Study Guide for Shakespeare's Sonnets

Text of Shakespeare's Sonnets (from the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center):   web version | e-book | Palm

Other Renaissance English Sonnets:  Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and Spenser.

A note on Shakespeare's Sonnets by Ian Johnston

Facsimile of the 1609 First Quarto (Q1) of Shakespeare's Sonnets 

Shakespeare's Sonnets FAQ

Petrarch's Canzoniere.

Background information on the English sonnet tradition (see sec. XII).

What is a sonnet?

PBS guide to teaching the Sonnets

Note the following structural divisions of the Sonnets:

1-126:  Sonnets addressed to a "young man" (the earl of Southampton?)

1-17:  The "procreation" sonnets

40-42:  The young man has stolen the poet's female lover?

78-86:  The "rival poet" sonnets

110-111:  Public displays

127-154:  Sonnets addressed to a "dark lady"

133-134:  The "dark lady" has been unfaithful--with the "young man"?

 

Study Questions

• How would you describe the poet's attitude toward the young man?  Is this a homoerotic relationship, or are there other ways of explaining his comments on the young man's beauty?
• Why does the poet want the young man to get married?  How does he respond to the young man's apparent refusal?
• How would you describe the poet's attitude toward the "dark lady"?
• How would you compare these sonnets to other love poems you have read?  How do they compare to sixteenth-century Petrarchan poems?  (Consult your Norton Anthology of English Literature, or the links above.)
• Can you identify images, mythological allusions, and themes that arise repeatedly in the Sonnets?

Bibliography

(The links below can only be accessed if you are connected to the Longwood network.)

Marotti, Arthur.  "'Love is not Love':  Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order."  ELH 49 (1982):  396-428.

Neely, Carol Thomas.  "The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences." ELH 45 (1978):  359-389.

Oppenheimer, Paul.  "The Origin of the Sonnet."  Comparative Literature 34 (1982):  289-304.

Reichert, John.  "Sonnet XX and Erasmus' 'Epistle to Perswade a Yong Gentleman to Marriage'."  Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965):  238-240.

Snow, Edward.  "Loves of Comfort and Despair:  A Reading of Sonnet 138."  ELH 47 (1980):  462-483.