Real life anxiety is too overwhelming so as long as I’m awake at 2AM and unable to shut up my brain I’m choosing to be emo about Shakespeare sonnets instead

The general misconception by people who’ve never studied them is that they’re just this collection of really gorgeous love poems; which is totally understandable! If the only one you’ve ever heard is “summer’s day” or “let me not to the marriage of true minds” then it makes sense

that you would assume they’re all like that — heartfelt love poetry, all standalone poems that you could grab at random to declare your love in the most literary fashion

But they’re not.

They’re this continuous weaving narrative addressing a young man and a Dark Lady and they are rife with conflict and satire and heartbreak and philosophy and some of them are downright FOUL

They tell a hella fuckin queer story— the VERY earliest sonnets address a fair youth, urging him to marry and have kids, but it... very quickly transitions into the poet wooing the fair youth himself. The Dark Lady comes in later, frequently a source of strife

as whatever relationship she and the poet have seems to be on-again off-again. It dips between agonized and adoring and sometimes sexist, it is rocky and some of the sonnets are just as frequently accusatory as they are loving (as I said, some of them are FOUL)

How much of this was deliberately commissioned and how much was Shakespeare fucking off on his own to write, is a subject of debate. We can’t ever know how much of this reflected William-the-man’s actual experiences or feelings

But my god, my god— as much as people like to get excited these days about him writing King Lear in quarantine, it’s likely that what was helping to continue to pay Shakespeare’s bills during the plagues was poetry commissions—

—Venus & Adonis and Rape of Lucrece in 1593, the sonnets in the later years of his career.

And there is this thread of desperation about RUNNING OUT OF TIME, about the almost manic desire to try and grab onto something ephemeral and preserve it because time won’t stop MOVING and aging and dying and TAKING AWAY, and my god if that doesn’t hit home right now