Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece

Venus and Adonis appeared in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594, when plague had closed London theatres for long periods. Both were dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. Drawing on Ovid and Roman story, they established Shakespeare as a published poet.

The 1609 Sonnets

Thomas Thorpe published Shake-speares Sonnets in 1609 with an enigmatic dedication to “Mr. W. H.” The identity of that person remains uncertain. Readers often group the poems around a Fair Youth, a Dark Lady and a Rival Poet, but those labels are later critical tools, not headings supplied by Shakespeare.

How a Shakespearean sonnet works

The usual form has fourteen lines: three four-line quatrains followed by a closing couplet, commonly rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The argument often turns near line nine or in the couplet, but the poems continually vary this expectation.

Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee”

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The poem begins as praise but becomes an argument about poetry itself: summer fades, while the written lines promise continuing life.

Sonnet 116: “Let me not”

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

This celebrated definition insists that true love survives change and time. Its absolute confidence is also a rhetorical challenge, sealed by the final couplet.

Sonnet 130: “My mistress’ eyes”

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

The poem overturns conventional, exaggerated comparisons. Its closing praise values the beloved without pretending that she is a goddess.

The Phoenix and the Turtle and A Lover’s Complaint

The Phoenix and the Turtle is an enigmatic poem about ideal union and loss. A Lover’s Complaint follows the sonnets in the 1609 volume and presents a young woman recounting her seduction and abandonment; its authorship has attracted debate, though it remains associated with the collection.