This article is about the style of sonnet. For the actual sonnets written by Shakespeare, see Shakespeare's sonnets

The Shakespearean sonnet, also called the Elizabethan or English sonnet, comprises three quatrains and a final couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. Often, the beginning of the third quatrain marks the "turn", or the line in which the poem's mood shifts and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany.

It was derived from the older Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, created early examples in the 16th century, but the form is strongly associated with William Shakespeare because of his authorship of a famed collection published in 1609 (see Shakespeare's sonnets).

This example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, illustrates the form:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

See also

• Spenserian sonnet
• Shakespeare's sonnets

William Shakespeare | Poetic form