William Shakespeare

1、William Shakespeare, in the famous "Chandos" portrait. Artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery (UK).See also: Shakespeare's sonnetsWhen English sonnets were introduced by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century, his sonnets and those of his contemporary the Earl o

2、f Surrey were chiefly translations from the Italian of Petrarch and the French of Ronsard and others. While Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English, it was Surrey who gave it a rhyming meter, and a structural division into quatrains of a kind that now characterizes the typical English sonnet. Havin

3、g previously circulated in manuscripts only, both poets' sonnets were first published in Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonnetts, better known as Tottel's Miscellany (1557).It was, however, Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) that started the English vogue for sonne

4、t sequences: the next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and many others. These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally treat of the poet

5、9;s love for some woman; with the exception of Shakespeare's sequence. The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he was the first to write in this form but because he became its most famous practitioner. The form consists of fourteen lines structured as three quatrains and a couplet

6、. The third quatrain generally introduces an unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic "turn" the volta. In Shakespeare's sonnets, however, the volta usually comes in the couplet, and usually summarizes the theme of the poem or introduces a fresh new look at the theme. With only a rare ex

7、ception, the meter is iambic pentameter, although there is some accepted metrical flexibility (e.g., lines ending with an extra-syllable feminine rhyme, or a trochaic foot rather than an iamb, particularly at the beginning of a line). The usual rhyme scheme is end-rhymed a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g

8、-g.This example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, illustrates the form (with some typical variances one may expect when reading an Elizabethan-age sonnet with modern eyes):Let me not to the marriage of true minds (a)Admit impediments, love is not love (b)*Which alters when it alteration finds, (a)Or be

9、nds with the remover to remove. (b)*O no, it is an ever fixèd mark (c)*That looks on tempests and is never shaken; (d)*It is the star to every wand'ring bark, (c)*Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken. (d)*Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks (e)Withi

10、n his bending sickle's compass come, (f)*Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, (e)But bears it out even to the edge of doom: (f)*If this be error and upon me proved, (g)*I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (g)* * PRONUNCIATION/RHYME: Note changes in pronunciation since composition.* P

11、RONUNCIATION/METER: "Fixed" pronounced as two-syllables, "fix-ed."* RHYME/METER: Feminine-rhyme-ending, eleven-syllable alternative.The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet is also a sonnet, as is Romeo and Juliet's first exchange in Act One, Scene Five, lines 104-117, beginning with

12、 "If I profane with my unworthiest hand" (104) and ending with "Then move not while my prayer's effect I take." (117).10In the 17th century, the sonnet was adapted to other purposes, with John Donne and George Herbert writing religious sonnets, and John Milton using the sonne

13、t as a general meditative poem. Both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan rhyme schemes were popular throughout this period, as well as many variants.The fashion for the sonnet went out with the Restoration, and hardly any sonnets were written between 1670 and Wordsworth's time. However, sonnets cam

14、e back strongly with the French Revolution. Wordsworth himself wrote hundreds of sonnets, of which the best-known are "The world is too much with us" and the sonnet to Milton; his sonnets were essentially modelled on Milton's. Keats and Shelley also wrote major sonnets; Keats's son

15、nets used formal and rhetorical patterns inspired partly by Shakespeare, and Shelley innovated radically, creating his own rhyme scheme for the sonnet "Ozymandias". Sonnets were written throughout the 19th century, but, apart from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portugues

16、e and the sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, there were few very successful traditional sonnets. In Canada during the last decades of the century, the Confederation Poets and especially Archibald Lampman were known for their sonnets, which were mainly on pastoral themes. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote

17、several major sonnets, often in sprung rhythm, such as "The Windhover", and also several sonnet variants such as the 10½-line curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty" and the 24-line caudate sonnet "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire." By the end of the 19th century, the sonnet

18、had been adapted into a general-purpose form of great flexibility.This flexibility was extended even further in the 20th century. Among the major poets of the early Modernist period, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and E. E. Cummings all used the sonnet regularly. William Butler Yeats wrote th

19、e major sonnet Leda and the Swan, which used half rhymes. Wilfred Owen's sonnet Anthem for Doomed Youth was another sonnet of the early 20th century. W. H. Auden wrote two sonnet sequences and several other sonnets throughout his career, and widened the range of rhyme-schemes used considerably.

20、Auden also wrote one of the first unrhymed sonnets in English, "The Secret Agent" (1928). Robert Lowell wrote five books of unrhymed "American sonnets," including his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume The Dolphin (1973). Half-rhymed, unrhymed, and even unmetrical sonnets have been ve

21、ry popular since 1950; perhaps the best works in the genre are Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets and Clearances, both of which use half rhymes, and Geoffrey Hill's mid-period sequence 'An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England'. The 1990s saw something of a forma

22、list revival, however, and several traditional sonnets have been written in the past decade.edit Spenserian sonnetA variant on the English form is the Spenserian sonnet, named after Edmund Spenser (c.15521599) in which the rhyme scheme is, abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee. A Spenserian sonnet does not appear to

23、 require that the initial octave set up a problem that the closing sestet answers, as with a Petrarchan sonnet. Instead, the form is treated as three quatrains connected by the interlocking rhyme scheme and followed by a couplet. The linked rhymes of his quatrains suggest the linked rhymes of such Italian forms as terza rima. This