Shakespeare’s Sonnet Generator

About Shakespeare’s Sonnet Generator

Shakespeare’s Sonnet Generator takes up where the Bard of Avon left off. Using 70 of his lines, our website can generate any of 61 036 015 625 new sonnets. Writing the software was easy, but selecting the lines was a balancing act between rhyme and reason. Out of Shakespeare’s original 2 156 lines, we picked fourteen sets of five rhyming lines.

Our implementation is based on the Shakespearean Telesonnet Program described by Dave Morice in the November 1991 issue of Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet Generator is the only one on the Web that produces poetry from Shakespeare’s original sonnets with the correct rhythm and rhyme scheme. It uses only lines from Shakespeare, and all the lines fit together grammatically.

There are other kinds of sonnets, but Shakespeare’s are the best-known throughout the world. A Shakespearean sonnet is fourteen lines long and has an iambic pentameter rhythm throughout. The lines rhyme in the pattern ABABCDCDEFEFGG.