The first seventeen sonnets created by Shakespeare are dedicated to a beautiful man in whom Shakespeare himself tries to motivate and persuade to marry and have children. He puts the man in a narcissistic view, asking often why the man does not want to pass on his legacy of beauty. Why would he try to convince the young man to marry and bear children? Well it seems unlikely that Shakespeare would be homosexual, however he has implicated several homosexual tendencies. Not only were his first seventeen sonnets dedicated to a young man of incredible beauty, but several of the sonnets afterwards seem to refer back to the young man in subtle ways.
The young man in sonnets 1-17 is being urged to marry not because he has come of age, but because in Shakespeare’s eyes, his beauty should be destined to live on through his legacy such as stated in the quote, “Were it not for the speakers wish to incite the young man to marry he would scarcely continue to insist, when hearing music, on the conceit of ‘married sounds.” In Elizabethan times, when a young man is 17 he is at the ripe age to be wed, and naturally the sonnets begin in that fashion of motivation because of age, until, that is, Shakespeare begins to fall in love. Notably, the man mentioned in the middle series of his sonnets starting from 18, could possibly be this same young man he has idolized and begun to praise, but that is not verifiable as yet.