The Sonnets are undoubtedly some of Shakespeare's finest works, albeit much less studied. The sonnets give us a very private insight into the life of William Shakespeare. There is great mystery surrounding the sonnets, however. The sonnets are dedicated to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Master W.H." People do not know for certain whom this is. People also do not know the identity of other characters, such as the youth, the dark lady and the rival poet, namely. People often wonder whether the sonnets are a biography of Shakespeare. In William Wordsworth's sonnet Scorn not the Sonnet, he writes, "with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart". There is a definitely case to be made that they are representative of Shakespeare's life. To understand how the sonnets represent, Shakespeare's life, it is important to study who the book is dedicated to. One of the biggest debates over Shakespeare's sonnets is the identity of "Mr. W.H.". This debate has even been put into short story form when Oscar Wilde wrote "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." in 1889. Scholars have argued over the identity of the "onlie …show more content…
"to speculate about the anxieties and desires of readers in this way is already to move from Claudius’s reading to Hamlet’s, to see sonnets not as a window on the poet’s soul but as a play to catch the conscience of the reader, and perhaps to force the hatch and disclose of his or her ‘malefactions’. The impossibility of writing a life So what do we do when we write the lives of the sonnets? Strictly speaking, one can’t write a life. One writes a series of events embedded in a particular context, but the subjective experience this narrative may or may not convey to a reader has no determined relation to what it felt like to the person who lived the recounted events." (Grossman,