In 1601 a collection of shakespeare's sonnets were printed by
Answers
Although nowadays we think of Shakespeare primarily as a playwright, in his own lifetime he was also well-known as a poet. His sonnets and narrative poems appeared in print to widespread acclaim during the 1590s and 1600s.
The themes of Shakespeare’s Sonnets include the shortness of life and fleetingness of beauty, ways to achieve immortality (through having children and writing or being written about in poetry), desire and longing, love as a sickness, and poetic patronage. He is quite radical in his love poetry, often departing from courtly ideals of truth and purity to wrangle with sex, lies and love triangles. It is not known whether the Sonnets are autobiographical or purely fictional. The first 126 sonnets are addressed to a ‘fair youth’ and the rest to a ‘Dark Lady’; many scholars have tried to identify these characters with historical individuals and speculated about Shakespeare’s sexuality, the ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets possibly revealing a romantic and/or sexual interest in men.
Scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote and revised the sonnets during the 1590s and early 1600s. They were first printed in 1609 in a quarto volume – Shakes-Speares Sonnets – containing a sequence of 154 sonnets concluded by a longer poem, A Lover’s Complaint. Although scholars in the past have taken a different view, it is now generally believed that Shakes-Speares Sonnets was published with the consent of the author and with the poems in their proper order, but that the manuscript/s used to set the printed text may not have been authorial or definitive, or may have been difficult to work from.