Shakespeare/Poems and Sonnets (0)

SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in
the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving
works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays
have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
POEMS

In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare
published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus
and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The
Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin.
Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poems show the guilt and moral
confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.[
Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third
narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction
by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most
scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that
its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in
Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and
his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144
appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without
his permission.
SONNETS