Shakespeare’s sonnets are very different from Shakespeare’s plays, but they do contain 【A1】________ elements and an overall sense of story. Each of the poems 【A2】________  with a highly personal theme, and each can be 【A3】________  on its own or in relation to the poems around it. The sonnets have the feel of 【A4】________  poems, but we don’t know whether they deal with real events or not, because no one knows 【A5】________  about Shakespeare’s life to say whether or not they deal with real events and feelings, so we tend to refer to the voice of the sonnets as “the speaker”—as 【A6】________  he were a dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear. There are certainly a number of intriguing 【A7】________  throughout the poems. The first 126 of the sonnets seem to be 【A8】________  to an unnamed young nobleman, whom the speaker loves very much; the rest of the poems (except for the last two, which seem generally unconnected to the 【A9】________  of the sequence) seem to be addressed to a mysterious 【A10】________ , whom the speaker loves, hates, and lusts for simultaneously. The two addressees of the sonnets are usually 【A11】________  to as the “young man” and the “dark lady”; in summaries of individual poems, I have also called the young man the “beloved” and the dark lady the “lover,” especially in cases where their 【A12】________  can only be surmised. Within the two mini-sequences, there are a 【A13】________  of other discernible elements of “plot”: the speaker 【A14】________  the young man to have children; he is forced to 【A15】________  a separation from him; he competes with a 【A16】________  poet for the young man’s patronage and affection. At two points in the sequence, it seems that the young man and the 【A17】________  lady are actually lovers themselves—a state of affairs with which the speaker is none too 【A18】________ . But while these continuities give the poems a narrative flow and a helpful frame of reference, they have been frustratingly 【A19】________  for scholars and biographers to pin 【A20】________ . In Shakespeare’s life, who were the young man and the dark lady?

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