the glutton who, in epigram, eats the world's due". Context Shakespeare's sonnets do not exactly follow the sonnet form established by the Italian poet Petrarch. According to Robert Matz, "Shakespeare transforms the sonnet convention". Shakespeare brings in topics and themes that were unusual at the time. Shakespeare's audience would have interpreted such an aggressive tone as entirely improper encouragement of procreation. In fact, the other sonnets of the time revered chastity. However, Shakespeare "does not engage in stock exaltation of the chastity of the beloved, but instead accuses the young man of gluttonous self-consumption in his refusal to produce a 'tender heir' who would continue his beauty beyond the inexorable decay of aging". Sonnets are often about romantic love between the speaker and the beloved but Shakespeare does not do this. Instead, Shakespeare urges the young man to have sex and procreate with a woman in marriage. Context for Sonnet 1 This sonnet is the first one of the collection of sonnets published in the 1609 quarto. According to Helen Vendler, this sonnet can be “as an index to the rest of the sonnets", mainly because it brings "into play such a plethora of conceptual material; it seems a self-conscious groundwork laid for the rest". Vendler says that because of the "sheer abundance of values, images, and concepts important in the sequence which are called into play" and "the number of significant words brought to our attention" in this sonnet, that it may have been composed late in the writing process, and then placed first "as a 'preface' to the others". Philip Martin says that Sonnet 1 is important to the rest because it "states the themes for the sonnets immediately following and also for the sequence at large". To him, the themes are announced in this sonnet and the later ones develop those themes. Joseph Pequigney says that Sonnet 1 may be "a befitting way to begin the least conventional of Renaissance love-sonnet sequences". It provides a "production of metaphorical motifs that will recur in the upcoming sonnets, particularly in the next fourteen or so; it gives the concepts of beauty and time and their interrelationship, as also the emblem of the rose, all of which carry the weight in the other sonnets; and it shows the theme of reproduction, to be taken up in all except one of the sixteen ensuing poems". Donald A. Stauffer says that the