Understanding Shakespeare: The Sonnets

by Robert A. Albano

Shakespeare's Sonnets explained in plain and simple prose! Like Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella," Shakespeare's collection of 154 poems forms a sonnet cycle. Written in the early 1590's (but not published until 1609), Shakespeare's sonnets, like other cycles, concern love and focus on the attitudes and feelings of the speaker. However, Shakespeare's cycle is far different from Petrarch's or Sidney's poetry.