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How to: Shakespearean Sonnets

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Welcome to "A Crash-Course in Shakespearean Sonnets!" Here you'll learn the basic techniques and the bare-minimums needed to create sonnets just like Shakespeare! You'll learn the rules he followed, as well as the rules he didn't follow (so you don't need to either!)

Let's get started:


                                              THE THREE RULES

                                         *** Division of Text ***
It’s really quite simple! Each Shakespearean Sonnets is divided into 4 main pieces, and each piece has a different purpose.

(1) The first four lines serve to introduce the problem the sonnet will attempt to solve.
(for example: trying to tell someone you love them)

(2) The second set of four lines serve to explore the problem being discussed
(for example: thinking about why you can’t say what you need to say)

(3) The third set of four lines offers a solution to the problem.
(for example: the person smiling at you gives you the courage to talk to them.)

(4) The last piece is the shortest, and only consists of two lines. These two lines offer a summary of the main idea of the sonnet.
(for example: Your smile is what gave me the courage to talk to you after so long being silent)

So it’s:
4 line intro to problem
4 line exploration of problem
4 line offer of a solution
2 line summary

For a total of 14 lines!

                                         *** Rhyme Scheme ***
Each 4-line chunk has the rhyme scheme "abab". The first and third lines rhyme, the second and fourth lines rhyme. The last piece with only two lines is called the “rhyming couplet”, and both of these lines rhyme.

Overall rhyme pattern: (same letters mean the lines rhyme)

A
B
A
B
C
D
C
D
E
F
E
F
G
G


                                        *** Iambic Pentameter ***
If writing a sonnet were as easy as rhyming words and having enough lines, it wouldn’t be considered an art. This last part is the trickiest part: each line follows perfect “iambic pentameter”. What this means is that each line has a certain “off-on” rhythm, repeated five times.

Take for example one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet lines:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

The emphasis always falls on every other syllable, five times:
shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Bold = emphasis
Italics = no emphasis

You might also see the emphasis markings written as:

“Shăll Í cŏmpáre thĕe tó ă súmmĕr’s dáy?”

(with the little u’s over the syllables to denote no emphasis and the accent marks [or dashes] over a syllable to denote an emphasized syllable. This is easier to use if you’re hand-writing the emphasis marks.)

Every line, for every part of the sonnet, has this same rhythm. You have to be careful: letting the emphasis fall on the wrong part of the word will make the word sound weird.

For example: summer vs. summer
Or: within vs. within

Try reading them aloud. The first one is correct and the second one is all messed up.


But wait? Didn't I say there were rules you could ignore? YES!


                                      THE THREE NON-RULES

(1) Shakespeare made up words. He added hundreds of words that had never been heard of before (or at least not written down). They were words like: lackluster, weird, puking, blush, fardels, alligator, foisons, assassin, generous, and useless. There are hundreds more! So you if you can't think of a word to rhyme with "orange", make one up. Shakespeare would have.

(2) The Grammar rules in Shakespeare's day were... lax at best, but non-existant most of the time. That means the order of his sentences sometimes looks a bit... off to us.

                          Instead of: "She sat in the barge."
                          He wrote: "The barge she sat in."
     (from a description he wrote of Queen Elizabeth, sailing on the river Thames.)

                You too can feel free to stray from the normal "subject verb object"
                order your teachers worked so hard to teach you in your early years.
                As long as it makes sense, go for it!

(3) Jazz up those descriptions and whip out those creative skills! Why be normal when you can be fun? Shakespeare didn't just write the most obvious, predictable descriptions... he got creative and made things more exciting!

             Instead of: "She is really fat."
             He wrote: "She is spherical, like a globe! I could find out countries in her!"
                   (from "The Comedy of Errors")



Use these rules (or non-rules too, if you would like) and try writing some of your own Shakespearean-form sonnets. You’re ready! Good luck!
This was written mostly for fun... I tried my hand at writing a few sonnets in this form and you can see them through the links provided below. I wanted other people to be able to do the same.

These rules are not set in stone. This is surely not the "one and only way" to write a sonnet. There are plenty of other types of sonnets, many of which nowhere near resemble a Shakespearean Sonnet.

The information provided here has been gathered from numerous years of working with Shakespearean text, and one or two things I may have picked up in English class along the way. You may have learned a different way of interpretting the sonnets, but this was the way I learned.

If you'd like to see some examples of the sonnets that I've written you can check them out here (they aren't perfect, but they can help you visualize what I meant here in this tutorial):
[link]
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Kumi-Yumi's avatar
Very helpful, thank you C: