The Shakespearean, or English, sonnet restructures the fourteen lines into three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, trading the Petrarchan octave's tightly repeated rhymes for a scheme better suited to English, a language poorer in rhyme than Italian. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, developed this structure from Sir Thomas Wyatt's earlier English adaptations of Petrarch, and William Shakespeare, though not its originator, used it so extensively and so influentially across his 154 sonnets that the form carries his name. Rather than the Petrarchan volta at the octave-sestet break, the English form typically saves its turn for the final couplet, giving the poem three quatrains to build a subject before two lines resolve it.
Facts
Place of OriginEngland, in the late 16th century; the form was given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, after Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet tradition from Petrarch's 14th-century Italy. 1 StructureThree quatrains followed by a closing couplet, fourteen lines total in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. 1 Notable ExampleShakespeare's own 154 sonnets, first published together in the 1609 quarto Shake-speare's Sonnets. 1 Connections
Associated With
Surrey devised the three-quatrain-and-couplet structure, later used so extensively by Shakespeare that the form now carries his name rather than Surrey's.
Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Source Poetry Foundation
Held Differently
The Sonnet, Forms A structural variant adapting the Petrarchan original to English's comparative scarcity of rhyme, not a rejection of the sonnet form; developed by Surrey from Wyatt's earlier translations before Shakespeare's own use made the name stick.
Source Poetry Foundation
Form Of Genre
Influenced
Sources
1. Shakespearean Sonnet (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Form and structure of the sonnets
The sonnets are almost all constructed using three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet. The sonnets are composed in iambic pentameter, the metre used in Shakespeare's plays.
Form and structure of the sonnets, rhyme scheme
The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Sonnets using this scheme are known as Shakespearean sonnets, or English sonnets, or Elizabethan sonnets.
Context section
Shakespeare's sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept through the Renaissance from Petrarch in 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-century England by Thomas Wyatt and was given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains by Henry Howard.
The quarto of 1609 section
The primary source of Shakespeare's sonnets is a quarto published in 1609 titled Shake-speare's Sonnets. It contains 154 sonnets, which are followed by the long poem "A Lover's Complaint".
View the Source Poetry Foundation
Poetry Foundationeducation/glossary/shakespearean-sonnet
This different sonnet structure allows for more space to be devoted to the buildup of a subject or problem than the Italian/Petrarchan form, and is followed by just two lines to conclude or resolve the poem in a rhyming couplet.
- Associated With: William Shakespeare
- Associated With: The Sonnet
View the Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University PressAssociated With: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
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