How many lines in a sonnet
(Sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The first 126 are addressed to a young man the last 28 are either addressed to, or refer to, a woman. The sonnets cover such themes as the passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty and mortality.
There is evidence in a note on the title page of one of the extant copies that the great Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn bought a copy in June 1609 for one shilling. Thirteen copies of the quarto have survived in fairly good shape from the 1609 edition, which is the only edition there were no other printings. It contains 154 sonnets, which are followed by the long poem " A Lover's Complaint". The primary source of Shakespeare’s sonnets is a quarto published in 1609 titled Shake-speare’s Sonnets. Shakespeare explores themes such as lust, homoeroticism, misogyny, infidelity, and acrimony in ways that may challenge, but which also open new terrain for the sonnet form. He also introduces the Dark Lady, who is no goddess. Instead of expressing worshipful love for an almost goddess-like yet unobtainable female love-object, as Petrarch, Dante, and Philip Sidney had done, Shakespeare introduces a young man. But Shakespeare’s sonnets introduce such significant departures of content that they seem to be rebelling against well-worn 200-year-old traditions. With few exceptions, Shakespeare’s sonnets observe the stylistic form of the English sonnet-the rhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and the metre. Shakespeare’s sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept through the Renaissance from Petrarch in 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-century England by Thomas Wyatt and was given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains by Henry Howard.