What was Shakespeare's most famous poem?
Sonnet 18
Sonnet 18 is one of the best-known of the 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Sonnet 109
Sonnet 109 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 80
Sonnet 79 is one of 154 sonnets published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in 1609. It is part of the Fair Youth sequence, and the third sonnet of the Rival Poet sequence.
Homoeroticism
The most prominent example in the Western canon is that of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. Though some critics have made assertions, some in efforts to preserve Shakespeare's literary credibility, to its being non-erotic in nature, no critic has disputed that the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets concern explicitly male-male love poetry. The only other Renaissance artist writing in English to do this was the poet Richard Barnfield, who in "The Affectionate Shepherd" and "Cynthia" wrote fairly explicitly homoerotic poetry. Barnfield's poems, furthermore, are now widely accepted as a major influence upon Shakespeare's.
The Passionate Pilgrim
The poems in "The Passionate Pilgrim" were reprinted in John Benson's 1640 edition of Shakespeare's "Poems," along with the "Sonnets", "A Lover's Complaint," "The Phoenix and the Turtle," and other pieces. Thereafter the anthology was included in collections of Shakespeare's poems, in Bernard Lintott's 1709 edition and subsequent editions.
Shakespeare's sonnets
The identity of the Fair Youth has been the subject of speculation among scholars. One popular theory is that he was Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, this is based in part on the idea that his physical features, age, and personality might fairly match the young man in the sonnets. He was both an admirer and patron of Shakespeare and was considered one of the most prominent nobles of the period. It is also noted that Shakespeare’s 1593 poem "Venus and Adonis" is dedicated to Southampton, and in that poem a young man, Adonis, is encouraged by the goddess of love, Venus, to beget a child, which is a theme in the sonnets. Here are the verses from "Venus and Adonis":
Reputation of William Shakespeare
Clearly there were some exceptions to the official approval of Shakespeare, and the great patriotic plays, most notably "Henry V" were shelved. The reception of "The Merchant of Venice" was at best lukewarm (Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta" was suggested as a possible alternative) because it was not anti-Semitic enough for Nazi taste (the play's conclusion, in which the daughter of the Jewish antagonist converts to Christianity and marries one of the Gentile protagonists, particularly violated Nazi notions of racial purity). So "Hamlet" was by far the most popular play, along with "Macbeth" and "Richard III".
Given the popularity of Shakespeare in Russia, there were film versions of Shakespeare that often differed from western interpretations, usually emphasizing a humanist message that implicitly criticized the Soviet regime. "Othello" (1955) by Sergei Yutkevich celebrated Desdemona's love for Othello as a triumph of love over racial hatred. "Hamlet" (1964) by Grigori Kozintsev portrayed 16th century Denmark as a dark, gloomy and oppressive place with recurring images of imprisonment marking the film from the focus on the portcullis of Elsinore to the iron corset Ophelia is forced to wear as she goes insane. The tyranny of Claudius resembled the tyranny of Stalin with gigantic portraits and bursts of Claudius being prominent in the background of the film, suggesting that Claudius has engaged in a "cult of personality". Given the emphasis on images of imprisonment, Hamlet's decision to revenge his father becomes almost subsidiary to his struggle for freedom as he challenges the Stalin-like tyranny of Claudius. Hamlet in this film resembles a Soviet dissident who despite his own hesitation, fears and doubts, can no longer stand the moral rot around him. The film was based on a script written by the novelist Boris Pasternak, who had been persecuted under Stalin. The 1971 version of "King Lear", also directed by Kozintsev presented the play as a "Tolstoyan panorama of bestiality and courage" as Lear finds his moral redemption amongst the common people.
Sonnet 59
Sonnet 59 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a part of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 148
Sonnet 148 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Sonnet 31
Sonnet 31 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence. Developing an idea introduced at the end of Sonnet 30, this poem figures the young man's superiority in terms of the possession of all the love the speaker has ever experienced.
