase "Neuer before Imprinted". The title also appears every time the quarto is opened. That the author's name in a possessive form is part of the title sets it apart from all other sonnet collections of

2030-463: The Dark Lady. The speaker expresses admiration for the Fair Youth's beauty, and—if reading the sonnets in chronological order as published—later has an affair with the Dark Lady, then so does the Fair Youth. Current linguistic analysis and historical evidence suggests, however, that the sonnets to the Dark Lady were composed first (around 1591–95), the procreation sonnets next, and the later sonnets to

2100-481: The Fair Youth last (1597–1603). It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical; scholars who find the sonnets to be autobiographical have attempted to identify the characters with historical individuals. The "Fair Youth" is the unnamed young man addressed by the devoted poet in the greatest sequence of the sonnets ( 1 – 126 ). The young man is handsome, self-centred, universally admired and much sought after. The sequence begins with

2170-519: The Italian sonnet. In that case the term "octave" and "sestet" are commonly used to refer to the sonnet's first eight lines followed by the remaining six lines. There are other line-groupings as well, as Shakespeare finds inventive ways with the content of the fourteen-line poems. When analysed as characters, the subjects of the sonnets are usually referred to as the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet, and

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2240-535: 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". Authors such as Thomas Tyrwhitt and Oscar Wilde proposed that the Fair Youth was William Hughes, a seductive young actor who played female roles in Shakespeare's plays. Particularly, Wilde claimed that he

2310-553: The audacity to use the wrong title, as perhaps is the case in Shakespeare's dedication. Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton ), with initials reversed, has received a great deal of consideration as a likely possibility. He was the dedicatee of Shakespeare's poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece . Southampton was also known for his good looks. Other suggestions include: The sonnets are almost all constructed using three quatrains (four-line stanzas ) followed by

2380-475: The author was out of the country or dead, which suggests that Shakespeare was not in London during the last stage of printing. However, Thorpe's entire corpus of such consists of only four dedications and three prefaces. It has been suggested that Thorpe signing the dedication, rather than the author, might indicate that Thorpe published the work without obtaining Shakespeare's permission. Though Thorpe's taking on

2450-582: The classical tradition in fact had continued uninterrupted during the Middle Ages . There was no single moment of rupture when the inhabitants of what was formerly the Roman Empire went to bed in antiquity and awoke in the medieval world; rather, the cultural transformation occurred over centuries. The use and meaning of the classical tradition may seem, however, to change dramatically with the emergence of humanism . The phrase "classical tradition"

2520-441: The contents of the text, but do not have to be. They may be purely decorative instead. A historiated initial is an initial, an enlarged letter at the beginning of a paragraph or other section of text, that contains a picture. Strictly speaking, a historiated initial depicts an identifiable figure or a specific scene, while an inhabited initial (see above) contains figures (human or animal) that are decorative only, without forming

2590-416: 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. After all, May 1609 was an extraordinary time: That month saw a serious outbreak of the plague, which shut down the theatres, and also caused many to flee London. Plus Shakespeare's theatre company

2660-413: The end of the play Henry V is written in the form of a sonnet ("Thus far with rough, and all-unable pen…"). Formal epilogues were established as a theatrical tradition, and occur in 13 of Shakespeare's plays. In Henry V , the character of Chorus, who has addressed the audience a few times during the play, speaks the wide-ranging epilogue/sonnet. It begins by allowing that the play may not have presented

2730-409: The fair youth (sonnet 152). The identity of the Fair Youth has been the subject of speculation among scholars. 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. He was both an admirer and patron of Shakespeare and was considered one of

2800-481: The first letter of normal sized text after a drop cap also would be capitalized, as may be seen in the Mainz Psalter above, and in the original 1609 printing of Shakespeare's sonnets . This evoked the handwritten "diminuendo" style of gradually reducing the text size over the course of the first line. This style now is rare, except in newspapers. There is no accepted solution for how to handle initials if there

2870-419: The initial may be in the left margin, with the text indented, as shown here. In word processors and HTML, this may be implemented using a table with two cells, one for the initial and one for the rest of the text. The difference between this and a true drop cap may be seen when the text extends below the initial. For example: With a drop cap , the initial sits within the margins and runs several lines deep into

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2940-513: The initial, although often still historiated, tended to become smaller again. In the very early history of printing , the typesetters would leave blank the necessary space, so that the initials could be added later by a scribe or miniature painter. Later initials were printed using separate blocks in woodcut or metalcut techniques. Since 2003, the W3C is working for initial letter modules for CSS Inline Layout Module Level 3, which standardized

