William Shakespeare

1564–1616 · England

The sonneteer who made English feel infinitely elastic.

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare spent his working life in the London theatre, where the pressure of a paying audience shaped a language that had to be immediately gripping and endlessly re-readable at once.

The 154 sonnets, published in 1609, were probably written across a decade for private circulation. They form the most psychologically restless sequence in English: love, jealousy, ageing, self-disgust and vanity all appear without the tidy resolutions the form seems to promise.

Style

Fourteen lines, three quatrains and a couplet, with the argument turning at line nine or in the final two lines.
Metaphors drawn from law, commerce, gardening and weather — the vocabulary of ordinary Elizabethan work.
Iambic pentameter used loosely enough that stressed deviations carry emotion.