Sonnet 118
Sonnet 118 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 91
Sonnet 91 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 129
Sonnet 129 is one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets and centers on the idea of the human mind and its primal urges. The sonnet consists of an unknown narrator having an internal mediation with himself about his sexuality; he fears it and harvests feelings of self-disgust for having such desires. "Omne animal post coitum triste est" is a Latin saying that is often quoted in association to sonnet 129. The phrase literally translates into "after sex, every animal is sad." That is the message the sonnet conveys. Shakespeare builds up the sonnet with imagery and desire, and ends it with the feeling of being a victim to lust, as well as the feelings of defeat and disappointment that ensue after the act is done and the desire is no longer there. "Sonnet 129 fixes and deprecates lust with...murderous precision" and Shakespeare leaves us questioning our own primal urges.
Sonnet 50
Sonnet 50 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. It is continued in Sonnet 51.
Alexander Pope
Pope's most famous poem is "The Rape of the Lock", first published in 1712, with a revised version published in 1714. A mock-epic, it satirises a high-society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (the "Belinda" of the poem) and Lord Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her head without her permission. The satirical style is tempered, however, by a genuine and almost voyeuristic interest in the "beau-monde" (fashionable world) of 18th-century English society. The revised and extended version of the poem brought more clearly into focus its true subject – the onset of acquisitive individualism and a society of conspicuous consumers. In the world of the poem purchased artefacts displace human agency, and 'trivial things' assume dominance.
Homoerotic poetry
The most prominent example in the English language and in the Western canon is that of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. Though some critics have made efforts to preserve Shakespeare's literary credibility by claiming his work to be non-erotic in nature, no critic has disputed that the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets concern explicitly male-male love poetry. The only other Renaissance artist writing in English to do this was the poet Richard Barnfield, who, in "The Affectionate Shepherd" and "Cynthia," wrote homoerotic poetry. Barnfield's poems, furthermore, are now widely accepted as a major influence upon Shakespeare's.
Sonnet 17
Sonnet 17 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is the final poem of what are referred to by scholars as the procreation sonnets (Sonnets 1-17) with which the Fair Youth sequence opens.
Ariel (The Tempest)
Sylvia Plath's most famous book of poetry is called "Ariel". It is named so because she considered the poem to be the best in the book. Many readers know that the title of the poem was changed to "The Horse" for the less discerning newspaper readers and think the poem Ariel is simply about her riding a wild horse. Others, however, such as , consider Plath's earlier childhood fascination with "The Tempest's" character Ariel and view the poem as talking about creativity and the dangerous direction her creativity was taking her.
Sonnet 71
Sonnet 71 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. It focuses on the speaker's aging and impending death in relation to his young lover.
William Shakespeare
In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" "Measure for Measure", "Troilus and Cressida", and "All's Well That Ends Well" and a number of his best known tragedies. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, "Hamlet", has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question". Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In "Othello", the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In "King Lear", the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play-offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty". In "Macbeth", the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Coriolanus", contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T.S. Eliot.
William Shakespeare
Published in 1609, the "Sonnets" were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in "The Passionate Pilgrim" in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends". Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".
Romeo and Juliet
"Romeo and Juliet" ranks with "Hamlet" as one of Shakespeare's most performed plays. Its many adaptations have made it one of his most enduring and famous stories. Even in Shakespeare's lifetime, it was extremely popular. Scholar Gary Taylor measures it as the sixth most popular of Shakespeare's plays, in the period after the death of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd but before the ascendancy of Ben Jonson during which Shakespeare was London's dominant playwright. The date of the first performance is unknown. The First Quarto, printed in 1597, says that "it hath been often (and with great applause) plaid publiquely", setting the first performance before that date. The Lord Chamberlain's Men were certainly the first to perform it. Besides their strong connections with Shakespeare, the Second Quarto actually names one of its actors, Will Kemp, instead of Peter, in a line in Act Five. Richard Burbage was probably the first Romeo, being the company's actor, and Master Robert Goffe (a boy) the first Juliet. The premiere is likely to have been at "The Theatre", with other early productions at "The Curtain". "Romeo and Juliet" is one of the first Shakespearean plays to have been performed outside England: a shortened and simplified version was performed in Nördlingen in 1604.
Memorials to William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's funerary monument is the earliest memorial to the paywright, located inside Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK, the same church in which he was baptised. The exact date of its construction is not known, but must have been between Shakespeare's death in 1616 and 1623, when it is mentioned in the First Folio of the playwright's works.shakespeare was a good man who wrote many books and novels or someshit.
English literature
In the early 17th century Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays", as well as a number of his best known tragedies, including "Macbeth" and "King Lear". In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays, including "The Tempest". Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.
