The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint Book

There is very little we know about William Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker from Stratford-upon-Avon. Oddly enough, this ordinary middle-class gentleman wrote the most enthralling plays in the past and possibly the future history of literature. Perhaps, for this reason, Shakespeare's Sonnets, one of his rare works of straightforward poetry, have long been considered a key to its author's biography.

Was Shakespeare obsessed with a "Fair Youth", did he ever feel for a "Dark Lady"? Or are the Sonnets a sort of mannerist exercise, in the style of Petrarca or Ronsard, the author of Hamlet devoted himself to, for the sheer purpose of honing his lyrical skills? These questions have given rise to a rather copious amount of commentary without providing any decisive answer.

It might be the absence of dramatic pull or the ever returning subjects of the fair and foul lovers, the fickle and perishable nature of beauty, the inexorable and destructive passage of time. Whatever the case may be, the Sonnets are probably, on first reading, the most difficult and most challenging work to fathom in the entire Shakespearean corpus. It takes a fair amount of gnawing and chewing to start to appreciate the throbbing beauty of these poems.