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1601Shakespeare, Hamlet
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1603Shakespeare, Othello
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1605Letter about Guy Fawkes
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1607Newsbook
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1608Shakespeare, King Lear
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1608English arrives in North America
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1609Shakespeare's Sonnets
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1611King James Bible
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1612Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
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1613First English dictionary
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1616The Globe Theatre
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1623Shakespeare's First Folio
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1633John Donne, Poetry
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1640Jonson, The English Grammar
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1646Areopagitica by John Milton
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1649Confessions of Charles I's executioner
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1650Advert for a quack doctor
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1650Marvell, 'An Horatian Ode'
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1653Early A - Z of London
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1660Samuel Pepys' Diary
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1662Theatrical figures
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1665Coffee houses
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1665A cure for the Plague
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1666The Fire of London
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1667John Milton's Paradise Lost
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1674Criminal slang
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1677Aphra Behn, The Rover
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1678Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
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1679Habeas Corpus Act
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1684Advert for a Rhinoceros
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1693Account of a shipwreck
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Intro
The sonnet is a 14-line fixed-pattern rhyming verse, borrowed from Italian poetry. Shakespeare was a master at creating them. His collection of 154 sonnets, first printed in 1609 but written many years earlier, is somewhat mysterious. Scholars have yet to reach agreement on the identity of either the ‘Fair Youth’ or the ‘Dark Lady’ to whom many of the poems are addressed.
On this page
Sonnets 135 and 136 play on the various meanings of ‘will’. The word appears 20 times, flexing its uses to convey the future, carnal desire and longing, with the author’s name William and its popular meaning in Elizabethan slang: male and female sexual organs.
Shelfmark: C.21.c.44.
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