Shakespeare Sonnet Sequence

1. Introduction

As the result of a BBC’s survey, William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” and “Sonnet 116” landed among 100 Britons’ favourite poems (Nation’s Favourite Poems). Read within the collection, these sonnets might seem loose specimens of love poetry; in fact, they are integrative parts of a sonnet sequence entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets and thus are disticctly interdependent.

As one of the most prominent and arguably the longest sonnet sequence of the Renaissance (Craik 165), Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been drawing attention of literary scholars and critics quite continuosly. One of the heatedly discussed topics is William Shakespeare’s affiliation with the Petrarchan sonnet writing tradition. Currently, there exist at least three suppositions in this regard: Some critics believe that Sonnets are written in perfect accordance with the Petrarchan convention; others – such as Katherine A. Craik, Douglas Trevor and Michael Schoenfeldt – claim that the sequence breaks with the tradition altogether. The third group of literary scholars and critics – including Michael R. G. Spiller and Phyllis Rackin – poises between the first two, arguing that although Shakespeare did introduce some innovations into the already existing convention he still remained within it, writing his sonnet sequence rather conventionally. Regardless of the aforementioned disagreement, there seems to be also a debate in the academic circles about the Sonnets’ main characters: Whereas Schoenfeldt