Shakespearean Sonnets: Respond to Questions for each Sonnet

Sonnet 116: Subject: the speaker's claim on true love, what true love is not, and what true love is--

1.What does the speaker say true love IS NOT?

2. What does the speaker say true love IS?

Sonnet 130: Subject: In a satirical, comic tone, the speaker disparages and ridicules both his own love for this "Dark Lady" and Elizabethan's attitudes toward dark haired, dark skinned women.

3. Where in this sonnet does the speaker express humor toward his attraction?

4. Where does his humor turn rude and crude?

Sonnet 138: Subject: The speaker's reflections on relationships, mainly this relationship, built on mutual deception

5. What does the speaker know about their partner's attitude/practice of "lies" in this relationship of age difference?

6. What does the speaker's play on the words, "lie" and "lies" in the last two lines--the couplet--tell us about his attitude in this relationship?

Sonnet 127: Subject: This poem is the speaker's defense of brunettes and dark skinned women. In Elizabethan England, dark haired, dark skinned women were not considered beautiful; however, the speaker's attitude signals a change in what the speaker considers beautiful.

7. What does the speaker say has changed about what they view as beautiful?

8. What most concerns the speaker about what women do to reject the beauty that nature gave them?

William Shakespeare and the Shakespearean/Elizabethan Sonnet:

9. Although Shakespeare had to leave school at about the age of thirteen (13), what does his literary work indicate about his education? Hint: Information in William Shakespeare: Partial Biography

10. How many lines make up a sonnet, how are the lines structured, and what is the meter/rhythm called? Hint: Information in video