In addition to being considered the greatest playwright of England, Shakespeare was also the greatest poet of his day. His sonnets, especially, form one of the most intriguing collections of poems from the Renaissance.
Like Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare's collection of 154 poems forms a sonnet cycle. Written in the early 1590's (but not published until 1609), Shakespeare's sonnets, like other cycles, concern love and focus on the attitudes and feelings of the speaker. However, Shakespeare's cycle is far different from Petrarch's or Sidney's poetry. Shakespeare creatively approached the cycle from a new and unusual perspective. Generally speaking, Shakespeare's Sonnets differ from the previous cycles in four distinct ways: