Sonnet 18
Sonnet 18 is one of the best-known of the 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Reputation of William Shakespeare
Shakespeare became an important emblem of national pride in the 19th century, which was the heyday of the British Empire and the acme of British power in the world. To Thomas Carlyle in "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History" (1841), Shakespeare was one of the great poet-heroes of history, in the sense of being a "rallying-sign" for British cultural patriotism all over the world, including even the lost American colonies: "From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever... English men and women are, they will say to one another, 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him'" ("The Hero as a Poet"). As the foremost of the great canonical writers, the jewel of English culture, and as Carlyle puts it, "merely as a real, marketable, tangibly useful possession", Shakespeare became in the 19th century a means of creating a common heritage for the motherland and all her colonies. Post-colonial literary critics have had much to say of this use of Shakespeare's plays in what they regard as a move to subordinate and deracinate the cultures of the colonies themselves. Across the North Sea, Shakespeare remained influential in Germany. In 1807, August Wilhelm Schlegel translated all of Shakespeare's plays into German, and such was the popularity of Schlegel's translation (which is generally regarded as one of the best translations of Shakespeare into any language) that German nationalists were soon starting to claim that Shakespeare was actually a German playwright who just written his plays in English. By the middle of the 19th century, Shakespeare had been incorporated into the pantheon of German literature. In 1904, a statue of Shakespeare was erected in Weimar showing the Bard of Avon staring into the distance, becoming the first statue built to honor Shakespeare on the mainland of Europe.
In the Romantic age, Shakespeare became extremely popular in Russia. Vissarion Belinsky wrote he had been “enslaved by the drama of Shakespeare”. Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, was heavily influenced by "Hamlet" and the history plays, and his novel "Boris Godunov" showed strong Shakespearean influences. Later on, in the 19th century, the novelist Ivan Turgenev often wrote essays on Shakespeare with the best known being “Hamlet and Don Quixote”. Fyodor Dostoevsky was greatly influenced by "Macbeth" with his novel "Crime and Punishment" showing Shakespearean influence in his treatment of the theme of guilt. From the 1840s onward, Shakespeare was regularly staged in Russia, and the black American actor Ira Aldridge who had been barred from the stage in the United States on the account of his skin color became the leading Shakespearean actor in Russia in the 1850s, being decorated by the Emperor Alexander II for his work in portraying Shakespearean characters.