Sonnet
It was, however, Sir Philip Sidney's sequence "Astrophel and Stella" (1591) that started the English vogue for sonnet sequences. The next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and many others. These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally treat of the poet's love for some woman, with the exception of Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets. The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he was the first to write in this form but because he became its most famous practitioner. The form consists of fourteen lines structured as three quatrains and a couplet. The third quatrain generally introduces an unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic "turn", the volta. In Shakespeare's sonnets, however, the volta usually comes in the couplet, and usually summarizes the theme of the poem or introduces a fresh new look at the theme. With only a rare exception (for example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 145 in iambic tetrameter), the meter is iambic pentameter.
Louis P. Bénézet
His hobby was the study of the so-called Shakespeare authorship question. He became an advocate for Oxfordian theory. In his book "Shakespeare and de Vere" (1937) he propounded a modified version of Percy Allen's Prince Tudor theory, but did not accept Allen's belief that Oxford had a son by Queen Elizabeth I. However, he argued that the sonnets were written to an actor son of the Earl's, who performed under the name "William Shakespeare". In "The Six Loves of Shake-Speare" (1959), he argued that the sonnets were addressed to six different individuals. He also devised the "Bénézet test" of conjoining lines from Oxford's and Shakespeare's verse to see whether the difference was noticeable to the reader.