Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What was Shakespeare's most famous poem?
Sonnet 18 is one of the best-known of the 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
In a 2007 monograph, "Shakespeare, "A Lover's Complaint," and John Davies of Hereford", Brian Vickers attributes to Davies the poem "A Lover's Complaint", which was published by Thomas Thorpe with "Shakespeare's Sonnets" in 1609. This attribution goes against scholarly consensus, and in particular studies by Kenneth Muir, Eliot Slater and MacDonald P. Jackson, but is based on both a detailed demonstration of the non-Shakespearean nature of the poem and a list of numerous verbal parallels—such as 'What brest so cold that is not warmed heare' and 'What heart's so cold that is not set on fire'—between the "Complaint" and the known works of Davies. On Vickers's attribution it was omitted from the 2007 "RSC Shakespeare Complete Works", a decision Jackson called a mistake in his "RES" review of Vickers's book, arguing, among other reservations, that "Evidence that, in poems undoubtedly his, Davies exhibits an intimacy with Shakespeare's works equal to that of the author of 'A Lover's Complaint' is very meagre."
In addition to plays, poems were published under Shakespeare's name. The collection published as "The Passionate Pilgrim" contains genuine poems by Shakespeare along with poems known to have been written by other authors, along with some of unknown authorship. Unattributed poems have also been assigned by some scholars to Shakespeare at various times. See below.
The couplet of Sonnet 116 Shakespeare went about explaining in the inverse. He says the opposite of what it would be natural to say about love. For instance, instead of writing something to the effect of 'I have written and men have loved', according to Nelson, Shakespeare chose to write, "I never writ, nor no man ever loved." Nelson argues that "The existence of the poem itself gives good evidence that the poet has written. It is harder to see, however, how the mere existence of the poem could show that men have loved. In part, whether men have loved depends upon just what love is…Since the poem is concerned with the nature of love, there is a sense in which what the poem says about love, if true, in part determines whether or not men have loved." Nelson quotes Ingram and Redpath who are in agreement with his statement when they paraphrase the couplet in an extended form: "If this is a judgment (or a heresy), and this can be proved against me, and by citing my own case in evidence, then I've never written anything, and no man's love has ever been real love."" Vendler states "Therefore, if he himself is in error on the subject of what true love is, then no man has ever loved; certainly the young man (it is implied) has not loved, if he has not loved after the steady fashion urged by the speaker, without alteration, removals, or impediments". Each of these authorities agree in the essence of the Sonnet and its portrayal of what love really is and what it can withstand, for example, the test of time and the fading of physical attraction of the object of our love. The couplet is, therefore, that men have indeed loved both in true and honest affection (this being the most important part of the argument) as well as falsely in the illusions of beauty before just as Shakespeare has written before this sonnet.
The Mary Cowper who was a member of the Shakespeare Ladies’ Club was the daughter of William Cowper, 1st Earl Cowper, and an elder cousin of the famous poet William Cowper. She married William de Grey, 1st Baron Walsingham in 1743. Mary Cowper recorded her involvement with the Shakespeare Ladies’ Club in a poem titled “On the Revival of Shakespear’s Plays by the Ladies in 1738,” which was preserved in the "Cowper Family Miscelany". The poem was reprinted in full in Michael Dobson's "The Making of the National Poet".
The spelling "Shakespeare" was vigorously defended by Isaac D'Israeli in his original letter to the "Gentleman's Magazine". Joseph Hunter also expressly stated it to be the most appropriate spelling. D'Israeli argued that the printed spellings of the poems would have been chosen by the author. He also insisted that the spelling represents the proper pronunciation, evidenced by puns on the words "shake" and "spear" in Shakespeare's contemporaries. Hunter also argued that the spelling should follow established pronunciation and pointed to the poems, stating that "we possess "printed evidence" tolerably uniform from the person himself" supporting "Shakespeare".
In 1869 "OZ" started publishing what turned out to be Nekrasov's most famous poem, "Who Is Happy in Russia?" (1863–1876). In 1873 a group of narodniks in Geneva printed the misleadingly titled, unauthorized "Collection of New Poems and Songs by Nekrasov", featuring all the protest poems banned in Russia, a clear sign of what an inspiration now the poet has become for the revolutionary underground.