Sonnet 89
Sonnet 89 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Shakespeare authorship question
John Taylor was the first poet to mention in print the deaths of Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in his 1620 book of poems "The Praise of Hemp-seed". Both had died four years earlier, less than two months apart. Ben Jonson wrote a short poem "To the Reader" commending the First Folio engraving of Shakespeare by Droeshout as a good likeness. Included in the prefatory commendatory verses was Jonson's lengthy eulogy "To the memory of my beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us" in which he identifies Shakespeare as a playwright, a poet, and an actor, and writes:
Aubrey Thomas de Vere
His best-known works are: in verse, "The Sisters" (1861); "The Infant Bridal" (1864); "Irish Odes" (1869); "Legends of St Patrick" (1872); and "Legends of the Saxon Saints" (1879); and in prose, "Essays Chiefly on Poetry" (1887); and "Essays Chiefly Literary and Ethical" (1889). He also wrote a picturesque volume of travel-sketches, and two dramas in verse, "Alexander the Great" (1874); and "St Thomas of Canterbury" (1876). According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, both of these dramas, "though they contain fine passages, suffer from diffuseness and a lack of dramatic spirit." One of his best remembered poem is "Inisfail" while two of his historical poems used to be on the Junior Cycle English syllabus, "The March to Kinsale" and "The Ballad of Athlone".
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.
Sonnet 68
Sonnet 68 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 38
Sonnet 38 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the lyric subject expresses its love towards a young man.
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and along with "Hamlet", is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.
Adonis
William Shakespeare's erotic narrative poem "Venus and Adonis" (1593), a retelling of the courtship of Aphrodite and Adonis from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", was the most popular of all his works published within his own lifetime. Six editions of it were published before Shakespeare's death (more than any of his other works) and it enjoyed particularly strong popularity among young adults. In 1605, Richard Barnfield lauded it, declaring that the poem had placed Shakespeare's name "in fames immortall Booke". Despite this, the poem has received mixed reception from modern critics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defended it, but Samuel Butler complained that it bored him and C. S. Lewis described an attempted reading of it as "suffocating".
Sonnet 103
Sonnet 103 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
O Captain! My Captain!
"O Captain! My Captain!" became one of Whitman's most famous poems, one that he would read at the end of his famous lecture about the Lincoln assassination. Whitman became so identified with the poem that late in life he remarked, "Damn My Captain...I'm almost sorry I ever wrote the poem."
Shakespeare authorship question
Shakespeare's authorship was first questioned in the middle of the 19th century, when adulation of Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time had become widespread. Shakespeare's biography, particularly his humble origins and obscure life, seemed incompatible with his poetic eminence and his reputation for genius, arousing suspicion that Shakespeare might not have written the works attributed to him. The controversy has since spawned a vast body of literature, and more than 80 authorship candidates have been proposed, the most popular being Sir Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; Christopher Marlowe; and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.
Ozymandias
English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) wrote a sonnet, first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of "The Examiner"
in London. It was included the following year in Shelley's collection "Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems" (1819) and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826. "Ozymandias" is Shelley's most famous work and is frequently anthologised.
Ben Jonson
Jonson's most influential and revealing commentary on Shakespeare is the second of the two poems that he contributed to the prefatory verse that opens Shakespeare's First Folio. This poem, , did a good deal to create the traditional view of Shakespeare as a poet who, despite "small Latine, and lesse Greeke", had a natural genius. The poem has traditionally been thought to exemplify the contrast which Jonson perceived between himself, the disciplined and erudite classicist, scornful of ignorance and sceptical of the masses, and Shakespeare, represented in the poem as a kind of natural wonder whose genius was not subject to any rules except those of the audiences for which he wrote. But the poem itself qualifies this view:
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (also commonly known as "Daffodils") is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. It is Wordsworth's most famous work.
Sonnet 101
Sonnet 101 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. The three other internal sequences include the procreation sonnets (1–17), the Rival Poet sequence (78–86) and the Dark Lady sequence (127–154). While the exact date of composition of Sonnet 101 is unknown, scholars generally agree that the group of Sonnets 61–103 was written mainly in the first half of the 1590s and was not revised before being published with the complete sequence of sonnets in the 1609 Quarto.
