Sonnet LXXXIX and Gaudy Night

William Shakespeare is regarded as the most popular playwright and poet of all time. Born in 1564, he gained notoriety during the Elizabethan Era in England with a vast array of plays including Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. He also compiled huge collections of sonnets; fourteen-line poems with rhyming patterns which poets would study for centuries after his death. His impact on the literary world only grows stronger as time goes on. Students and …

…to the entire collection of sonnets and his entire library. Sayers uses a portion of a sonnet that is related to a group of 126 individual sonnets, which together form a story of a poet's love for a youth. The power of love is a common theme in these sonnets and also some of Shakespeare's other work, such as Romeo and Juliet, in which two people loved each other so passionately they died for each other.