16 pages • 32 minutes read
William ShakespeareSonnet 29
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
Shakespeare’s career took place during the end of the Elizabethan Era, a name referencing the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The last decades of the 16th century were a peaceful golden age in England. Political turmoil was at a low point. Despite rising tensions between Catholics and Protestants, the country remained stable, as Elizabeth kept a tight leash on internal opponents and united the populace against external enemies such as Spain, whose Armada the English navy repelled in 1588. Internally, England would see peace until the Civil War that would grip it in the middle of the 17th century.
While Shakespeare was writing, between the 1580s and the 1610s, England was experiencing its version of the European Renaissance. Because of unprecedented access to education, as during the Tudor period increasing numbers of boys began attending grammar schools, audiences for the arts expanded, just as royal and noble patronage of art financed its production. Literary movements flourished: poetry introduced and popularized inventive new forms like the sonnet (Shakespeare’s particular favorite), the Spenserian stanza, and blank verse; prose narratives appeared, paving the way for what we know as the novel; and the era saw a tremendous growth of theater, with plays that spoke to contemporary concerns such as exploration, colonization, and empire, as well as age-old questions of birthright and political power.
Literary Context
Nearly two hundred years before Shakespeare’s time, the Italian poet Petrarch and his contemporaries elevated and popularized the sonnetto, or little song, a genre that was popular in lowbrow medieval tavern songs in Italy into the sonnet, an exalted form of romantic poetry about chivalric or courtly love. The sonnet made its way to England in the 16th century, where it developed new characteristics like its 14-line structure, a strict 10-syllable limit per line, rhyme, and the division into quatrains. During the late 1500s, Sir Philip Sidney published Astrophil and Stella, a collection of love sonnets written from the point of view of Astrophil to his star-like lover, Stella; the collection began a sonnet craze that permeated the literary scene of Elizabethan England.
Shakespeare’s sonnets continue this tradition, but with notable departures that rebel against by then well-worn tropes. Unlike other sonneteers, Shakespeare does not express worshipping erotic love for a goddess-like love interest. Instead, the object of Shakespeare’s poems is often a young man, or sometimes, a woman now known as a Dark Lady—the complete opposite of the traditionally ideal lover. This radical repositioning of the poems’ love object challenges the sonnet form and opens it up to new, earthy, and more realistic terrain—Shakespeare’s sonnets offered modern innovations that represented a fresh take on the classic form.
Shakespeare’s sonnets were not published until nearly 20 years after they were written, when the sonnet craze had faded out of fashion. They remained relatively obscure until they were rediscovered and re-popularized in the 19th century. “Sonnet 29” is a perfect example of Shakespeare’s rebellious and resonant writing style, describing an unconventional kind of love that is nonetheless profound and universally relatable.
Related Titles
By William Shakespeare
