The sonnets are either the most amazing work of imaginative fiction, or else the most breathtaking and intimate confessions penned by any writer, including St Augustine. And if they are the latter, would a man as sensitive to his honour and respectability as Shakespeare publish them for all the world to read?

Of all Shakespeare’s work, I find the sonnets the most baffling. Not the poems themselves, for each one is a gem, a miniature play, exquisitely wrought, full of life and passion. No, the baffling bit is the simple question: ‘Is the story they tell a fiction or are the poems autobiographical?’ Scholars have debated the question back and forth for the last hundred years.

First, the story they tell: the poet seems to have been commissioned to write a series of sonnets to a young man, urging him to marry. The poet does so, but falls in love with the young man’s beauty and personal attributes. The ensuing sequence enables him to express the full gamut of a lover’s emotions: ecstasy, longing, jealousy, anger, despair, forgiveness. Then the poet feels threatened by the arrival on the scene of a rival poet seeking the young man’s attention—but this threat is short-lived.

Next, the poet becomes sexually involved with a mistress—the so-called Dark Lady—with whom he has a stormy relationship, particularly when she becomes entangled with the young man. This sequence allows the poet to castigate the woman and eventually forgive the boy.

Interspersed in this fractured narrative are reflections on time, the corrosive force of lust and the beauty of marriage. The tone swings from lyrical to bawdy, from irony to revulsion to resignation.

Read as a sequence, the sonnets seem overwhelmingly personal and revelatory—a lover’s diary. And there’s the rub: are they any such thing, or are they purely a literary exercise, a fictitious drama in sonnet form, or, a third possibility, are they a fictitious drama, but informed (as so much great drama is) by personal experience?

Let’s first examine the theory that the poems are addressed to and about real people. Who are they?

The main contenders for the ‘lovely boy’ are Henry Wroithsley, Earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, depending on how you date the composition of the sonnets. Southampton has long been the favourite, as he was Shakespeare’s first patron and dedicatee of two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He was renowned for his almost feminine physical beauty, and a miniature painted by Nicholas Hilliard when the boy was twenty years old shows him with long auburn tresses draped over one shoulder. Scion of a great Catholic family, he was a ward of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s treasurer and the most powerful man in England. Burghley had the authority to negotiate his ward’s marriage and took the unscrupulous step of engaging the boy to his granddaughter on forfeit of a staggering five thousand pounds. Wroithsley resisted the marriage and it’s here that Shakespeare’s services were allegedly pressed into service. Obviously the sonnets failed to do the trick and Wroithsley paid the fine instead of marrying the girl.

Despite financial setbacks, Southampton was a generous patron of the arts and an avid theatregoer. He loved hunting and earned sufficient distinction as a soldier for Essex to appoint him General of the Horse in the ill-fated Irish campaign. His effeminate appearance must be weighed against his heterosexual adventurism, which earned him the disfavour of the Queen when he became involved with one of her ladies in waiting.

A second candidate for the ‘lovely boy’ is William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Heminges and Condell dedicated the First Folio. He too had a strong aversion to marriage but not to women. Having worried his father sick by turning down four suitable matches, he had an affair with another of Elizabeth’s maids of honour, Mary Fitton, and was thrown into prison (briefly) for getting her pregnant. Like his uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, he was a generous supporter of the arts and had a close association with the theatre. When Richard Burbage (Shakespeare’s leading actor) died, Herbert was overcome with grief for well over two months. Being invited by the Duke of Lennox to ‘a great supper’ to farewell the French ambassador, he replied:

Even now all the company are at play, which I being tender hearted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbage.

After Elizabeth’s death, Pembroke became a favourite of King James and played along with the overtly homoerotic atmosphere of the new court. At the King’s coronation, where the other lords kneeled to profess their fealty, Pembroke strode boldly up to the King and kissed him full on the lips, at which James laughed and playfully slapped his cheek.

When the sonnets were published, they were dedicated to ‘Mr W.H.’ . . . Who is he? They are unlikely to refer to a nobleman like the Earl of Pembroke, and would be a major typographical error if applied to Henry Wroithsley, with the initials reversed.

