50 Fun Facts About Shakespeare's Sonnets

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the speaker wonders whether to compare the beloved to what, then calls it less lovely?

A summer's day proves too short, too hot and too windy to match the beloved, whose beauty the poem promises to keep alive for as long as people can read.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which mocks flattering love poems, opens by saying the mistress's eyes are nothing like what?

The sun is only the first compliment refused: her lips are paler than coral and her breath reeks, yet the speaker ends by calling his love as rare as any woman praised with false comparisons.

Which metre, also the rhythm of the verse in Shakespeare's plays, is used in all but one of his sonnets?

Iambic pentameter gives each line five beats and roughly ten syllables. The lone exception is Sonnet 145, written in shorter lines of four beats.

Which Shakespeare play opens with a sonnet spoken by a Chorus and has its lovers share another when they meet?

Romeo and Juliet share fourteen lines when they first speak, trading metaphors of saints and their devotees.

Some scholars think Shakespeare's Sonnet 145 puns on the surname of which woman, whom he wed at eighteen?

Anne Hathaway is perhaps hidden in the words 'hate away' near the poem's end, a pun Andrew Gurr proposed in 1971. Other scholars doubt the two sounded alike.

Which singer named a 1987 album after a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 that he once quoted to a drunk?

Sting said a drunk asked him how beautiful the moon was, and he answered with the sonnet's opening words. He also worked them into the track Sister Moon.

A phrase from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 became the English title of which French novelist's seven-volume masterpiece?

Marcel Proust's translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff chose Remembrance of Things Past. A literal title, In Search of Lost Time, took over after a 1992 revision.

The word sonnet, the name of the fourteen-line form Shakespeare mastered, comes from an Italian word meaning what?

Little song is the literal sense of the Italian sonetto, and in Shakespeare's lifetime the English word could still mean any short lyric poem.

The first seventeen of Shakespeare's sonnets urge a handsome young man to do what before his beauty fades?

Have children, the speaker pleads, so the young man's looks survive in a son. Scholars call these seventeen poems the procreation sonnets.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, on love that never alters, calls love which guide to every wandering bark, or ship?

A star, specifically the fixed North Star that sailors steered by. The same sonnet insists that love endures 'even to the edge of doom'.

The 1609 quarto that first collected Shakespeare's sonnets, most never before printed, contains how many of them?

154 sonnets fill the book, and all but two were new to print: a pair had slipped into an unauthorised anthology about ten years earlier.

What is the rhyming pair of lines called that ends a Shakespearean sonnet, often with a twist or summary?

A couplet gives the form its punch: after twelve lines of alternating rhyme, two lines that rhyme with each other sum up or overturn the argument.

Before the closing rhymed pair, a Shakespearean sonnet is built from three four-line units known as what?

Quatrains fill twelve of the fourteen lines, and the shift of thought that critics call the turn often arrives at the end of the third.

Which rhyme scheme, ending in a matched pair, do nearly all of Shakespeare's sonnets follow?

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG is now called the Shakespearean or English scheme, though poets were using it in England before he was born.

What Italian term names the turn of thought that often arrives late in one of Shakespeare's sonnets?

Volta is simply Italian for 'turn'. In Shakespeare it tends to come after line twelve, later than in the Italian form, where it begins at line nine.

Shakespeare's sonnets broke from the Italian form named after which poet, who wrote hundreds of sonnets to Laura?

Petrarch wrote 317 sonnets charting his lifelong love for Laura, and poets across Europe were still imitating them two centuries later.

The 1609 edition of Shakespeare's sonnets is dedicated to a mysterious 'only begetter' identified by which initials?

Mr. W.H. has never been firmly identified, and the dedication is signed by the book's publisher instead of by Shakespeare.

Which nobleman, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis, is a leading candidate for the sonnets' Fair Youth?

The Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, was known for his good looks; the chief rival for the role is another young nobleman, the Earl of Pembroke.

Which Tudor poet, beheaded for treason in 1547, gave the English sonnet the shape Shakespeare later made famous?

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, reworked the form his friend Thomas Wyatt had brought into English, and was the last person executed at Henry VIII's insistence.

Which London publisher entered Shakespeare's sonnets in the Stationers' Register in 1609 and issued the quarto?

Thomas Thorpe perhaps acted without Shakespeare's approval: nobody knows whether his copy was an authorised manuscript.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, rough winds shake the darling buds of which month, a phrase reused as a novel's title?

May gave H. E. Bates the title of his 1958 novel The Darling Buds of May, which ITV adapted for television from 1991.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, thinking of the beloved lifts the outcast speaker's mood like which bird rising at dawn?

A lark, which the poem pictures singing hymns at heaven's gate. The sonnet's first line later gave John Herbert's 1967 play its title, Fortune and Men's Eyes.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 pictures old age as late autumn, a dying fire and which time of day?

Twilight sits between the bare branches and the embers, so the three images shrink from a year to a single evening to the last minutes of a fire.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 boasts that its rhyme shall outlive the gilded monuments of princes and which stone?

Marble and masonry fall to war in the sonnet while the verse survives. Horace and Ovid made the same boast, but claimed the immortality for themselves.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, about time's steady march, opens by likening our passing minutes to what?

Waves rolling towards a pebbled shore, each one replacing the last, set the sonnet's pace. Shakespeare took the image from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 ends by warning that which flowers, once they fester, smell far worse than weeds?

