Presenting The Sonnets by William Shakespeare with an introduction by Nicholas Tamblyn, and illustrations by Katherine Eglund. This classic is part of The Essential Series by Golding Books, and is also available in a Large Print edition.
By becoming a monument in the past few centuries, William Shakespeare has been ruined for many children and adults alike. Monuments belie the freshness and passion of their original creation.
Shakespeare was not immune to common human suffering and harmful desires. Even within the confines of poetic rhyme and the motives he may have had in addressing individuals (or the more lasting audience that he often alludes to), he used the sonnets to both reveal and explore powerful feelings, and ultimately to examine the ways that one may become, while inevitably flawed in some if not most of the areas of our sometimes unscrupulous and often challenging lives, a better person.
Shakespeare's Sonnets, like his plays, lead many readers to Bardolatry. Classics among early English poetry and (more modern) romantic poetry, lines found there (like his plays) mark them out as famous poems that are widely known, but some of the most touching, beautiful, or memorable sonnets are likely never to have reached the eyes or ears of most people. Many will agree with Wordsworth's famous line (in his sonnet on the sonnet) that "with this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart."
As outlined in Nicholas Tamblyn's introduction, the sonnet sequence begins with seventeen that urge a "right fair" youth to reproduce his beauty, and the remaining sonnets until 126 continue to be addressed to this "thou" and "you"; the sonnets after 127 are focussed on the "dark lady," excluding the last two, which are different in tone and are related to Cupid. Sonnet 126 contains only twelve lines rather than fourteen, and so in a sense acts as a deliberate or incidental turning point between the two sections.
Several sonnets touching on mortality appear in the sixties, but the great group of sonnets between number 18 (beginning with perhaps the sole line from the sequence that remains at the forefront of popular culture, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") and 126 describe a wide range of ideas and, in ways that may be surprising to those who are yet to read them, ordinary daily activities that make them intriguing and revelatory every time they are read, whether keeping to the given sequence or opening here and there to sonnets at random, each of which have a claim to being classic poetry and worthy (in their own unique ways) of as much attention as his greatest plays.
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. His father was John Shakespeare, an alderman and glover, and his mother was Mary Arden, the daughter of a wealthy landowning farmer. William was the third child of eight, and the eldest surviving son. In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway (about whom little is known, beyond her being eight years his senior), and their daughter Susanna was born six months later. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in 1585; Hamnet died at the age of eleven of unknown causes. The period from 1585 to 1592 is known as Shakespeare's "lost years." His works began to be published and mentioned in the 1590s; he would ultimately write about 38 plays (sometimes in collaboration, likely making uncertain contributions to other plays), two long narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and other short verses. Shakespeare died-within one month of signing his will, and the date his birth is traditionally observed-on 23 April, 1616.
