William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a prosperous leather merchant in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire England. He attended grammar school, married an older woman named Anne Hathaway, and eventually left Stratford for London to pursue a career in theater.

      Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets mainly during 1592-1594 when the London theatres were closed. The poems are addressed to a friend of the upper class (Sonnets 1-126), to a dark lady (sonnets 127-154) or to rival poets. Shakespeare took the traditional sonnet from that many, many English poets (and young men) had been writing in the form popularized by the Italian poet, Petrarch; but he developed this over used poetic form and adapted it to the present “English” or Shakespearean” sonnet form. The beloved of Shakespeare is a real and not so amazingly beautiful but rather ‘dark’ and unique woman. There are certainly a number of intriguing continuities throughout the poems. The first 126 of the sonnets seem to be addressed to an unnamed young nobleman, whom the speaker loves very much; the rest of the poems (except for the last two, which seem generally unconnected to the rest of the sequence) seem to be addressed to a mysterious woman, whom the speaker loves, hates, and lusts for simultaneously. Shakespeare also doesn’t limit his subject to the love of this lady: as if confident in his true, the speaker also deals with other subjects of life, immortality, death, poetic fame, and so on.
      Shakespeare changed the rhyming scheme to abab; cdce; efef; gg. He used the iambic pentameter. He used three quatrains and a couplet. The concluding couplet is usually an unusual twist given to the argument of the body of the argument in three quatrains. So the Shakespearian sonnet can also be divided into two parts; statement-cum-argument, and conclusion.
      Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the supreme poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration g garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays were in reality written by someone else- Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates-but all the so-called evidence for this claim is strictly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars. Today, Shakespeare is remembered for the wealth of magnificent poetry and drama he left the world- for Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and many other plays, and for his extraordinary sequence of 154 lyrics, which we group together as Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are very different from Shakespeare’s plays but they do contain dramatic elements and an overall sense of story. Each of the poems deals with a highly personal theme, and each can be taken on its own or in relation to the poems around it. The sonnets have the feel of like autobiographical poems, but we don’t know whether they deal with real events or not, because no one knows enough about Shakespeare’s life to say whether or not they deal with real events and feelings, so we tend to refer to the voice of the sonnets as “the speaker” - as though he were a dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear.

Shakespeare as a Great Dramatist

      Shakespeare was unique among the world’s great dramatists in his ability to create the finest examples of both comedy and tragedy. That the same writer could produce King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and The Tempest, has been a source of wonderment to millions of readers. Also his complex English history plays, with their multiple plots and points of view, have influenced the way we think to history itself. The wide range of Shakespeare’s achievement was boldly set forth in the first edition of his complete dramatic works in 1623 when the publishers divided what has become to be known as the ‘First Folio’ into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Shakespeare’s plays are mostly written in blank verse and include comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It; historical plays including Richard III and Henry V; the Greek and Roman plays, which include Julius Caesar and Cleopatra; the so called “problem play,” enigmatic comedies which include All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure; the great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth; and the group of tragicomedies with which he ended his career, such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. He also wrote narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594).