By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied poems in all of Renaissance literature. The poem is often viewed as a love lyric, but can alternatively be interpreted as a poem about the power of poetry to immortalise the human subject of the poem. But in fact, the poem takes in a variety of themes which deserve the critic’s and student’s close attention.