THE SONNETS by William Shakespeare - FULL AudioBook | Greatest AudioBooks

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THE SONNETS by William Shakespeare - FULL AudioBook | Greatest AudioBooks - Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The quarto ends with "A Lover's Complaint", a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal. *For FREE SPECIAL AUDIOBOOK OFFERS & MORE:* http://www.GreatestAudioBooks.com More on The Sonnets by William Shakespeare: The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid. The sonnets are almost all constructed from three quatrains, which are four-line stanzas, and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter.[19] This is also the meter used extensively in Shakespeare's plays. The rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. Sonnets using this scheme are known as Shakespearean sonnets. Often, the beginning of the third quatrain marks the volta ("turn"), or the line in which the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany. There are a few exceptions: Sonnets 99, 126, and 145. Number 99 has fifteen lines. Number 126 consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked with italic brackets; 145 is in iambic tetrameters, not pentameters. There is one other variation on the standard structure, found for example in sonnet 29. The normal rhyme scheme is changed by repeating the b of quatrain one in quatrain three, where the f should be. Shakespeare's sonnets can be seen as a prototype, or even the beginning, of a new kind of "modern" love poetry. During the eighteenth century, the sonnets' reputation in England was relatively low; as late as 1805, The Critical Review could still credit John Milton with the perfection of the English sonnet. As part of the renewed interest in Shakespeare's original work that accompanied Romanticism, the sonnets rose steadily in reputation during the nineteenth century. The sonnets have great cross-cultural importance and influence. There is no major written language into which the sonnets have not been translated. (Summary adapted by Wikipedia.org - Attribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shakespeare%27s_sonnets&action;=history) - SUBSCRIBE to Greatest Audio Books: http://www.youtube.com/GreatestAudioBooks - Become a FRIEND: http://www.Facebook.com/GreatestAudioBooks - BUY T-SHIRTS & MORE: http://bit.ly/1akteBP - Visit our WEBSITE: http://www.GreatestAudioBooks.com - READ along by clicking (CC) for Closed Caption Transcript! - LISTEN to the entire audiobook for free! Chapter listing and length: 01 Sonnets 1-10 00:08:59 02 Sonnets 11-20 00:09:06 03 Sonnets 21-30 00:08:52 04 Sonnets 31-40 00:09:29 05 Sonnets 41-50 00:09:14 06 Sonnets 51-60 00:08:47 07 Sonnets 61-70 00:08:46 08 Sonnets 71-80 00:08:53 09 Sonnets 81-90 00:09:20 10 Sonnets 91-100 00:09:35 11 Sonnets 101-110 00:09:08 12 Sonnets 111-120 00:09:07 13 Sonnets 121-130 00:09:10 14 Sonnets 131-140 00:09:14 15 Sonnets 141-154 00:12:27 #audiobook #audiobooks #freeaudiobooks #greatestaudiobooks #book #books #free #top #best #shakespeare #williamshakespeare #sonnets This video: Copyright 2014. Greatest Audio Books. All Rights Reserved. Audio content is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit librivox.org.