They do not follow the traditional structure called Petrarchan or Italian sonnet (two quatrains and three tercets) so popular at that time. They follow the Elizabethan structure: three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, later called Shakespearean Sonnet. This form was extremely suitable to give dramatic shape to a syllogism: a premise, a second premise, a conclusion and an ironic or simply concluding couplet.

Sonnet sequences were very popular in the Elizabethan Age and they dealt with love and religious subjects. Shakespeare’s collection has no precise narrative or sequential ordering.

The first group of sonnets (from I to CXXVI) is dedicated to a “Fair Youth”, probably the Earl of Southampton or the Earl of Pembroke who were both his friends and patrons. The sonnets of the second group are addressed to a mysterious “Dark lady”, a lady whom the poet loved at first with passionate devotion, realizing later that she had only taken a brief fancy to him.

The collection deals with disparate themes: marriage and procreation, beauty and narcissism, time and art’s ability to confer immortality. These themes are often presented in a dramatic way, thus revealing that they were the product of a dramatist.. more than grand statements and certainties, they express “possibilities”, human weaknesses, the glorification of human beauty in spite of its transience.