A popular candidate is Sir William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather. According to this theory, Southampton had the original manuscript of the sonnets and left it in his mother’s keeping. On her death, her husband, seeing the financial potential, passed the manuscript on to Thomas Thorpe, who dedicated the publication to ‘Mr W.H . . . . the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets . . .’ The initials ‘W.H.’ could therefore apply to Sir William Harvey, but according to this scenario, the sonnets were published without Shakespeare’s permission. Yet Thorpe was a respected and conscientious publisher, not a pirate. Moreover, the poet Thomas Heywood asserts that Shakespeare was miffed by William Jaggard’s publishing, in 1599, a pirated collection called The Passionate Pilgrime by W. Shakespeare, containing various poems and sonnets, only some of which were by Shakespeare. So in 1609, says Heywood, Shakespeare, ‘to do himself right, hath since published them in his own name’. However, the jury is still out as to whether the sonnets were published with Shakespeare’s consent.

Next puzzle: who is the ‘rival poet’ who threatens to come between the author and his patron, stealing both affection and patronage?

Probably because he is the most obvious and dramatic candidate, Christopher Marlowe is most people’s choice. There is something very Marlovian in the opening lines of Sonnet 86:

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you?

And there may be a glance at Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and the conjuring of spirits a little later in the same sonnet:

Was it his spirit, taught by spirits to write

Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?

No, neither he nor his compeers by night,

Giving him aid, my verse astonished.

Then again, Thomas Fuller had compared Ben Jonson to a ‘Spanish great Galleon’ and Shakespeare to a light and lively ‘English Man Of War’, so is Jonson the rival poet? Or could it be George Chapman, who spoke of Homer’s spirit guiding him as his muse? There could be a reference to Marlowe’s murder in the line:

Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead . . .

That may be just a coincidence, although it does find an echo in Touchstone’s speech, in As You Like It, referring to the same incident:

When a man’s verses cannot be understood . . . it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

Samuel Daniel, John Davies and Francis Davison have also been advanced as possible contenders. It’s unlikely we will ever know for sure.

Then what of the ‘Dark Lady’—who is she?

Here again there are several contenders, including a prostitute known as Black Luce or Lucy Negro, the Prioress of Clerkenwell. But the most popular choice is Emilia Lanier, who was certainly known to Shakespeare. The illegitimate daughter of Baptista Bassano, part of a family of Venetian Jews who became court musicians, she was popular in Elizabeth’s court and soon caught the eye of the former patron of the Chamberlain’s Men, Lord Hunsdon, fifty years her senior. When she became pregnant to him he concealed the affair by marrying her to a musician named Alphonse Lanier. Being a Venetian Jewess she was probably no English rose, but dark-haired and of a ‘swarthy’ complexion. She was a talented musician and published poetry in her own right. Much of our information concerning her comes from the diary of the quack Simon Forman, whom she consulted about her husband’s horoscope. She was one of the many whom Forman notched up as sexual conquests.

So much for the protagonists; what of the content?

The first seventeen sonnets are devoted to urging a young man to marry. The poet’s main tactic is flattery, playing on the youth’s narcissism, assuring him of immortality in that his beauty will be perpetuated in his offspring. But towards the end of this sequence the poet gains confidence and assures the boy of immortality a second way—through the sonnets themselves.

And all in war with time for love of you

As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

And:

But were some child of yours alive that time,

You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.

The bulk of the collection, from sonnets 18 to 126, is assumed to be addressed to this same young man and examines every imaginable aspect of being a lover. There is the rhapsodic praise of the love object’s beauty and rueful acceptance that this beauty must wither. A fair bit of special pleading comes in here as the poet assures the youth, again and again, that he will live forever, not anymore by having offspring, but by being loyal to his chronicler:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

. . .

