Take your pick of Shakespeare’s sonnets below, along with a modern English interpretation of each one to aid your understanding. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets published in his ‘quarto’ in 1609, …

The Shakespearean sonnet expresses a single idea, but the division into three quatrains and one couplet allows the poet to switch the focus, dealing with a different aspect of the idea in each section.

All Shakespearean sonnets follow this 14 line pattern and rhyming structure. So, now you have the basics, here are the three simple steps to have you writing your own sonnet in no time:

Read Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ with an explanation and modern English translation, plus a video performance. The sonnet is possibly the most famous …

While Shakespeare was pursuing a successful career in acting, writing plays, promoting other playwrights, and managing theatres he was also writing sonnets. He wrote most of them as a young …

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, published in his ‘quarto’ in 1609. These covered eternal themes such as the passage of time, mortality, love, beauty, infidelity, and jealousy.

This rhythm was popularised by Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatised such as Shakespeare and John Donne, and is still used today by modern authors (read sonnet examples from other poets – some …

Read Shakespeare's sonnet 130 in modern English: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; coral is far more than her lips are. If snow is white, all I can say is that her breasts are a brownish grey colour.

Read Shakespeare's sonnet 29 in a modern English version: "How can I then return in happy plight, That am debarred the benefit of rest?

Read Shakespeare's sonnet 55 with a version in modern English: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments, Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;