Abstract
<p>Shakespeare’s sonnets are a summit in terms of their thematic profundity as well as their rhetorical beauty and emotional exquisiteness. This paper attempts to make an exploration of the thematic uniqueness of Shakespeare’s sonnets through analyzing the themes of time, beauty, and love in the cultural context of the Renaissance. These sonnets show that men should conquer time through offspring, poetry and true love to procure eternal beauty and life, and thus reflect Shakespeare’s humanistic consciousness and his philosophical thoughts.</p>
Highlights
Sonnet is “a lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in English” (Baldick, 2004, p. 207)
This paper attempts to make an exploration of the thematic uniqueness of Shakespeare’s sonnets through analyzing the themes of time, beauty, and love in the cultural context of the Renaissance. These sonnets show that men should conquer time through offspring, poetry and true love to procure eternal beauty and life, and reflect Shakespeare’s humanistic consciousness and his philosophical thoughts
Sonnet was introduced to England by Henry Howard & Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century
Summary
Sonnet is “a lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in English” (Baldick, 2004, p. 207). Over the two centuries, these sonnets were not duly appreciated in the literary arena due to their unconventionality They came to be eulogized by some romanticists as Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Goethe with the rise of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century and the early 19th century. It is from the end of the 19th century that Shakespeare’s sonnets have attracted extensive attention, and literary critics mainly concentrated on the complex feelings therein, diverse images, exquisite poetics, and some controversial issues as the archetype of the “dark lady”, the real identity of Mr W. These above interpretations inspire readers to gain new insights into the themes of Shakespeare’s sonnets Apart from these thematic studies, the prominent themes of time, beauty, and love have drawn constant attention of critics, but there’s still room for www.ccsenet.org/ells. Vol 6, No 2; 2016 rendering a more detailed and comprehensive interpretation based on textual reading and the historical context of the Renaissance
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