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