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.
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."