Characters in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

What Is A Sonnet?

Para1 Sonnet is a poetic form commonly used for love poems, starting in 13th century Italy with the poems of Petrarch. Sonnets are always 14 lines long and are formed in various patterns of rhyme and meter, usually composed in iambic pentameter with one stanza of eight lines called an octave and another one of six called a sestet. Petrarch’s poems feature a fascination with contrasts and paradoxes and a speaker suffering from unrequited love for a distant beloved, a pattern which reappears in many English sonnets of the early modern period.
Para2Sir Thomas Wyatt adapted the sonnet into English in the 1520s. The form reached peak popularity in the 1590s, when scholars presume Shakespeare composed his set of 154 poems, which were not published until 1609. The Elizabethan sonnet also uses iambic pentameter, but usually features three sets of four lines called quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet of two lines.

Characters in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Para3Just as Shakespeare created characters for his plays, he also did so in his sonnets. It remains tempting to read these intensely intimate poems as biographical, however no clear evidence exists to support this interpretation. Much about Shakespeare’s sonnets, from the precise time they were composed to the subject of the dedication to the identity of the characters, has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate.

Character: The Poet

Para4However personal some of the sonnets seem, Shakespeare creates a speaker for them, a poetic persona. The “I”of the poems is older than the Young Man. He loves the Young Man, but there is a quarrel (see sonnets 33-35) and at times the Poet despairs of the Young Man’s love (see sonnets 94, 67, 69). The poet is both attracted and repelled by another character, the Dark Lady.


Para5Many of the sonnets become meditations on the Poet’s fascination with the destruction of beauty and the passage of time (see Sonnet 65, also 5, 7, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 60, 63-65, 73, 100, 115-116, 123, 126). In one of the most famous of those on the passage of time, the Poet speaks as one on the very brink of death:
That time of year thou may’st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold;

Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
(Sonnet 73)

Characters: The Young Man

Para6The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are written to a Young Man. The first 20 urge him to marry, while later ones meditate on time, love, and beauty. The Young Man is a very dear friend of the Poet, and the Poet admires his beauty and urges him to have children. 
Later, the Young Man has an affair a woman whom scholars call the Dark Lady. Some sonnets describe the Poet’s feelings during their separation and the Young Man’s often irresponsible behavior.
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
(Sonnet 144; see also 40-42)
Para7Despite extensive efforts to identify the Young Man and what was Shakespeare’s personal relationship to him, no clear answers have been found. Some scholars suggest it was Henry Wriothesly, the Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare dedicated his narrative poems. Shakespeare’s Poet and Young Man operate within the accepted Renaissance tradition of male friendship, which was one that featured intense emotional bonds but was not necessarily sexual. Sonnet 20 indicates the relationship is not a physical one, although readers cannot escape the positive and negative passions in the friendship the poems portray. Many scholars have asserted that the sonnets are expressions of male-male love and desire, and so an extensive body of criticism exists that discusses this assertion.

The Dark Lady?

Para8Sonnets 33-35 and 40-42 introduce the Dark Lady, who appears again in 127-130 and 146-147. The Dark Lady becomes the object of desire and despair. Her dark hair and possibly dark eyes both attract and repel the Poet. The best known of these poems is Sonnet 130, which operates as a famous inversion of the Petrarchan concept of beauty. In one famous couplet, he comments that,
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright./Who art has black as hell, as dark as night.(Sonnet 147)
Para9As with the Young Man, the identity of the Dark Lady has inspired extensive speculation. The poet Aemilia Lanyer, a woman who was the mistress of Lord Henry Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who served as the patron of the playing company to which Shakespeare belonged and who may have had dark hair and eyes since her father was an Italian court musician, has been suggested as a potential candidate. No reliable evidence to confirm this theory exists, and Lanyer never mentions Shakespeare in her published book of poetry.

The Rival Poet

Para10A Rival Poet, with proud full sail of his great verse (Sonnet 86) competes for the attention of the Young Man (see sonnets 78-86). The poet envies the situation due to his worthier pen (Sonnet 79). Various candidates have been suggested, including published authors Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Samuel Daniel, John Lyly, and Michael Drayton. No conclusive evidence exists for any firm identification of who The Poet envied so much that it became subject matter for the sonnets. As with the rest of the characters in the sonnets, speculation based on hints and suggestion is all that remains for readers to consider.

Key Print Sources

A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by Michael Schoenfeldt. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 2007.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by Edmondson, Paul and Stanley Wells. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Simon and Schuster, 2006.
Smith, Bruce R.Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the History of Sexuality: A Reception History. In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 2005, pp. 4-26.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Bare, ruined choirs. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/youth/ruinedchoirs.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.
Best, Michael. The plot thickens. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/youth/sonnets.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.
Best, Michael. The Sonnets: the cast of characters. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/youth/sonnets2.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Characters in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
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Utah Valley University
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