You Deserve The Best In Life

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are as popular as misunderstood. Though they had been published in 1609, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, it was most likely a pirated edition, and they were never republished until the late 17th century, when a certain compiler issued a collection of wildly distorted Shakespearean poems. He felt it was possible even to cut two of three sonnets in pieces and merge them together. This led to many misconceptions about the nature of the Sonnets, which survived well into the 19th and 20th century even after the true texts had been discovered. One of those misconceptions is that all or most of the Sonnets are love poems addressed to a woman. This idea had infl uenced the Russian translations by Nicolas Gerbel and Samuel Marshak who made Shakespeare address a woman where in fact he addressed a man. Actually, only 26 out of 154 sonnets address a ‘Dark Lady’ whose identity is unknown. Two of the rest are purely allegorical, and 126 are dedicated to a ‘Fair Friend’ – a young m

The last quarter of the 16ft century saw an outburst of English drama whose true gem was indeed William Shakespeare (1564—1616). To the  reader, the coming of Shakespeare seems miraculous, if not mysterious. Given the fact that very little is known about his personality, some people doubt that he had ever written anything at all — there must have been some other author, they argue. In fact, Shakespeare's emergence was powerful, but in no way surprising. By the time he was born, England had a steady cultural basis for a new era in literature. In the early 16th century John Colett, an Oxford professor, introduced a new standard for school education, under which children of common people were taught Latin classical literature like Virgil and Cicero. The recently invented printing press allowed even poor people to have text-books. It was also throughout the 16th century that many pieces of ancient and contemporary foreign literature were translated into English and published in hundr