Sonnets | Why did Shakespeare use the sonnet cycle form?
Although they were first published under the title of Shake-speares Sonnets in 1609, we know that at least some of sonnets in that collection were written at least ten years earlier. Two of them, Sonnets 138 and 144 from the so-called "dark lady" cycle, appeared in a miscellaneous collection called The Passionate Pilgrim which must have been written before 1598. Most scholars assign the sonnets an early date in Shakespeare's career; stylistic evidence suggests that they were written in 1592 and/or 1593. A year earlier in 1591, Philip Sidney's sonnet cycle Astrophel and...
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