Elizabethan literature
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) stands out in this period both as a poet and playwright. Shakespeare wrote plays in a variety of genres, including histories, tragedies, comedies and the late romances, or tragicomedies. His early classical and Italianate comedies, like "A Comedy of Errors", containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Much Ado About Nothing", "As You Like It", and "Twelfth Night". After the lyrical "Richard II", written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, "Henry IV, parts 1" and "2", and "Henry V". This period begins and ends with two tragedies: "Romeo and Juliet", and "Julius Caesar", based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's "Parallel Lives", which introduced a new kind of drama.
Sonnet 67
Sonnet 67 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man, and is a thematic continuation of Sonnet 66. In this poem, the speaker's anxiety about the social difference between him and his beloved takes the form of a criticism of courtly corruption. This sonnet was placed first in the pirated and mangled edition of 1640.
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is an anthology of 20 poems collected and published by William Jaggard that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are considered authentically Shakespearean. These are two sonnets, later to be published in the 1609 collection of "Shakespeare's Sonnets", and three poems extracted from the play "Love's Labour's Lost". Internal and external evidence contradicts the title page attribution to Shakespeare. Five were attributed to other poets during his lifetime, and two were published in other collections anonymously. While most critics disqualify the rest as not Shakespearean on stylistic grounds, stylometric analysis by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza put two blocks of the poems (4, 6, 7 and 9, and 10, 12, 13 and 15) within Shakespeare's stylistic boundaries. Jaggard later published an augmented edition with poems he knew to be by Thomas Heywood.
Sonnet 99
Sonnet 99 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. The sonnet is generally grouped with the preceding two in the sequence, with which it shares a dominant trope and image set: the beloved is described in terms of, and judged superior to, nature and its beauties.
Shakespeare authorship question
Leonard Digges wrote the elegy "To the Memory of the Deceased Author Master W. Shakespeare" that was published in the Folio, in which he refers to "thy Stratford Moniment". Brought up four miles from Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1590s, Digges was the stepson of Shakespeare's friend, Thomas Russell, whom Shakespeare in his will designated as overseer to the executors. William Basse wrote an elegy entitled "On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare" sometime between 1616 and 1623, in which he suggests that Shakespeare should have been buried in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer, Beaumont, and Spenser. This poem circulated very widely in manuscript and survives today in more than two dozen contemporary copies; several of these have a fuller, variant title "On Mr. William Shakespeare, he died in April 1616", which unambiguously specifies that the reference is to Shakespeare of Stratford.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" is the first line of a speech by Mark Antony in the play "Julius Caesar", by William Shakespeare. Occurring in Act III, scene II, it is one of the most famous lines in all of Shakespeare's works.
Sonnet 114
Sonnet 114 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 106
Sonnet 106 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Shakespeare's Kingdom
"Shakespeare's Kingdom" is a poem written by Alfred Noyes and set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar. It was one of the songs (also known as the ""Pageant of Empire"") written to be performed in the "Pageant of Empire" at the British Empire Exhibition on 21 July 1924.
Sonnet 115
Sonnet 115 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 81
Sonnet 81 is one of 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare, and published in a quarto titled "Shakespeare's Sonnets" in 1609. It is a part of the Fair Youth series of sonnets, and the fourth sonnet of the Rival Poet series.
Sonnet 86
Sonnet 86 is one of 154 sonnets first published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in the Quarto of 1609. It is the final poem of the Rival Poet group of the Fair Youth sonnets in which Shakespeare writes about an unnamed young man and a rival poet competing for the youth's favor. The exact date of its composition is unknown, it has been suggest that the Rival Poet series may have been written between 1598 and 1600.
Sonnet 44
Sonnet 44 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. "Sonnet 44" is continued in "Sonnet 45".
Sonnet 29
Sonnet 29 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-126 in the accepted numbering stemming from the first edition in 1609). In the sonnet, the speaker bemoans his status as an outcast and failure but feels better upon thinking of his beloved. Sonnet 29 is written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet.
