H2 Now put all 3 points together to create your sonnet!Īll you have to do now is put the three things together – your idea, your rhyming words and your iambic pentameter.Įxamine the following sonnet, number 73, a Shakespeare reflection on being old, and see how it fulfills all the requirements of a Shakespearean sonnet. And the sonnets unfold in everyday language too, except that, unlike the blank verse of the plays, the sonnets are strictly rhymed. It’s by using that basic scheme and playing around with it a bit for special effects that Shakespeare manages to make the characters in his plays speak in everyday language. For example, “I love the way the sunlight falls on flowers,” or “If you won’t go then don’t ask me to go,” or “To bake this cake you need a charcoal stove.” Try it. You can very easily talk in iambic pentameter yourself, and you often do without knowing it, as our everyday speech falls naturally into that rhythmic pattern. Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter because it closely resembles the rhythm of everyday speech and he wants to imitate everyday speech in his plays. And they are all an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. Here is one example: ‘But screw your courage to the sticking post’ (Lady Macbeth) Read it like this: /but screw/ your cour/age to /the stick/ing post/ Count the feet – there are five. Source:Iambic pentametre is characteristic for Shakespeare’s works, not only sonnets, but other genres as well. The pattern of the word stresses should be in iambic pentameter So your rhyme pattern for the sonnet will be abab/cdcd/efef/gg The Shakespearean sonnet concludes with a couplet. That will be gg, for example, Spain and rain. You have two more lines to go so you will have to write a couplet, which is two rhyming lines, using words that you haven’t used as your rhymes in the quatrains. That adds up to twelve lines, arranged in three quatrains. The second quatrain’s rhyme scheme will be cdcd and the third will be efef. The second and third quatrains will be the same but with different rhyming words, of course. They must follow this rhyme scheme: abab, for example, breath, life, death, wife. The sets of four lines is obligatory, known as quatrains. It could be about meeting someone or an incident, or an observation about one of life’s many aspects, but you must not diverge from whatever it is you choose as your idea. It could be about an area that interests you, like music, a film, sport. It could be a feeling, like falling in love or grieving the death of a loved one. It has to be a single idea, with no distractions.
Your sonnet has to be about something so you need an idea. Source:Roll up your sleeves, then, and let’s get down to writing your Shakespearean sonnet.
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