Being written within the boundaries of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare's Sonnets naturally bore the main characteristics of the period. Still, they presented some new ideas. This collaboration between the traditional and the new proved to be a success, for later the Shakespearean sonnet became a pattern in English Literature. The Sonnets manifest the author's idea of love and shape up his object of love, which is very much influenced by Humanism and the 'courtly love' tradition.
Shakespeare's object of love is a very complicated one. At one hand the author rests upon the Petrarchan tradition, while on the other - he negates it. As a Petrarchan follower he enacts in his work the laws of "courtly love". According to these laws 'the poet is necessarily deep in love with a beautiful and disdainful lady' and in his poems he is supposed to present 'a catalogue of her physical beauties' [2]. The 'catalogue' should be filled with learnt by heart phrases, such as 'coral lips', 'pearly teeth', 'alabaster neck', and etc [2]. The strange thing is that 'the object of love needed not possess these qualities' [2].
But being a true and passionate sonneteer, Shakespeare managed to form in the reader's mind a much more realistic image of his object of love. That is so because he deliberately points out negative as well as positive features. He does not try and draw the images using, like he says, "false compare". Unlike Petrarch and his followers, he does not try to convince both the reader and his beloved, that the latter possesses what she obviously does not. The praises and comparisons Petrarch and his followers make are so exaggerated that they are, in fact, unthinkable.
Shakespeare's object of love would not be the same were it not for Humanism, the 'essence of the Renaissance' [3]. Humanism expressed 'a confidence in human ability to exercise control over nature' [3]. It made way for 'the new image of man', for his 'entirely different relating to nature, religion and human relationships' [3].