During the 1990s, critics continued to praise the poem with many critics placing emphasis on what the Preface adds to the poem. David Perkins, in 1990, argued that "Coleridge's introductory note to "Kubla Khan" weaves together two myths with potent imaginative appeal. The myth of the lost poem tells how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and dispelled irrecoverably." Also in 1990, Thomas McFarland stated, "Judging by the number and variety of critical effort to interpret their meaning, there may be no more palpably symbolic poems in all of English literature than "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner"." In 1996, Rosemary Ashton claimed that the poem was "one of the most famous poems in the language" and claimed the Preface as "the most famous, but probably not the most accurate, preface in literary history." Richard Holmes, in 1998, declared the importance of the poem's Preface while describing the reception of the 1816 volume of poems: "However, no contemporary critic saw the larger possible significance of Coleridge's Preface to 'Kubla Khan', though it eventually became one of the most celebrated, and disputed, accounts of poetic composition ever written. Like the letter from the fictional 'friend' in the "Biographia", it brilliantly suggests how a compressed fragment came to represent a much larger (and even more mysterious) act of creation."
In addition to writing numerous poems, plays, and short stories, Choʻlpon translated the works of many famous foreign writers, such as Alexander Pushkin, Maxim Gorky, and William Shakespeare into the Uzbek language. In particular, he translated Shakespeare's "Hamlet" into Uzbek. He also translated "Boris Godunov" and "Dubrovsky" of Pushkin.
Shakespeare's primary source for "Henry V", as for most of his chronicle histories, was Raphael Holinshed's "Chronicles"; the publication of the second edition in 1587 provides a "terminus post quem" for the play. Edward Hall's "The Union of the Two Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York" appears also to have been consulted, and scholars have supposed that Shakespeare was familiar with Samuel Daniel's poem on the civil wars. An earlier play, the "Famous Victories of Henry V" is also generally believed to have been a model for the work.
The conventional nature of the poem, what Evelyn Simpson called its "frigid conceit," is perhaps a large part of the reason that this poem is not among the most famous of the sonnets today.
Sonnet 138 is one of the most famous of William Shakespeare's sonnets. Making use of frequent puns ("lie" and "lie" being the most obvious), it shows an understanding of the nature of truth and flattery in romantic relationships. The poem has also been argued to be biographical: many scholars have suggested Shakespeare used the poem to discuss his frustrating relationship with the Dark Lady, a frequent subject of many of the sonnets. (To note, the Dark Lady was definitely not Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.) The poem emphasizes the effects of age and the associated deterioration of beauty, and its effect on a sexual or romantic relationship.
Chapman was a prominent poet and translator of Homer. Scholars speculate that Shakespeare was familiar with his work, having read part of his translation of the "Iliad" for his own "Troilus and Cressida", a dramatic reworking of Chaucer's epic poem. Chapman wrote "Ovid's Banquet Of Sense", a metaphysical poem seen as a response to the erotic "Venus and Adonis," which incidentally features Shakespeare's most quoted poet, Ovid. In "Shakespeare and the Rival Poet", Acheson conjectures that Chapman's erotic poems were written with a view to gaining Southampton's patronage. The moral tone of "Ovid's Banquet of Sense" eschews the amatory tone of Shakespeare's, and seeks to instill spiritual seriousness in a work that takes the five senses as its Conceits. Chapman's patrons also moved in the same circles as Shakespeare's; thus Shakespeare may have felt insecure about the stability of his own income versus a talented rival. Chapman was both then and now regarded as being particularly erudite, whereas, as Ben Jonson writes, Shakespeare had "small Latine and lesse Greeke".
In Milton's case, there is an understandable difference in the way he matched his style to his subjects. For the ‘Nativity Ode’ and commendatory poem on Shakespeare he deployed Baroque conceits, while his two poems on the carrier Thomas Hobson were a succession of high-spirited paradoxes. What was then titled “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare” was included anonymously among the poems prefacing the second folio publication of Shakespeare's plays in 1632. The poems on Thomas Hobson were anthologised in collections titled "A Banquet of Jests" (1640, reprinted 1657) and "Wit Restor’d" (1685), bracketing both the 1645 and 1673 poetry collections published during Milton's lifetime.
