Shakespeare's Sonnets is a collection of 154 sonnets about love, beauty, death and the passage of time, published in 1609. Most of the poems follow the form of the "Shakespearian sonnet": four quatrains (4-line stanzas) followed by a couplet, written in iambic pentameter with the rhyming scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. Many of the poems break from the tradition of sonnets, introducing new themes and parodying other poets and love.
One interpretation is that Shakespeare's sonnets are a pastiche or parody of the 300-year-old tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets; Shakespeare consciously inverts conventional gender roles as delineated in Petrarchan sonnets to create a more complex depiction of human love. He plays with gender roles (20), comments on political events (124), makes fun of love (128), speaks openly about sexual desire (129), parodies beauty (130) and even references pornography (151). In a dozen of the sonnets to the youth, Shakespeare also refers to his "disgrace": "My name be buried where my body is / And live no more to shame nor me nor you." (72)
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