Who or what is William Shakespeare's beloved in Sonnet 18?

Question

Who or what is William Shakespeare's beloved in Sonnet 18?

Answer 1

My lecturer said that the Sonnet 18 was made for a guy.. His not g*y but it just that the boy was so pretty that he just need to praise the beauty of the guy.. The sonnet was created so that the beauty will last as long as people read the sonnet

Answer 2

Canonically, the address of the first 126 sonnets is to a character often called the `Young Man,' and from 127 to 154 the addressee is considered to be the `Dark Lady.'  These can be thought of as two somewhat separate sonnet sequences.

If you read the sonnets from the beginning, the ones numbered 18 and 19 seem to be pivotal.  Before these, the tone has a studied formality and shocking uniformness of subject which, to me, makes them read like a commissioned work.  Beginning at 18-19 the poet instantly warms to his subject, and they become so personal the poet seems to be taking incredible rhetorical risks.  It is at this point also that the `plot' of the sonnets as chronicles of an evolving relationship, such as it is, begins.  As I read it, this relationship is almost certainly fictional, because the sonnets were quite clearly written in a span of a couple of years, and the sonnets describe a much longer relationship.  (One way you can tell the sonnets were written over a short span, from the pure textual evidence, is that Shakespeare cross-quotes extensively in plays which were presumably written at the same time: most notable is Love's Labour's Lost, written around 1594 if I remember correctly; another interesting fact about LLL is that it is the only play whose title is a complete sentence.)  I would not personally be totally sure that the sonnets are not actually three sequences, with the first one ending around 18.  But in any case, the Young Man is traditionally imputed to be the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, who was one of Shakespeare's patrons in the late 1580s and 1590s.

Answer 3

i've heard that he had an affair (lifelong) with a black woman.  he couldn't marry her because it was so unaccaepted during that time period so he glorified her in his writing.  

there are other examples but i don't remember specifically.  this is what i was taught in my college level english class, sp it's probably based on some truth.  

maybe this is where he got the idea for othello?

Answer 4

This isn't a very professional answer - sorry... But I keep hearing that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, not to a specific person, but as a test of his own skills. Of course he may of had someone in mind, but men back then often wrote in order to compare their skills. I've also heard men often wrote poetry for their friends, to help them out in their relationships. So Shakespeare could have written the sonnet for someone else's love interest.

Again, this is all that I've heard, and I can't give you a reliable source. =/

Answer 5

As the poster above me has mentioned, scholars generally attribute the first portion of Shakespeare's sonnet collection to a male patron. However, I think the best way to approach your question is to look simply at the evidence within the text. The beloved is clearly a young person who is very beautiful in the eyes of the speaker. To the speaker, the beloved will always remain young and beautiful, immortalized within the speaker's own writing.

It's possible that this is based on Shakespeare's relationship with a real person, but it is just as likely that both the speaker and the beloved are imaginary characters in the mind of a great dramatist. It's dangerous, and usually false, to assume that the speaker of the poem is intended to represent the poet himself (or herself).