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Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece were written with a view to selling them--they were written for the public market. They were dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton for whom you might say they were written. The dedication of the sonnets is to "Mr. W.H.", which might be the same guy or not. There are lots of opinions on this.

The sonnets are thought to have been written for various people, but there are two whose identities are deduced from the poems themselves--a "fair youth" and a "dark lady". Nobody knows who these might be, but they love to guess.

There is some slight circumstantial evidence that the Dark Lady was a Jewish Venetian musician whose married name was Lanier. If the Dark Lady is a real person, she seems to fit the descriptions in the sonnets.

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13y ago

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