William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) wrote many works. His top dramatic works are: Romeo and Juliet (1595), Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604) etc. Two years after the edition of the Sonnets we can see his anger in an epilogue from The Tempest (1611):
Now my charms are all o´erthrown,
And what strength I have´s mine own,
Which is most faint… .
Odvrhol som všetky taje,
Mám len vlastnú silu – tá je
Stokrát slabšia…
But when "his own strength", of which fruit are Sonnets, is hundred times weaker than the poetic fantasy, from which originated plays, it was gigantic power.
Ján Vilikovský wrote: "The poetic grandeur of Shakespeare is coming from that he can interpose us his experience with irresistible insistency and with conviction."
Shakespeare´s Sonnets were published without the author´s consent in 1609. Theye were written probably between 1594 and 1602. Their secret is still unsolved in spite of tremendous efforts of acute and erudite criticism. It is still uncertain whether they should be regarded as a poetical record of Shakespeare´s actual experience, or as his tribute to the prevailing fashion of sonnet-writing. There are 154 Shakespeare´s sonnets. Though, however, we may never know who Shakespeare´s mistress, the mysterious "dark Lady", that is mentioned in the second part of the sonnets, or his young and noble patron and friend, to whom are devoted the first 126 sonnets, or his rival poet, were, the intrinsic beauty of these lyrical effusions of the great dramatist is unsurpassed and eternal. From every sonnet is trickling some poetic sap – every sonnet shows that it is written from something that happened at first in the poet´s opulent life. Their form is that of the majority of Elizabethan sonnets, namely 14 lines arranged in three quatrains and one couplet which rounds up the theme or the principal idea. The form is less expert than the Petrarchan sonnet, but its looseness is redeemed by the infinite care with which Shakespeare caresses words and sounds.
Shakespeare´s sonnets "are talking with each other", once they are envolving, on the other side they are contradicting each other. The dominant theme of the whole cycle is the relationship me and you - and the rhyme me/thee.