The Shakespearean Sonnet

The Shakespearean sonnet is William Shakespeare's version of the English sonnet. It typically conforms to the general rules of the English sonnet, showing generally few metrical and volta-related variations. When it does vary metrically, it's typically with trochaic substitutions and just way, way more spondees than you want there to be.

Example:

Sonnet 14

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck; And yet methinks I have astronomy, But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality; Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell, Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind, Or say with princes if it shall go well, By oft predict that I in heaven find: But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, And, constant stars, in them I read such art As truth and beauty shall together thrive, If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert; Or else of thee this I prognosticate: Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

"Many of Shakespeare's sonnets preserve (except for rhyme) the two-part structure pf the Italian sonnet, in which the first eight lines are logically or metaphorically set against the last six. An octave-generalization will be followed by a particular sestet-application, an octave-question will be followed by a sestet-answer (or at least a quatrain-answer before a summarizing couplet" (Vendler 50).

"The Shakespearean sonnet...because of its four discrete parts, runs an inherently greater risk of disunity than does the Italian sonnet" (Vendler 80).

"Shakespeare is in the Sonnets an astonishingly nonclassical poet. The gods and goddess who populated many continental sonnets play almost no part in his sequence...The impression of naked and immediate speech conveyed by Shakespeare's sequence is due in great part to [this] absence" (Vendler, 198).