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. Until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among them "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear", and "Macbeth", all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
A Psalm of Life
Calhoun also notes that "A Psalm of Life" has become one of the most frequently memorized and most ridiculed of English poems, with an ending reflecting "Victorian cheeriness at its worst". Modern critics have dismissed its "sugar-coated pill" promoting a false sense of security. One story has it that a man once approached Longfellow and told him that a worn, hand-written copy of "A Psalm of Life" saved him from suicide. Nevertheless, Longfellow scholar Robert L. Gale referred to "A Psalm of Life" as "the most popular poem ever written in English". Edwin Arlington Robinson, an admirer of Longfellow's, likely was referring to this poem in his "Ballade by the Fire" with his line, "Be up, my soul". Despite Longfellow's dwindling reputation among modern readers and critics, "A Psalm of Life" remains one of the few of his poems still anthologized.
Sonnet 95
Sonnet 95 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 112
Sonnet 112 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. It is noted for its compressed and obscure language.
Shakespeare Jubilee
The Shakespeare Jubilee was staged in Stratford-upon-Avon between 6 and 8 September 1769. The jubilee was organised by the actor and theatre manager David Garrick to celebrate the Jubilee of the birth of William Shakespeare. It had a major impact on the rising tide of bardolatry that led to Shakespeare's becoming established as the English national poet. Thomas Arne composed the song "Soft Flowing Avon" for the Jubilee.
Theatre of the United Kingdom
The reign of Elizabeth I in the late 16th and early 17th century saw a flowering of the drama and all the arts. Perhaps the most famous playwright in the world, William Shakespeare, wrote around 40 plays that are still performed in theatres across the world to this day. They include tragedies, such as "Hamlet" (1603), "Othello" (1604), and "King Lear" (1605); comedies, such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1594—96) and "Twelfth Night" (1602); and history plays, such as "Henry IV, part 1—2". The Elizabethan age is sometimes nicknamed "the age of Shakespeare" for the amount of influence he held over the era. Other important Elizabethan and 17th-century playwrights include Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster.
Shakespeare's sonnets
Like all Shakespeare's works, "Shakespeare's Sonnets" have been reprinted many times. Prominent editions include:
There are sonnets written by Shakespeare that occur in his plays. They differ from the 154 sonnets published in the 1609, because they may lack the deep introspection, for example, and they are written to serve the needs of a performance, exposition or narrative.
Shakespeare authorship question
Despite adulatory tributes attached to his works, Shakespeare was not considered the world's greatest writer in the century and a half following his death. His reputation was that of a good playwright and poet among many others of his era. Beaumont and Fletcher's plays dominated popular taste after the theatres reopened in the Restoration Era in 1660, with Ben Jonson's and Shakespeare's plays vying for second place. After the actor David Garrick mounted the Shakespeare Stratford Jubilee in 1769, Shakespeare led the field. Excluding a handful of minor 18th-century satirical and allegorical references, there was no suggestion in this period that anyone else might have written the works. The authorship question emerged only after Shakespeare had come to be regarded as the English national poet and a unique genius.
Sonnet 113
Sonnet 113 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 137
Sonnet 137 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's will
William Shakespeare's last will and testament was signed on 25 March 1616, just under a month before his death. The document has been used by many scholars and biographers to deduce details of his personal life and opinions. The best-known passage from the will is the bequest to the wife of his "second best bed". The significance, if any, of this phrase, has been much debated. The will has also been used as evidence of his attitudes towards his two daughters, Susanna and Judith, and their respective husbands, John Hall and Thomas Quiney
David Garrick
In September 1769 Garrick staged the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was a major focal point in the emerging movement that helped cement Shakespeare as England's national poet. It involved a number of events held in the town to celebrate (five years too late) 200 years since Shakespeare's birth. In a speech made on the second day of the Jubilee in Stratford Garrick recognized the Shakespeare Ladies Club as those who "restor'd Shakespeare to the Stage," protecting his fame and erecting "a Monument to his and your own honour in Westminster Abbey." No Shakespeare plays were performed during the Jubilee, and heavy rain forced a Shakespeare Pageant to be called off. The Pageant was first staged a month later at Drury Lane Theatre under the title "The Jubilee" and proved successful enjoying 90 performances. The song "Soft Flowing Avon" was composed by Thomas Arne, with lyrics by Garrick, for the Jubilee.
Sonnet 36
Sonnet 36 is one of 154 Shakespeare's sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the speaker expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 105
Sonnet 105 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 139
Sonnet 139 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Sonnet 119
Sonnet 119 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 42
Sonnet 42 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a part of the Fair Youth section of the sonnets addressed to an unnamed young man.
