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The Characters "I
am sure I shall turn sonnet." At Queen Elizabeth's court in the late 1580s and 90s, it was all the rage for courtiers and poets to write sonnet sequences in the personae of lovesick narrators pining for their lady-loves. In some cases, these characters were fictional. In other cases, the characters were clearly modeled on real-life love-stories (almost always unrequited). Did Shakespeare model his poet-narrator, fair youth, and dark lady on real people? We don't know… The raw passion and coy teasing of the poems (along the puns on Will) make it easy to believe that the Narrator is Shakespeare himself, while that the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady are fictional masks for real people. It's quite possible, though, that all these figures - including the poet-narrator - are figments of Shakespeare's imagination. He was, after all, a master creator of character. |
