The term comes from the Italian “sonetto” which means “to sound”, “to ring”. Poetic hearing is heightened not only to the sounds of the world but also to the sound of a word which suggests a semantic closeness of concepts in the sound relationship. For him, it is much more important to establish the very possibility of a new poetic world, revealing the state of the world as a great analogy which becomes the image of a new connection of things. The comparison has often reached an extreme point of hyperbolism. The more unexpected the adaptation was, the better it was considered. For each case, the poet has found the appropriate image or the whole chain of them. Petrarch has determined the internal form of a sonnet based on a comparison. In some cases, this is explained by the absence of a grammatical category of gender in English which often makes it difficult to clearly identify the addressee of a sonnet. However, in some translations, certain sonnets, dedicated to a friend, are addressed to a woman. 126 sonnets are addressed to a friend, the rest – to the beloved one in the original. Dedications unite the “Sonnets” of Shakespeare.
This is how the cycles of sonnets were created, linked by inner unity. Sonnet poetry reached its peak in England in the late XVI and XVII centuries.įrom the very beginning of sonnet poetry, the poems were dedicated to one person. The Spaniards, the French, and the British adopted the form of a sonnet from Italian poets in the XVII century. The traditional Italian sonnet consists of 14 lines and is divided into 2 parts – an octave (eight-line stanza), including 2 quatrains, and a sestet (sestain), split into 2 terzettos (tercet). Belinsky, who determined that a sonnet is a special poem form which originated in the XIII century in the poetry of the Provencal troubadours. In describing a sonnet, I will rely on the opinion of the scientist, V. But if the Italian poet wrote sonnets mainly about love, his followers filled them with deep philosophical content. The relevance of this subject is that the real blossoming of the sonnet was in the works of Frank Petrarch well before William Shakespeare’s time.
Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order.