Shakespeare has written sonnets mostly on conventional topics such as love and beauty, time and mutability. He treats these themes in his own distinctive fashion like addressing the poem on love and praise on a young man rather than a maiden and by including the second subject of passion a woman not so attractive and with questionable virtue.
Critics have discussed Shakespeare’s paradoxical representation of love in the sonnets and that Shakespeare has also tried to immortalize the young man’s beauty by defying the destructive nature of time.
The nature of the relationship between the youth and the speaker is as important as the themes of friendship and betrayal of friendship which are critical issues.
The eroticism of the sonnets has elicited various responses. Some say that the two men had an asexual relationship whereas others say that they had a sexual relationship.
It is due to the slow involvement in the sonnets and the change in the emotions in the sonnets that one realizes that it is about the history of love which anyone might have known, mortal or immortal love that lovers at any time must have experienced or are still experiencing.
We should not forget that it is an unconventional love which was rare during the Elizabethan period than it is now. It is this unconditional love that forces us to question the meaning of the word love.
Since the lyrics are so intense, emotionally vivid and passionate that many readers and commentators assume that it must be autobiographical but there is no what degree Shakespeare’s personal experiences are reflected in his sonnets or if the evidence that it is so.
There has always been a lot of speculation on finding out the people on which the sonnets were based. The fact remains that no one knows to imagination and understanding of human heart and relationship.
Characters are solely imaginary and a product of Shakespeare’s observation, Shakespeare’s sonnets did not resemble anything that was written in the early 1600s. It was his choice to write on a young man than writing about a beautiful lady.