The son of a merchant in Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare did not attend university but made his way in his twenties into the risky, irregular life of professional acting and playwriting in London. He gradually won recognition as the best and financially most successful dramatist of his time.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, although they are sensuously rich and laden with conceits, escape the Petrarchan model and achieve a marvelous emotional immediacy. The fourteen lines of the Shakespearean sonnet fall into three quatrains and a couplet rhyming abab cded efef gg. The Petrarchan model is constructed as an octet rhyming abbaabba, followed by a sestet rhyming variously.

The sequence in Shakespeare’s collection of sonnets is not chronological, but the sonnets do hint at a connected story. The speaker in the sonnets is in love with a young friend who is socially superior, perhaps a patron, of surpassing beauty and apparent constancy in his love for the speaker. In Elizabethan thinking, friendship was an attachment as important and potentially as emotional as heterosexual love—a view in keeping with the example of male friendships in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, dating from an Athenian culture in which the line between such friendship and homosexual love was fluctuating and indefinite. The friend’s constancy turns out not to be complete—he becomes sexually entangled with a beautiful, provocative brunette who was, and continues to be, sexually enthralling to the speaker himself. The speaker’s jealousy, reproaches, sacrificial self-torture, and continuing love for his friend generate some of the most telling sonnets in the sequence.

Some of these sonnets deal with the sense of loss, ruin, and death that Time, personified as a malevolent being, imposes on created things. The friend’s inevitable future loss of beauty and life is seen against a background of change in nature and the ruination of antique monuments and glory. The only sure defense against Time is the eternity of the poem itself, inspired by the excellence and beauty of the friend. Shakespeare’s use in the sonnets for Spenser’s Ruins of Rome shows that his thinking here derives from the familiar idea of the eternity of ancient Latin literature, inspired by Roman excellence. Living in Rome, Du Bellay had contrasted the ghostly ruins of the physical city, destroyed by Time, with the survival —through a secular eternity of 1,500 years or more— in its Latin poetry of the idea of Rome.

Songs from Elizabethan plays, particularly Shakespeare’s, are among the loveliest of lyrics. They not only illuminate the play’s action at the point where they are sung, but deepen and embellish it emotionally.

Passages from two plays by Shakespeare, one early and one late, illustrate both the character and development of his poetry and the evolution of some of his dramatic methods. Blank verse, beginning in English with Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, descends in Richard III (the early play here) from Shakespeare’s older contemporaries: the regular pentameter and end-stop lines are as powerfully and regularly accentuated as the character of Richard—the embodiment of villainy—is grippingly melodramatic. With maturity Shakespeare relaxed his handling of the iambic pentameter line. The beat became less obtrusive and less regular, the natural voice continuing without pause from one line to the next. This development was part of his growing ability to make as single dramatic scene carry many meanings beyond mere action. In the late A Winter’s Tale, the speech is so natural that one needs to look twice to see how exquisitely the verse is handled.