Sonnet 102
Sonnet 102 is one of the 154 sonnets written by English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is one of the Fair Youth sonnets, in which Shakespeare writes of an unnamed youth with whom the poet is enamored. Sonnet 102 is among a series of seemingly connected sonnets, from Sonnet 100 to Sonnet 103, in which the poet speaks of a silence between his Muse and himself. The exact date of writing is unknown, and there is contention among scholars about when they were written. Paul Hammond among other scholars believes that sonnets 61-103 were written primarily during the early 1590s, and then being edited or added to later, during the early 1600s (decade). Regardless of date of writing, it was published later along with the rest of the sonnets of the 1609 Quarto.
Same-sex intimacy
The most notable example of frequent and common instances of courtly love occurs in the writings of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote many sonnets to young men that he admired, praising their beauty, intelligence and virility. He addressed sonnets 1-126 to "Fair Youth"—an individual who is commonly interpreted to be male—and later, in Sonnet 20, refers to the boy as the "master-mistress of [his] passion." Additional examples of Shakespeare writing of same-sex intimacy and courtly love are within his procreation sonnets. In these poems, Shakespeare encourages a young man to marry and have children to preserve his beauty, using loving and occasionally romantic language to communicate his message. Additionally, it is believed by many scholars that Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") is also about a man, as he dedicated his book of sonnets to an unidentified "Mr. W.H."