Shakespeare’s Sonnets, sequence of 154 sonnets by English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. Thought to be written between 1595 and 1599, the sonnets are of the English, or Shakespearean, form, which consists of three quatrains and a couplet, with the rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg. These sonnets are considered one of the supreme achievements in this form in all of English literature.

Shakespeare’s sonnets were first collected in book form by the printer Thomas Thorpe, who registered them on May 20, 1609, with the title Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted. Thorpe prefixed to the volume a cryptic dedication: “To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our everliving poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T. T.” Many attempts have been made to determine the identity of “Mr. W. H.” The two leading candidates are William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.

The sonnets describe the devotion of a person, often identified as Shakespeare himself, to a young man whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a mysterious and faithless Dark Lady with whom the poet is infatuated. In several sonnets the poet accuses his patron of deserting him for a rival poet or charges him with stealing the poet’s mistress, the Dark Lady. The ensuing triangular situation, resulting from the attraction of the poet’s friend to the Dark Lady, is treated with passionate intensity and psychological insight. As with identifying the Mr. W. H. of the dedication, attempts to determine the identities of the youth, rival poet, and mistress have been inconclusive.

The sonnets are grouped in a rough pattern, loosely linked by subject matter, stylistic device, or theme. The first 126 sonnets are addressed to the young nobleman. In the first 17 sonnets the poet urges the young man to marry and beget children, since his youth will fade. Sonnets 100 to 126 are addressed to him again after an interval of two or three years. Sonnets 127 to 152 are miscellaneous but are mostly addressed to the Dark Lady, who has already appeared in some of the earlier sonnets. The poet’s attitude towards her is lustful, accompanied by occasional pangs of guilt and revulsion. Several sonnets in this sequence (35, 40, 41, 42) imply a liaison between the friend and the lady. The two final sonnets in Thorpe’s edition do not appear to be part of the previous sonnet sequence. Translations or adaptations of a Greek epigram, they evidently refer to the hot springs at the city of Bath, in southwestern England. While some readers accept the sonnets as a literal account of events that actually happened to Shakespeare, most critics view them as semiautobiographical evidence that has yet to be satisfactorily proven.

While the sonnets may provide little conclusive information about Shakespeare’s life, they do provide insight into him as an artist. Like his later plays, Shakespeare’s sonnets are highly metaphorical. The sonnets derive their artistic unity less from the story that runs intermittently through them than from their exploration of the universal human themes of time, death, change, love, lust, and beauty. Shakespeare’s deep seriousness permeates even the most lyrical passages. None of the early readers of sonnets 129 or 146, for example, could have doubted his eventual capacity to write great dramatic prose.