If you have already had the good fortune of encountering “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare, you were probably at a wedding. It is not, by most accounts, a sexy poem. It is not exactly a ...

A forgotten copy of Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 116 was found tucked away in a 17th-century manuscript in the Oxford Library. It was hidden among the papers of Elias Ashmole, founder of the ...

In his plays, Shakespeare created complex characters navigating universal issues. He additionally invented the Shakespearean sonnet, a 14-line classic poem form with a set structure and rhyme pattern.

The chaos of this period is reflected in Ashmole’s collection, which, along with the song version of Sonnet 116, includes Royalist poetry and banned Christmas carols.

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 remains one of the best-known poems on love in the English language, its steely reverence for marital commitment long making it a wedding favorite.