mercalia wrote:well Will didnt write to be read but to be seen and heard on a stage by everyone, who understood his language? So I suspect he might be amused he is now Great Literature. He was the contemporary equivalent of the cinema, out to make a hit to earn his keep at the box office?
He wrote sonnets too.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)
William Shakespeare - 1564-1616
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
If you read the last two lines it's clear he expected them to be read.
The novel had not yet reached England, it had only just been developed by Cervantes.
Shakespeare wrote two longer narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece also to be read.