The Chandos portrait, attributed to John Taylor, c. 1600–1610. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing IV
William Shakespeare
1564–1616 · Playwright, poet, and sonneteer
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”
William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, is the most influential writer in the English language. Working in London’s booming theatre world as an actor, playwright, and shareholder, he wrote some three dozen plays — comedies, histories, and tragedies such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear — that remain performed and studied around the world.
He was also a master of the sonnet. His sequence of 154 sonnets, published in 1609, ranges across love, jealousy, time, and mortality. Sonnet 130, featured in this module, is his witty send-up of the clichés of love poetry — proof that even four centuries ago poets were tired of comparing their sweethearts to the sun and to roses.
His enormous vocabulary, his invented words and phrases, and his psychological depth have shaped literature and everyday English ever since.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing IV — Love and Anti-Romance →