William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born in the English town of Stratford-on-Avon in the prosperous age of Queen Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan Age (1558-1603), considered one of the greatest periods in English history, flourished in many different areas. England not only became a leading naval, commercial, and economic force but also enjoyed an intense cultural and artistic renaissance,  supporting the production of authors such as Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, and the remarkable dramatist and poet William Shakespeare. Renaissance is characterized as a period that achieved an extraordinary level of production in architecture, philosophy, literature, painting, and arts in general, being constantly referred to as one of the periods that most contributed to the enrichment and development of humanity.  

Shakespeare, who was part of this important movement, has been regarded as one of the greatest authors of all times, sustaining a canonical status in the literary history. His literary production, which still remains magnificent and untouchable up to the present moment in spite of the dense, obscure, and sometimes archaic use of language structure, comprises an expansively famous and influential body of literature: 36 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 narrative poems.  

In 1593-94 a plague caused the closing of theaters in London. In those years, Shakespeare reduced the production of plays and converged to poetry, publishing two narrative poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”. Nevertheless, the circumstances about the production of his sonnets are not clear. Scholars do not exactly know how long before their unauthorized publication (1609) they were in fact written, if they were all written in the same period, or if the sequence in which they appeared was the same in which they were composed.  

The vivid and dramatically intense Shakespearean plays entertained the Elizabethan audience, whether in a tragic or in a comic way, with plots that covered different topics such as historical facts, wars, voyages, romance, family conflicts, internal problems, human psychology and so on. His sonnets, however, are more reflective and introspective, dealing with themes such as time, death, friendship, love, and the immortality of poetry. The most recurrent and analyzed theme, love, is present in Sonnet 116.

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This sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous ones, is about an ideal, enduring and everlasting love. It celebrates the marriage between people who are truly in love (“marriage of true minds” - line 1), praising a genuine love that overcomes impediments (“Let me not ... admit impediments” – lines 1 and 2) and is able to resist adversities and turbulent moments (“looks on tempests and is never shaken” – line 6). Some commentators, without any concrete basement, state that these impediments are an allusion to the obstacles imposed against homosexual marriages. Although no church of that time permitted people ...

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