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Sonnet 66 Is One of 154 Sonnets Written by The English Playwright and Poet William Shakespeare
Sonnet 66 Is One of 154 Sonnets Written by The English Playwright and Poet William Shakespeare
Sonnet 66 Is One of 154 Sonnets Written by The English Playwright and Poet William Shakespeare
It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young
man.
Sonnet 66 is a world-weary, desperate list of grievances of the state of the poet's society. The
speaker criticizes three things: general unfairness of life, societal immorality, and oppressive
government. Lines 2 and 3 illustrate the economic unfairness caused by one's station or nobility:
Lines 4-7 portray disgraced trust and loyalty, unfairly given authority, as by an unworthy king
"Gilded honour shamefully misplaced", and female innocence corrupted "Maiden virtue rudely
strumpeted". Lines 8, 10, and 12, as in lines 2 and 3, characterize reversals of what one deserves,
and what one actually receives in life.
As opposed to most of his sonnets, which have a "turn" in mood or thought at line 9, (the beginning
of the third quatrain (See: Sonnets 29, 18) the mood of Sonnet 66 does not change until the last line,
when the speaker declares that the only thing keeping him alive is his lover. This stresses the fact
that his lover is helping him merely survive, whereas sonnets 29 and 30 are much more positive and
have 6 lines in which they affirm that the lover is the fulfillment of the poet's life.