Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Published 1969 · 89,650 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is Shakespeare's Sonnets to read?
Shakespeare's Sonnets scores 73 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 82 out of 100
- Early modern English, with many words that have shifted meaning entirely.
- Sentence structure: 85 out of 100
- Compressed, inverted, heavily figured syntax within a fixed form.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Time, love and mortality handled at the highest level of abstraction.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Fourteen lines carrying an entire argument, over and over.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A speaker whose relationships to the young man and the dark lady are deliberately obscure.
- Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
- Nearly every line works figuratively.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- Sustained self-undercutting, especially in the later sonnets.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The sequence has no settled narrative and no ending.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- A sequence whose order and story have been argued over for four centuries.
How Shakespeare's Sonnets is regarded
Shakespeare's Sonnets holds a literary regard score of 97 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.