1. The Elizabethan sonnet and the Shakespeare’s sonnets
The Sonnet
The Elizabethan sonnet and the Shakespeare’s sonnets

2. The Sonnet
The most typical expression of Renaissance poetry was the Sonnet. Dante and Petrarch had a great influence on the diffusion of this new genre in England.
The greatest English sonnet writers of the Renaissance were Philip Sidney (Astrophil and Stella), Edmund Spenser (Amoretti) and William Shakespeare.
The themes were: love, friendship, beauty, the destructive effect of time and the desire for women who were unattainable.
For the poet, love is inspired by the beauty of his beloved, which he tries to capture in poetic form.
The lady is an idealised figure and the love felt by the poet is often a platonic one

3. The form of the sonnet
The original Petrarchan sonnet was a poem of fourteen lines of hendecasyllables divided into two parts, the first containing two Quatrains, the second, two Tercets. The rhyme scheme was usually ABBA ABBA CDE CDE (enclosed rhymes).
The English sonnet was different. It was composed of fourteen lines of iambic pentameters (ten syllables), divided into three Quatrains and one rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme is usually ABAB CDCD EFEF GG (alternate rhymes)

4. Shakespeare’s Sonnets
The English sonnet tradition culminated with the publication in 1609 of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
154 Sonnets
They consist of 14 lines structured as 3 Quatrains and 1 Couplet. The rhyme schema is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The 3 Quatrains introduce the theme; the final Couplet usually presents a conclusion often surprising or unexpected.
The Sonnets are addressed to a young man, the «fair youth»
The Sonnets are addressed to a woman, the «dark lady»

5. The Themes
The first 17 poems, «the procreation sonnets», invite the young man (the fair youth) to marry and have children in order to make his beauty immortal. The sonnet 18 is about the love and the passionate concern for him;
The second group of sonnets revolves around the relationship with the «dark lady» (she has black hair and dun coloured skin); the beloved lady’s physical features distinguish her from the fair, angelic woman typical of Petrarchan sonnets. She is depicted as a very attractive and seductive lady and his love for her is also a sexual passion.

6. Love, Time and Poetry
Love: several sonnets are also about the unpleasant sensations caused by love, such as fear, despair and alienation; other investigate the nature of love itself, comparing the idealized love of Petrarchan poems with the complicated love found in real life.
Time and Poetry: Shakespeare describes time as an enemy of love. Time destroys love because it causes beauty to fade, people to age, and life to end. But Poetry has the power to contrast the action of time. Shakespeare makes the «fair youth» and the «dark lady» immortal.

7. Shakespeare’s sonnets break with the tradition
Part of his sonnets are addressed to a man which was unique in Elizabethan England;
While conventional sonnets are addressed to an idealized woman, his dark lady is very different from the angelic ideal of the courtly poems;
In conventional sonnets love is platonic, while S. also speaks about sexual desire.