The Elizabethan sonnet, also known as the English sonnet, is a genre of poetry that became popular during the reign of the English monarch Queen Elizabeth I. It usually consists of fourteen lines—three stanzas of four lines, which are called quatrains, and a final two-lined stanza, which is called a couplet. Elizabethan sonnets are also written in iambic pentameter and follow an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme.

The Elizabethan sonnet was first introduced to England by the 16th century poets Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard. They took inspiration from the already popular Italian sonnets, especially from the poetry of Francesco Petrarca, who is actually known as the father of the sonnet. The poet who popularized the Elizabethan sonnet as a distinct poetic form, however, was the famed bard William Shakespeare. In fact, his sonnets were so popular, that the Elizabethan sonnet is also sometimes called the Shakespearean sonnet.

The most common and most important themes in Elizabethan sonnets include love, the glorification of youth, the passage of time, mortality, and the imminence of death. Some of the most well-known Elizabethan sonnets are Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Edmund Spenser's sonnet cycle Amoretti and Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella.