A reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet 14 William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14 is another ‘Procreation Sonnet’, which urges the Fair Youth, the addressee of the early Sonnets, to marry and sire an heir. What follows is a short summary and analysis of Sonnet 14, which takes astrology as its (rejected) trope, and […]
A reading of a Shakespeare sonnet William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 13, beginning ‘O that you were yourself!’, continues the procreation theme established in the previous dozen sonnets. What follows is a short analysis of Sonnet 13 – its language, its meaning, and its imagery. O that you were your self! but, […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’: so begins one of the more famous ‘Procreation Sonnets’, the suite of 17 sonnets that begin Shakespeare’s cycle of poems to the Fair Youth.
A reading of a Shakespeare sonnet William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 11, beginning ‘As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st’, is another ‘Procreation Sonnet’, in which the Bard urges the Fair Youth to marry and have children. Below, we sketch out a brief analysis of Sonnet 11 in terms […]
A reading of a Shakespeare sonnet ‘For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any’: so begins Sonnet 10 in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. This sonnet represents a minor turning point in the sequence, since Shakespeare’s admiration of the Fair Youth and his beauty becomes personal, rather than merely being couched in […]