Textuality » 4A Interacting
The sonnet is a lyric form of poetry; it is composed of fourteen lines arranged into two stanzas following a rhyme scheme.
The name "sonnet" derives from the Occitan "sonet" and the Italian "sonetto". They both mean "little song". The sonnet was introduced during the Renaissance in Italy by Petrarch.
In England the sonnet arrived later than in Italy. It was introduced by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century, but his and his contemporaries sonnets were translations of Patriarch's sonnets until the Earl of Surrey, an English aristocratic, fixed the rules that characterize the sonnet form. So the two different types of sonnet are the Italian one and the English one. They differ as for the arrangement of lines into two stanzas.
The Italian sonnet is made up of an octave and a sestet; the English one is organized in three quatrains and a rhyming couplet (the first three quatrains have the function to present three different aspects of the same problem while the final couplet gives a possible solution in an epigrammatic style).
The main theme of the English sonnet is courteous love, that is love for an idealzed and inaccessible woman.
However William Shakespeare took distances from the idea of a love for a fair haired and perfect woman that elevated men to God, addressing his sonnets to the "dark lady": a woman seen in her concreteness, a woman that a man loves despite her imperfections.