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Sonnets (Magill Book Reviews)

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Shakespeare was the most unconventional of the Elizabethan sonneteers. The typical lovesick sonneteer, imitating the Italian Petrarch, idealized his fair lady in highly wrought, artificial language featuring metaphor and oxymoron. Shakespeare not only poked fun at this conventional language (see Sonnet 130) but also declared his love for a younger man and a rather sluttish “dark lady.” He also used a simplified sonnet form, three quatrains and a rhyming couplet.

Sonnets 1-126 address the young man, whom Shakespeare idealizes but also advises and corrects. The first seventeen...

[The entire page is 522 words long]

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