Sonnet 121
Sonnet 121 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards his young lover.
Sonnet 52
Sonnet 52 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Outline of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare – English poet, playwright, and actor who lived during the 17th century. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".Shakespeare's plays –
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1589 and 1593. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as showing his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and motifs with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. The play deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed.
Frank W. Wadsworth
Wadsworth was probably best known to the public for his "The Poacher from Stratford" (1958), a popular defense of Shakespeare’s authorship and the first such book written by an academic Shakespearean scholar. He thought that Shakespeare scholars should not dismiss the claims of those who believe that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the canon, and that treating the subject with silence worked instead to encourage rather than discourage such theories. Thirty-five years later he reviewed the field in an article published in the "Shakespeare Newsletter", "The Poacher Re-Visited," in which he wrote:
The Rape of Lucrece
The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem, "Venus and Adonis" (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to compose a "graver labour". Accordingly, "The Rape of Lucrece" has a serious tone throughout.
Reputation of William Shakespeare
In his own time, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was rated as merely one among many talented playwrights and poets, but since the late 17th century he has been considered the supreme playwright and poet of the English language.
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic "Merchant of Venice", contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of "Much Ado About Nothing", the charming rural setting of "As You Like It", and the lively merrymaking of "Twelfth Night" complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical "Richard II", written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, "Henry IV, parts 1" and "2", and "Henry V". His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: "Romeo and Juliet", the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and "Julius Caesar"—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's "Parallel Lives"—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in "Julius Caesar," "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".
Sonnet 149
Sonnet 149 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Reputation of William Shakespeare
Many English-language Modernist poets drew on Shakespeare's works, interpreting in new ways. Ezra Pound, for instance, considered the Sonnets as a kind of apprentice work, with Shakespeare learning the art of poetry through writing them. He also declared the History plays to be the true English epic. Basil Bunting rewrote the sonnets as modernist poems by simply erasing all the words he considered unnecessary. Louis Zukofsky had read all of Shakespeare's works by the time he was eleven, and his "Bottom: On Shakespeare" (1947) is a book-length prose poem exploring the role of the eye in the plays. In its original printing, a second volume consisting of a setting of "The Tempest" by the poet's wife, Celia Zukofsky was also included.
Sonnet 63
Sonnet 63 is one of 154 sonnets published in 1609 by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is one of the Fair Youth sequence. Contrary to most of the other poems in the Fair Youth sequence, in sonnets 63 to 68 there is no explicit addressee, indeed the second person pronoun (you or thou) is not used anywhere in sonnets 63 to 68.
Shakespeare's influence
Shakespeare's influence extends from theatre and literature to present-day movies, Western philosophy, and the English language itself. William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of the English language, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He transformed European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through innovation in characterization, plot, language and genre. Shakespeare's writings have also impacted a large number of notable novelists and poets over the years, including Herman Melville Charles Dickens, and Maya Angelou, and continue to influence new authors even today. Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world after the various writers of the Bible; many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages.
Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are poems that William Shakespeare wrote on a variety of themes. When discussing or referring to Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609; however there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays "Romeo and Juliet", "Henry V" and "Love's Labour's Lost".
Rudyard Kipling
"Book-ending" this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: "Puck of Pook's Hill" (1906), and "Rewards and Fairies" (1910). The latter contained the poem "If—". In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted the UK's favourite poem. This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling's most famous poem.
The Phoenix and the Turtle
The Phoenix and the Turtle (also spelled The Phœnix and the Turtle) is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love by William Shakespeare. It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. It has also been called "the first great published metaphysical poem". The title "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is a conventional label. As published, the poem was untitled. The "turtle" is the Turtledove, not the shelled reptile.
Evangeline
"Evangeline" became Longfellow's most famous work in his lifetime and was widely read. Contemporary reviews were very positive. A reviewer for "The Metropolitan Magazine" said, "No one with any pretensions to poetic feeling can read its delicious portraiture of rustic scenery and of a mode of life long since defunct, without the most intense delight". Longfellow's friend Charles Sumner said he had met a woman who "has read 'Evangeline' some twenty times and thinks it the most perfect poem in the language". Other admirers of the poem included King Leopold I of Belgium. It has been called the first important long poem in American literature.
