This Month's Sonnets Feature >>

The complications of rival lovers and of time in several of the sonnets of the 18 to 77 number range yield to another concern in Sonnets 78 through 86. In this sub-group, the poet waxes jealous over his speculation that his beloved young man has found another poet (a George Chapman, for example) to render his beauty into words for the ages. Literary historians have interpreted this group of sonnets to be an expression of the poet's (i.e., Shakespeare's) disturbance at a shift in the largesse of one of his patrons toward another writer. Another theme with an autobiographical resonance surfaces in Sonnets 110, 111, and 112. In these three poems, the speaker speaks of his worry that the young man has turned from him because of public display, the poet allowing that he has gone to the theater, appeared as a "motley" on the stage, and this "sold cheap" to the theater-going masses that which is "most dear."