You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Some of the loveliest of the poems deal with separation, longing and pining for the beloved. Others portray quarrels, fallings-out, mutual betrayals, forgiveness and reconciliation. Some portray jealousy when rivals, including the rival poet, seek the boy’s attentions. Some describe the poet’s anxiety about his failing powers and sense of getting old.

The love expressed for the youth, although highly romantic, remains platonic. It is clear that the relationship is never consummated. This is made most explicit in Sonnet 20:

And for a woman wert thou first created,

Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

In other words, Nature got carried away when creating the love object and added a penis, thus making a physical relationship out of the question. But the poet is quite content for the boy to go and screw around with women as long as he can have the boy’s affection. This kind of ‘Grecian’ model was widely accepted during the Renaissance and part of the identity of a courtier. It was not a substitute for genuine male friendship, but a ‘noble refinement’, sometimes affected by those who didn’t actually experience it but did not want to seem to be lacking in sensitivity.

Sonnets 127 to 152 are preoccupied with the ‘Dark Lady’ and describe a very different kind of passion. This is an intensely physical relationship and one which the poet sometimes revels in, sometimes observes with wry amusement, and sometimes recoils from in self-disgust. He becomes enraged when the lady seduces his male friend, and although hurt by the friend’s betrayal, lays the blame at the feet of the seductress. But sexually addicted as he is to the lady, there is no way out of his pain:

My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please:

. . .

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic mad with ever more unrest.

The sonnet sequence ends abruptly with no resolution. The last two poems, numbers 153 and 154, are conventional love poems that have no bearing on the preceding narrative.

Early in the relationship with the lady, the emphasis is on the playful, the bawdy, and even the downright filthy—the ecstasies of sexual excess. Given that the word ‘will’ meant sexual appetite as well as being a slang word for both male and female genitalia, and was also the poet’s first name, consider the following verbal gymnastics in Sonnet 135:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I, that vex thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious,

And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

And in abundance addeth to his store;

So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will

One will of mine, to make thy large Will more;

Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

It may not be the most gracious of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but it’s one of the funniest. Throughout his career he seems to have delighted in punning on his own name. Sonnet 136, following the one just quoted, concludes with the couplet:

Make but my name thy love, and love that still;

And then thou lov’st me, for my name is Will.

(One in the eye for those foolish enough to claim that the works of Shakespeare were written by somebody else.)

So what is it about the sonnets that makes them so intriguing? It’s the fact that Shakespeare took such a straitjacket of a form, so confining and demanding, and breathed such life into it. Just look at the rules a moment: the Petrarchan form (named after its inventor, Francesco Petrarca) had to consist of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with the following rhyme scheme: ab, ab, cd, cd, ef, ef, gg. The first eight lines establish a thesis, the next four counter with an antithesis and the couplet provides a resolution. Given these constraints, no wonder sonnets can be so stiff and stodgy. If you want to find out how hard it is, try writing one yourself.

Shakespeare took this difficult form and filled it with such passion, such warmth, humour, pain, vulnerability, anguish, tenderness, sadness and spontaneity that we are convinced, while we are reading them, that they must be the sincere outpourings of emotion from one human being to another. We think, ‘This cannot be a fiction; it is too genuine; it feels so true.’

But now let’s apply a bit of logic and test that reaction. To start with the dedication: ‘To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr W.H. . . .’ If Sir William Harvey was indeed the person who gave the sonnets to Thomas Thorpe, is it likely that they revealed a real relationship between his stepson, Henry Wroithsley, Earl of Southampton, and a common player? Wroithsley was well ensconced at court again in 1609, a favourite of King James. Is it likely his stepfather would expose him to shame and ridicule as someone caught up in a steamy sexual triangle? Is it likely that Southampton himself would have welcomed their publication? On the contrary, he would have been furious with Shakespeare and cut off all contact. But instead the publication of the sonnets caused no ruckus at all, and there is every indication that Shakespeare’s relationships with both Southampton and Pembroke continued amiably, as the dedication of the First Folio to Pembroke in 1623 would show.