Sonnet 1
Sonnet 1 is the first in a series of 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare and published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe. Nineteenth-century critics thought Thorpe might have published the poems without Shakespeare's consent, but modern scholars don't agree and consider that Thorpe maintained a good reputation. Sonnet 1 is the first of the "Fair Youth" sonnets, in which an unnamed young man is being addressed by the speaker. Patrick Cheney comments on this: "Beginning with a putatively male speaker imploring a beautiful young man to reproduce, and concluding with a series of poems – the dark lady poems – that affiliate consummated heterosexual passion with incurable disease, Shakespeare's Sonnets radically and deliberately disrupt the conventional narrative of erotic courtship". Sonnet 1 serves as being a kind of introduction to the rest of the sonnets, and may have been written later than the ones that follow. The "procreation sonnets" (sonnets 1 – 17) urge this youth to not waste his beauty by failing to marry or reproduce. Joseph Pequigney notes: "... the opening movement give[s the] expression to one compelling case... The first mode of preservation entertained is procreation, which is urged without letup in the first fourteen poems and twice again".
Sonnet 49
Sonnet 49 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 94
Sonnet 94 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
William Shakespeare
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on sexual themes, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In "Venus and Adonis", an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in "The Rape of Lucrece", the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. Influenced by Ovid's "Metamorphoses", the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, "A Lover's Complaint", in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the "Sonnets" in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote "A Lover's Complaint". Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. "The Phoenix and the Turtle", printed in Robert Chester's 1601 "Love's Martyr", mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in "The Passionate Pilgrim", published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.
Sonnet 30
Sonnet 30 is one of the 154 sonnets written by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. It was published in the Quarto in 1609. It is also part of the Fair Youth portion of the Shakespeare Sonnet collection where he writes about his affection for an unknown young man. While it is not known exactly when Sonnet 30 was written, most scholars agree that it was written between 1595 and 1600. It is written in Shakespearean form, comprising fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, divided into three quatrains and a couplet.
John Godfrey Saxe
His best remembered poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant", a version of the ancient tale Blind men and an elephant, was not his most famous in his day. Though a satirist, his poems written during more somber periods remain some of his most beautiful and enduring, including "Little Jerry the Miller" about his father's mill assistant. Few of the satirical works which had made him famous are read today.
British literature
After Blake, among the earliest Romantics were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends, including William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Robert Southey (1774–1843) and journalist Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859). However, at the time, Walter Scott (1771–1832) was the most famous poet. Scott achieved immediate success with his long narrative poem "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" in 1805, followed by the full epic poem "Marmion" in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past.
Sonnet 28
Sonnet 28 is one of 154 sonnets published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in 1609. It is a part of what is considered the Fair Youth group, and part of another group (sonnets 27, 28, 43 and 61) that focuses on the solitary poet reflecting on his friend. There is a theme of night and sleeplessness, which is a traditional motif that also occurs in Petrarchan sonnets.
Sonnet 70
Sonnet 70 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 122
Sonnet 122 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and first published in 1609. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. Although the relationship started exuberantly in Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") by now it has given way to an almost defensive tone. The poet justifies giving away or losing a notebook ("tables") given him by the youth to record shared events by saying that his memories of them are stronger.
Sonnet 65
Sonnet 65 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Tragedy
In English, the most famous and most successful tragedies are those of William Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries. Shakespeare's tragedies include:
Sonnet 41
Sonnet 41 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a part of the Fair Youth section of the sonnets addressed to an unnamed young man. While the exact date of the composition is unknown, it was originally published in the 1609 Quarto along with the rest of the sonnets.
Edmund Spenser
Spenser's masterpiece is the epic poem "The Faerie Queene". The first three books of "The Faerie Queene" were published in 1590, and a second set of three books were published in 1596. Spenser originally indicated that he intended the poem to consist of twelve books, so the version of the poem we have today is incomplete. Despite this, it remains one of the longest poems in the English language. It is an allegorical work, and can be read (as Spenser presumably intended) on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In a completely allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues. In Spenser's "A Letter of the Authors", he states that the entire epic poem is "cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises", and that the aim behind "The Faerie Queene" was to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline".
Sonnet 64
Sonnet 64 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.