3010-489: The last lines of which contain Lucrece's complaint. Other examples are found in the works of Michael Drayton , Thomas Lodge , Richard Barnfield , and others. The young man of the sonnets and the young man of "A Lover's Complaint" provide a thematic link between the two parts. In each part the young man is handsome, wealthy and promiscuous, unreliable and admired by all. Like the sonnets, " A Lover's Complaint " also has

3080-410: The late 20th century the discovery of Montaigne 's copy of Lucretius enabled scholars to document an influence that had long been recognized. Shakespeare%27s sonnets William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote sonnets on a variety of themes. When discussing or referring to Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in

3150-504: The linguistic approaches, another way of considering Shakespeare's sonnets is in the context of the culture and literature that surrounds them. Gerald Hammond, in his book The Reader and the Young Man Sonnets , suggests that the non-expert reader, who is thoughtful and engaged, does not need that much help in understanding the sonnets: though, he states, the reader may often feel mystified when trying to decide, for example, if

3220-419: The meter. After Berowne is caught breaking his vow, and exposed by the sonnet he composed, he passionately renounces speech that is affected, and vows to prefer plain country speech. 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…") The epilogue at

3290-435: The most prominent nobles of the period. It is also noted that Shakespeare's 1593 poem Venus and Adonis is dedicated to Southampton and, in that poem a young man, Adonis, is encouraged by the goddess of love, Venus, to beget a child, which is a theme in the sonnets. Here are the verses from Venus and Adonis : A problem with identifying the fair youth with Southampton is that the most certainly datable events referred to in

3360-410: The output of initial letters for web pages. The initials are morphologically classified: the rubricated letter (red); the epigraphic letter, imitating ancient Roman majuscules ; the figurated initial (usually in miniatures); the historiated initial, that gives spatial support to scenes of a narrative character; etc. The initial may sit on the same baseline as the first line of text, at

3430-866: The paragraph, indenting some normal-sized text in these lines. This keeps the left and top margins of the paragraph flush. In modern computer browsers, this may be achieved with a combination of HTML and CSS by using the float: left; setting. An alternate CSS-only method can instead use the :first-letter pseudo-element. An example of this format is the following paragraph: orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. In some older manuscripts,

3500-573: The perfection of the English sonnet. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare and Milton seemed to be on an equal footing, but critics, burdened by an over-emphasis on biographical explorations, continued to contend with each other for decades on this point. Like all Shakespeare's works, Shakespeare's Sonnets have been reprinted many times. Prominent editions include: There are sonnets written by Shakespeare that occur in his plays, and these include his earliest sonnets. They differ from

3570-461: The poet urging the young man to marry and father children (sonnets 1–17). It continues with the friendship developing with the poet's loving admiration, which at times is homoerotic in nature. 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. It concludes with the poet's own act of betrayal, resulting in his independence from

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3640-512: The prologue to the second act ("Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie…"), and set in the form of dialogue at the moment when Romeo and Juliet meet: ROMEO 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. JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, And palm to palm

3710-460: The quarto of 1609 take a radical turn away from that older style, and have none of the lovelorn qualities that are mocked in the plays. The sonnets published in 1609 seem to be rebelling against the tradition. 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. All of them break the last part of

3780-470: The reception of classical antiquity as "a two-way process ... in which the present and the past are in dialogue with each other." The beginning of a self-conscious classical tradition is usually located in the Renaissance , with the work of Petrarch in 14th-century Italy . Although Petrarch believed that he was recovering an unobstructed view of a classical past that had been obscured for centuries,

3850-606: The rest of the text, until the whole page might be taken over. The decoration of insular initials, especially large ones, was generally abstract and geometrical, or featured animals in patterns. Historiated initials were an Insular invention, but did not come into their own until the later developments of Ottonian art , Anglo-Saxon art , and the Romanesque style in particular. After this period, in Gothic art large paintings of scenes tended to go in rectangular framed spaces, and

3920-675: The same margin, as it does here. This is the easiest to typeset on a computer, including in HTML . An example follows (using Lorem ipsum nonsense text): L orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Alternatively,

3990-497: The second part, "A Lover's Complaint", expresses the misery of a woman victimized by male desire. The earliest Elizabethan example of this two-part structure is Samuel Daniel's Delia ... with the Complaint of Rosamund (1592)—a sonnet sequence that tells the story of a woman being threatened by a man of higher rank, followed by the woman's complaint. This was imitated by other poets, including Shakespeare with his Rape of Lucrece ,

