Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
Sonnet 18 opens with what sounds like a compliment and turns out to be an argument — one of the most quietly radical arguments in the English language.
Read the Analysis ›“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
The Tempest
The Dark Lady Sonnets: Who Was She?
The Dark Lady is the unnamed woman addressed in Sonnets 127–154. She is unfaithful, sexually compelling, and described…
What Is a Shakespearean Sonnet?
A Shakespearean sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter, following a specific rhyme scheme and structure that…
Sonnet 6: Then Let Not Winter’s Ragged Hand Deface
Sonnet 6 presses the urgency of Sonnet 5 to its logical conclusion — if beauty must be preserved,…
The Shakespeare Authorship Question
The authorship question is the debate over whether William Shakespeare of Stratford actually wrote the plays attributed to…
Sonnet 5: Those Hours, That with Gentle Work Did Frame
Sonnet 5 is the first poem in the sequence to make time itself the subject rather than the…
Sonnet 129: The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame
Sonnet 129 is the most violent poem in the sequence — a controlled explosion of self-disgust at the…