Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
The first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man (a.k.a. the Fair Youth), who is a sort of a recurring "character" in the sonnet sequence. (Source.)
Although you wouldn't know it from reading Sonnet 29 on its own, the speaker of the Sonnets is a poet, just like Shakespeare. (Source)
Shakespeare inserted sonnets into plays like Romeo and Juliet, where a couple of star-crossed lovers have a conversation that just so happens to form a perfect Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnet. (Source.)
To celebrate the 2012 Olympics and the Queen's Jubilee, a group of artists set Shakespeare's sonnets to pop music and even used classic Elizabethan instruments to get the job done. Cool. (Source)
In American author Tobias Wolff's novel Old School (2003),one of the chapters is titled "When in Disgrace with Fortune." Yep, that's from the first line of Sonnet 29. (Source)
There's a shout-out to Sonnet 29 in poet T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" (1930): "Because I do not hope to turn/ Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope/ I no longer strive to strive towards such things." (Source)
Emily Brontë's ode "To Imagination" reworks Shakespeare's Sonnet 27 and Sonnet 29. (Source)