Has anyone stopped to wonder how likely it is that a mere poet, a common player, would form an intimate relationship with a young aristocrat and address him with such familiarity? Anyone with the slightest experience of the English class system knows how exclusive and snobbish it still is. Multiply that about four hundred times for Elizabethan England and you’ll see it’s absurd to suggest that Shakespeare could have dared presume to woo, blame, criticise or advise one of the highest ranking noblemen of the age. Sure, aristocrats liked to go slumming occasionally and may have formed the odd casual liaison with an actor, especially a boy actor, but nothing as sustained, intimate or intense as the narrative of the sonnets implies.

It’s a pretty fantasy to imagine the parents or guardians of a wayward young aristocrat hiring a poet to compose sonnets urging him to marry. But do we imagine a headstrong, wilful young man like a Southampton or a Pembroke so easily coming to heel? He would more likely tell said parents or guardian to jump in the lake and take their sonnets with them.

The true relationship of Shakespeare to an aristocratic patron is reflected in his dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton:

Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen. Only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour.

Your Honour’s in all duty,

William Shakespeare.

This is the tone of the modest and humble supplicant to the wealthy and influential patron, without whom the poet has no chance of survival. And it’s another smack in the eye for those who claim Shakespeare’s works were written by the Earl of Oxford, or Rutland or Sir Francis Bacon. Why would any of them need a patron and have to debase themselves thus? If Christopher Marlowe wrote the poem in 1593, why would he sign himself ‘William Shakespeare’? The claims of the ‘anti-Stratfordians’ become more laughable the more you look at them.

Although the tone of the sonnets addressed to the youth is platonic, there is enough of a gay frisson to raise eyebrows in a society where sodomy was still a capital offence. Of course it all went on behind closed doors, especially in James’s court circle, but no one would publish poems like these if any real-life model was suspected. Some critics have argued that because the sonnets had only one print run, they may have been suppressed by Southampton; but as I said earlier, that is unlikely, given his continued friendship and support of Shakespeare. It is more likely that the sonnets just didn’t catch on, either because they were out of vogue and seemed a little old-fashioned, or because they were too unconventional and personal to be properly understood.

But most importantly, would Shakespeare himself have wanted them published if he thought there would be a scandal attached? Throughout his life he demonstrated a most urgent desire for respectability and status. He worked hard at securing the coat of arms with its motto ‘Not Without Right’. He steered clear of debauchery and trouble, determined to establish himself as a gentleman in both London and Stratford, where he was revered as a leading citizen worthy of a tomb within the chancel of Holy Trinity. It is simply absurd to think he would pass his sonnets around among his friends, let alone publish them, if they were to proclaim him a homosexual and serial adulterer. Yet the sonnets caused no ripple of gossip in either London or at home with his wife and family. In other words, no one assumed for a moment that the sonnets were autobiographical. It was rightly assumed that they encapsulated a fiction, a play, and one that was toying with the conventions of the sonnet sequence as a form.

As for the ‘Dark Lady’, be it Emilia Lanier or anyone else, does an outraged lover really sit down to compose sonnets as a way of letting off steam? Does he then send them to her, expecting some response? He might well let fly a filthy letter, but not one of the exquisite gems of this sonnet sequence.

A further problem with trying to construct a meaningful narrative of the sequence is that we can’t be really sure of what order the poems should be in, or the gender of the person addressed in every case. By rearranging the sequence you get many different meanings and the gender of the addressee in many cases becomes a matter of conjecture.

It is entirely possible that the poems urging marriage were written with one young man in mind while the others were written to or about a different young man (or men) altogether. There is nothing to identify any of the subjects, male or female. The only person we know for sure is Will, the author.

So if all those sonnets promising eternity to the subject were for real, they have entirely misfired, because we are never given his, or her, name. If you really want to immortalise someone and guarantee that his

. . . beauty shall in these black lines be seen

or

’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom,

then you’d better let us know who you’re talking about.

The fact that Shakespeare never told us and nobody thought to ask should reassure us that it is meaningless to look for real-life subjects in the sonnets. Rather, they should be understood as universal love poems, reflecting all the vagaries, the triumphs and despairs of love written over the space of a decade. If we want to find the real subject we should look in the mirror. This is Shakespeare the actor/dramatist playing a series of roles, just as he does in his plays.

