The Sonnets

Shakespeare’s sonnets, first printed in 1609, have been among the author’s most popular, most read, most annotated and most translated works for two hundred years. Their equally fascinating and irritating combination of raging passions such as love, jealousy and anger with profound reflections on transience and the ability of poetry to wrest moments of eternity from the decay of time have made them an inexhaustible source of passionate and art-philosophical linguistic forms that are tested in and with them. Moreover, since the Romantic period, many readers have wanted to hear the poet speak directly in the sonnets, especially when they seem to speak so frankly about the many varieties of love, and have seen them as a “bowl to the bard’s heart”, i.e. as a medium for supposedly revealing his inner self, which always remains hidden in the dramas.