Despite being some of the most famous poetry ever written, very little is actually known about Shakespeares sonnets. We dont know for certain who any of them were addressed to, what exactly they were talking about, or why Shakespeare wrote them in the first place. We know that Shakespeare started writing poems when the London playhouses were closed due to the effects of Plague, so he might just have been messing about because he was bored. But some of them seem so personal and intense that they must have been written for a reason. The exact meaning behind them has been inspiring scholarly debates and mortarboard-slap fights for years. Most of the current debate centres around the male fair youth to whom over 100 are addressed. But there are hundreds of references, to women, men, and other writers, who are similarly unidentified. Scholars are reduced to finding thematic connections between the sonnets. But theres little evidence that any are deliberately connected, and their order in print appears to have been decided at random. Basically, the sonnets are just some words which sound nice. If anyone says they know anything beyond that, theyre probably lying.