4060-448: The sense of "hand over, hand down." Writers and artists influenced by the classical tradition may name their ancient models, or allude to their works. Often scholars infer classical influence through comparative methods that reveal patterns of thought. Sometimes authors' copies of Greek and Latin texts will contain handwritten annotations that offer direct evidence of how they read and understood their classical models; for instance, in

4130-428: The sonnets. It may be that the Rival Poet is a composite of several poets through which Shakespeare explores his sense of being threatened by competing poets. The speaker sees the Rival Poet as competition for fame and patronage. The sonnets most commonly identified as the Rival Poet group exist within the Fair Youth sequence in sonnets 78 – 86 . "A Lover's Complaint" is part two of the quarto published in 1609. It

4200-546: The speaker of the sonnets, the poet, are in a sexual relationship. She is not aristocratic, young, beautiful, intelligent or chaste. Her complexion is muddy, her breath "reeks", and she is ungainly when she walks. The relationship strongly parallels Touchstone's pursuit of Audrey in As You Like It . The Dark Lady presents an adequate receptor for male desire. She is celebrated in cocky terms that would be offensive to her, not that she would be able to read or understand what

4270-528: 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: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme The initials "T.T." are taken to refer to the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. Thorpe usually signed prefatory matter only if

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4340-611: The story in its full glory. It points out that the next king would be Henry VI, who was an infant when he succeeded Henry V, and who "lost France, and made his England bleed/ Which oft our stage hath shown." It refers to the three parts of Henry VI and to Richard III — connecting the Lancastrian and the Yorkist cycles. Three sonnets are found in Romeo and Juliet : The prologue to the play ("Two households, both alike in dignity…"),

4410-412: The subject of a great amount of speculation: That he was the author's patron, that he was both patron and the "faire youth" who is addressed in the sonnets, that the "faire youth" is based on Mr. W.H. in some sonnets but not others, and a number of other ideas. William Herbert , the Earl of Pembroke , is seen as perhaps the most likely identity of Mr. W.H. and the "young man". He was the dedicatee of

4480-402: The text, and about twice as tall as the other letters. The radical innovation of insular manuscripts was to make initials much larger, not indented, and for the letters immediately following the initial also to be larger, but diminishing in size (called the " diminuendo " effect, after the musical term ). Subsequently, they became larger still, coloured, and penetrated further and further into

4550-449: The time, except for one— Sir Philip Sidney's posthumous 1591 publication that is titled, Syr. P.S. his Astrophel and Stella , which is considered one of Shakespeare's most important models. Sidney's title may have inspired Shakespeare, particularly if the "W.H." of Shakespeare's dedication is Sidney's nephew and heir, William Herbert . The idea that the persona referred to as the speaker of Shakespeare's sonnets might be Shakespeare himself,

4620-528: The transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress ; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid . The publisher, Thomas Thorpe , entered the book in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609: Whether Thorpe used an authorised manuscript from Shakespeare or an unauthorised copy

4690-482: The vow by falling in love. The lord Longaville expresses his love in a sonnet ("Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye…"), and the lord Berowne does, too—a hexameter sonnet ("If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?")–a form Sidney uses in six of the sonnets in Astrophel and Stella (Numbers 1, 6, 8, 76, and 102). These sonnets contain comic imperfections, including awkward phrasing, and problems with

4760-471: Was given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains by Henry Howard . With few exceptions, Shakespeare's sonnets observe the stylistic form of the English sonnet—the rhyme scheme , the 14 lines, and the metre . But, Shakespeare's sonnets introduce significant departures of content. 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

4830-465: Was on tour from Ipswich to Oxford. 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, and deal with the litigation of a lawsuit in Warwickshire that involved a substantial amount of money. The identity of Mr. W.H., "the only begetter of Shakespeare's Sonnets ", is not known for certain. His identity has been

4900-459: Was the Mr. W.H. referred to in the dedication attached to the manuscript of the Sonnets. The Dark Lady sequence (sonnets 127–152) is the most defiant of the sonnet tradition. The sequence distinguishes itself from the Fair Youth sequence with its overt sexuality ( Sonnet 151 ). The Dark Lady is so called because she has black hair and "dun" skin. The Dark Lady suddenly appears (Sonnet 127), and she and

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