How did Shakespeare use rhyme in his sonnets?

The answer extended far beyond the original question. Most of Shakespeare's extant written work is written as verse, rather than prose form. He has very few short patches of true prose in his plays. He wrote most of the plays in blank verse - no rhymes. Short sections in some plays use rhymes. read more

Even before Shakespeare's death in 1616 the sonnet was no longer fashionable, and for two hundred years after his death, there was little interest in either Shakespeare's sonnets, or in the sonnet form itself. read more

Many of his sonnets in the sequence, for instance, impose the thematic pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet onto the formal pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, so that while there are still three quatrains and a couplet, the first two quatrains might ask a single question, which the third quatrain and the couplet will answer. read more