Shakespeare’s sonnets were published at a time when the genre was becoming somewhat unfashionable, in the late English Renaissance. Erin A. McCarthy, writing for the Folger Library’s Shakespeare Documented, elaborates on this: “The 1590s were the peak of the sonnet vogue in England: 20 first edition sonnet books appeared between 1590 and 1599. While some sonnet sequences were printed or reprinted during the seventeenth century, by 1609, the form was a bit dated.” Poets who took part in the English sonnet craze were Philip Sidney, whose sequence titled Astrophil and Stella was published in 1591, and Edmund Spenser, whose Amoretti was published in 1595. Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets appear in his play Romeo and Juliet, which was published in 1597, at the beginning of the end of the sonnet’s popularity in England.

Sonnets originally became popular in Italy in the 14th century. The English word “sonnet” comes from the Italian word sonetto, which means “little song.” Most scholars credit Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, with popularizing the sonnet form in the 1300s. Both the Italian and English forms contain 14 lines, but the

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