A classic Shakespeare sonnet analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state …’ Excluding Sonnet 18, Sonnet 29 is probably the first really famous poem in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. But why is it so widely regarded and […]
A reading of a Shakespeare sonnet We left Shakespeare, at the end of Sonnet 27, lamenting the fact that thoughts of the Fair Youth keep him awake at night; now, in Sonnet 28, he continues this thread, bemoaning the fact that his nights and his days are ruined thanks to […]
A reading of Shakespeare’s 27th sonnet Every sonnet sequence should have at least one poem about sleeplessness. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) had ‘Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace’ in his Astrophil and Stella, and, in Sonnet 27 beginning ‘Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed’, […]
A reading of a Shakespeare sonnet ‘Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage …’: so begins Shakespeare’s Sonnet 26, which is the focus of our analysis here. It’s seen as something of a triumph among the early sonnets in the sequence, and is worth unpicking and summarising carefully for […]
A reading of a Shakespeare sonnet ‘Let those who are in favour with their stars’ – also known as Sonnet 25 – is not the most famous poem in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Yet it is worth reading and analysing not least because of the light it can shed on some of […]