Textuality » 4A Interacting
After considering the resource I'm going to answer the question about the sonnet form. As for point one, the name sonnet recalls the sound level of the poem that is stricty connected to the domain of music.
The sonnet is strictly arranged into a fourteen line love poem which was created in Italy in the thirteen century and was imported into English culture by Sir Thomas Wyatt The Elder during King Henry VII reign. For this reason there are two different structures of the sonnet: the first one is the Italian ( the so-called Petrarchan ) and the second one is the English ( Shakespearean ).
The Italian form is characterised by a bipartite division into the octave and the sestet. The octave has a section of eight lines rhyming " abbaabba, The sestet has six lines rhyming "cdecde ", "cdcdcdc" or " "cdecde".
The English sonnet embodies four divisions: three quartains each one with a particoular rhyme-scheme and a rhymed coupled: "abab bcbc cdcd ee". The couplet provides an apigrammatic end
In the sonnet the message is generally about love and the exaltation of beauty and the attitude of the person the poet loves. The standart theme of the English sonnet was courtly love: the poet is in love with a lady he cannot reach. Shakespeare dodnìt want to follow the conventional theme and he talked about a young man who was beautiful and a woman called the dark lady who was not so good looking.
Shakespeare describes her physical apparence not in a typical manner, a romantic manner.