Lilies that fester appear word for word in the anonymously printed play Edward III, part of the case that Shakespeare had a hand in it.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 71 asks the beloved to mourn the speaker only while which surly, sullen sound can be heard?

A bell announcing the death sets the limit. The speaker claims he would rather be forgotten than have loving thoughts of him cause any grief.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 19 opens by daring devouring Time to blunt the paws of which animal?

The lion heads a list of things Time is free to ruin, with the tiger's teeth and the phoenix. Only one crime is forbidden: carving lines into the young man's brow.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, which opens with 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame', is a furious attack on what?

Lust is savage, extreme, rude and cruel before it is satisfied, the sonnet says, and despised the moment afterwards, like bait a fish has swallowed.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 147, the speaker's love is like which illness, with reason as the doctor who has walked out?

A fever that craves whatever feeds it, the sonnet says, though Elizabethan medicine held that such a patient must go hungry; ignored, the doctor leaves in anger.

What name do scholars give the unnamed mistress of Shakespeare's later sonnets, who also seduces the young man?

The Dark Lady gets her name from her black hair and 'dun' skin. Her sonnets, the last large group in the book, are the most defiant of love-poem convention.

Shakespeare's final two sonnets retell a Greek epigram about which god falling asleep beside his torch?

Cupid has his torch stolen and plunged into a cold spring, which turns into a hot bath that still fails to cure the lovesick speaker.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 135 puns relentlessly on which word, printed in capitalised italics in the 1609 quarto?

Will turns up fourteen times in the sonnet if 'wilt' counts, standing for desire, stubbornness and the poet's own first name at once.

Shakespeare's sonnets first appeared as a book in 1609, during the reign of which monarch?

James I had ruled England for six years by then, though many of the sonnets are thought to have been written in the 1590s under Elizabeth.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 3, the young man is told to look in his 'glass', an Elizabethan word for which object?

A mirror shows the face the young man is told to study, and the sonnet then calls him his mother's 'glass', since she sees her own youth in him.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, the speaker loves to hear his mistress speak but admits what has a far more pleasing sound?

Music beats her voice, roses beat her cheeks and perfume beats her breath in this sonnet, which refuses every stock compliment and still ends by declaring love.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 146, unusually religious in tone, is addressed not to a lover but to the speaker's own what?

The soul is scolded for pining within while spending so much on the body, its 'fading mansion', and is urged to grow rich by letting the body waste.

Which number in Shakespeare's sonnets, the farewell to the Fair Youth, has only twelve lines, all rhymed in pairs?

Sonnet 126 stops two lines short, and the 1609 printer marked the gap with two pairs of empty brackets, as if something were missing.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 118 opens by saying people take sharp mixtures to make what keener?

Appetite is the first of the sonnet's excuses: the speaker says he strayed the way a healthy person takes a purge, and learned that the drugs only poisoned him.

Which Irish writer's 1889 story imagines that a boy actor in Shakespeare's company inspired the sonnets?

Oscar Wilde has a character forge a painting to prove the theory, which rests on wordplay in the poems and on no historical record at all.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, the speaker pretends to believe his mistress when she swears she is made of what?

Truth is what neither offers: she lies about being faithful, he lies about his age, and the closing pun has them lying together in both senses.

Whose Astrophil and Stella, printed in 1591, began the run of love-sonnet sequences that Shakespeare's later joined?

Philip Sidney had been dead five years when the book appeared, and its 108 sonnets made such sequences the fashion for the next two decades.

The opening lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 echo the marriage service in which Anglican text?

The Book of Common Prayer echo is reinforced, one critic argues, by the sonnet's play on 'alter', which calls up a couple standing before an altar.

Which Shakespeare comedy has a king and his lords swear off women, then get caught writing sonnets to them?

Love's Labour's Lost treats the sonnet as proof that love turns men foolish: its lords have vowed to live like monks, and their verses give them away.

Two of Shakespeare's sonnets first reached print in which 1590s anthology, issued under his name by William Jaggard?

The Passionate Pilgrim credits every poem to Shakespeare, yet only five are thought to be his. He was said to be much offended at the use of his name.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 128, the speaker envies the wooden jacks of which instrument as his mistress plays?

The virginals, a relative of the harpsichord, had wooden jacks that jump as the keys go down, and the speaker wishes his lips could trade places with them.

A. L. Rowse proposed which poet, who published her own verse in 1611, as the mistress of Shakespeare's sonnets?

Emilia Lanier went on to publish the first substantial book of original poetry by an Englishwoman, and scholars of her work doubt Rowse's theory.

Which writer reported in 1598 that Shakespeare's 'sugared sonnets' were circulating among his private friends?

Francis Meres, a clergyman, mentioned the poems in his book Palladis Tamia, proof that some were passing around in manuscript 11 years before they were printed.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 summons old memories to 'sessions of sweet silent thought', taking its imagery from where?

A law court holds sessions and issues a summons, and the sonnet keeps up the conceit by treating old sorrows as debts the speaker must pay all over again.

Which singer marked 400 years since Shakespeare's death with Take All My Loves, an album built on nine of the sonnets?

Rufus Wainwright shared the album with guests including Florence Welch, Carrie Fisher and William Shatner; the project grew out of a 2009 Berlin stage show.