Shakespeare's sonnets
The primary source of Shakespeare’s sonnets is a quarto published in 1609 titled "Shakespeare’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 from the 1609 edition, which is the only edition; there were no other printings. There 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.
Sonnet 56
Sonnet 56 is part of the Fair Youth sequence. This sequence spans sonnets 1-126. Furthermore, the first 77 sonnets are called the "Procreation" section, the rest 78-126 the "Rival Poet" and 127-154 is the "Dark Lady" section. In the Fair Youth section Shakespeare details his feelings towards the young man that he is in love with. This sonnet was published along with the rest in 1609 in Quarto. There is a debate as to why the sonnets were published in 1609. One theory affirmed by Duncan-Jones, is that these sonnets were published in order to "put right the wrong done" by the unauthorized publishing by Jaggard in 1599. They are thought to have been written long before the publication in 1609. Some researchers have used clues from Sonnet 107 with its allusions to Queen Elizabeth to date it to 1596. If the sonnets were written in the order that they appear in Quarto, then it is plausible that some were written before 1596.