In 2007, the New York Times surveyed 265 Shakespeare teachers on the topic. To the question "Do you think there is good reason to question whether William Shakespeare of Stratford is the principal author of the plays and poems in the canon?", 6% answered "yes" and an additional 11% responded "possible", and when asked if they "mention the Shakespeare authorship question in your Shakespeare classes?", 72% answered "yes". When asked what best described their opinion of the Shakespeare authorship question, 61% answered that it was a "A theory without convincing evidence" and 32% called the issue "A waste of time and classroom distraction".
The book opens with engraver William Marshall's portrait of Shakespeare — a reduced and reversed version of Martin Droeshout's engraving from the First Folio. This is followed by Benson's preface "to the Reader", commendatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, and then the poems themselves. The edition combined most of Shakespeare's sonnets (numbers 18, 19, 43, 56, 75, 76, and 126 are omitted), mingled with poems from "The Passionate Pilgrim" (the corrupt 1612 edition), plus "A Lover's Complaint", "The Phoenix and the Turtle", Milton's poem to Shakespeare from the Second Folio, poems by Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Robert Herrick and others, and miscellaneous pieces.
William Shakespeare made reference to Danish tribute in "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark", Act 3, scene 1 (King Claudius is talking of Prince Hamlet's insanity):
Danegeld is the subject of the poem "Dane-geld" by Rudyard Kipling, whose most famous lines are "once you have paid him the Danegeld/ You never get rid of the Dane." The poem ends thus:
Kipling's poem was set to music by filk musician Leslie Fish on her 1991 album, "The Undertaker's Horse".
Basse's most famous poem is his "enormously popular sixteen-line elegy on Shakespeare":
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of his plays. The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Jonson presciently hails Shakespeare in a now-famous quote as "not of an age, but for all time".
One of Okara's most famous poems is "Piano and Drums". Another popular poem, "You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed", is a frequent feature of anthologies. Okara is very concerned with what happens when the ancient culture of Africa is faced with modern Western culture, as in his poem "Once Upon a Time".
The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship contends that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. Though most literary scholars reject all alternative authorship candidates, including Oxford, popular interest in the Oxfordian theory continues. Since the 1920s, the Oxfordian theory has been the most popular alternative Shakespeare authorship theory.
John Taylor was the first poet to mention in print the deaths of Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in his 1620 book of poems "The Praise of Hemp-seed". Both had died four years earlier, less than two months apart. Ben Jonson wrote a short poem "To the Reader" commending the First Folio engraving of Shakespeare by Droeshout as a good likeness. Included in the prefatory commendatory verses was Jonson's lengthy eulogy "To the memory of my beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us" in which he identifies Shakespeare as a playwright, a poet, and an actor, and writes:
The most notable example of frequent and common instances of courtly love occurs in the writings of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote many sonnets to young men that he admired, praising their beauty, intelligence and virility. He addressed sonnets 1-126 to "Fair Youth"—an individual who is commonly interpreted to be male—and later, in Sonnet 20, refers to the boy as the "master-mistress of [his] passion." Additional examples of Shakespeare writing of same-sex intimacy and courtly love are within his procreation sonnets. In these poems, Shakespeare encourages a young man to marry and have children to preserve his beauty, using loving and occasionally romantic language to communicate his message. Additionally, it is believed by many scholars that Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") is also about a man, as he dedicated his book of sonnets to an unidentified "Mr. W.H."
Neville was kinsman to Leonard Digges whose poems preface both Shakespeare’s "First Folio" (1623) and Benson’s edition of "Shakespeare’s Sonnets" (1640). Digges's father was the famous astronomer Thomas Digges whose theory of "infinite space" endured until the 20th century and seems to be referred to in "Hamlet" (Act II Scene ii). Neville studied astronomy at Oxford.
It was, however, Sir Philip Sidney's sequence "Astrophel and Stella" (1591) that started the English vogue for sonnet sequences. The next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and many others. These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally treat of the poet's love for some woman, with the exception of Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets. The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he was the first to write in this form but because he became its most famous practitioner. The form consists of fourteen lines structured as three quatrains and a couplet. The third quatrain generally introduces an unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic "turn", the volta. In Shakespeare's sonnets, however, the volta usually comes in the couplet, and usually summarizes the theme of the poem or introduces a fresh new look at the theme. With only a rare exception (for example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 145 in iambic tetrameter), the meter is iambic pentameter.