Shakespeare’s attitude towards sonneteering had always been a bit ambivalent. The models provided by Petrarch to his Laura and Sidney to his Stella had become debased by being so widely imitated. Every courtier or scholar was supposed to be able to reel off sonnets as a proof of his breeding, and all too many of them did. These are the young men Shakespeare is mocking in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Jaques’ ‘lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow’. Don Adriano de Armado, smitten by love, implores:

Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme,

For I am sure I shall turn sonneteer.

Sometimes Shakespeare takes the sonnet seriously. The first meeting of Romeo and Juliet is remarkable in that they jointly improvise a sonnet to illustrate their ‘marriage of true minds’.

But one suspects that in his great sonnet collection as published in 1609, Shakespeare is doing his best to subvert earlier models and blow them wide open. Where Petrarch is obsessed with a noble chaste lady who cannot be seduced, Shakespeare addresses a lady who is decidedly worldly, sexual and unconventional. He declares ‘my mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun’ and then proceeds to demolish the established catalogue of graces with which sonneteers were supposed to endow their subjects. The very act of addressing a male love object instead of a female one is a deliberate reversal of convention, one meant to shock or at least destabilise expectations.

So who is Shakespeare being in this drama? He is being ‘the poet’, the hired hack who knows how to flatter and write to order; the lover rhapsodising, agonising, castigating, forgiving. He talks about writer’s block, the artist’s insecurity, the slog of being an actor on tour, the older man routinely betrayed by younger lovers. Is any of Shakespeare in this? Of course. Whatever life experience he had he brought to bear in all his work. Did he ever fall in love with a younger man? It’s entirely possible, but he didn’t need to in order to write the sonnets, any more than he needed to murder a man to write Macbeth or to go mad in order to write King Lear. By observation, intuition and imagination he could put himself in anyone’s shoes. Part of his great genius was his openness. His ‘feminine’ side was easily available to him and he seems to have loved women wholeheartedly. Yes, he is ‘the poet’ of the sonnets, just as he is Rosalind, Hamlet, Falstaff and Cleopatra. He is all of them and they are all aspects of him.

The sonnet collection is an exquisite work of art and among Shakespeare’s greatest achievements. If he had written nothing else, it would still mark him out as pre-eminent among English poets. The more you read them the more you grow to love them. They are best read quietly aloud so that you can mull over the wit, the cadences, the long melancholy vowels and sprightly skipping rhythms. The heartfelt passion, joy, anguish, delight and bawdy fun are all immediately accessible. Each needs to be read over and over because each is a toy, a complex little puzzle, and it’s handy to have a good edition, like the Arden, with copious notes and commentary to help with the obscurities. Once that hurdle is over, it’s a joy to return again and again to a particular sonnet, relishing its compact cleverness and digging a little deeper each time.

I’d find it hard to choose my personal favourites—there are too many, and the more you read them, they increasingly become part of a mosaic, difficult to prise from the whole. So let me just pick three at random, each different in tone from its fellows. First, number 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self that seals up all in rest;

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As on the deathbed, whereon it must expire;

Consumed with that which it was nourished by;

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

After the joy and exuberance of so many of the earlier sonnets this one has a wintry melancholy reinforced by the funeral bell reiteration of ‘in me . . .’ The tempo is sad, slow and deliberate.

The poem reminds us how often Shakespeare reverts to nature for his metaphors, here comparing himself to the lapse of autumn into winter, the setting sun and the embers of a dying fire. The second line has a very effective anti-diminuendo going from ‘yellow leaves, or none, or few . . .’ making the sequence less predictable and making us focus more clearly on the image of autumn leaves dropping.

The ‘bare ruined choirs’, it has often been remarked, conjure up the image of leafless trees bereft of birds but also the monasteries and convents stripped and destroyed by Henry VIII, now bereft of the monks and nuns who once sang there. It is one of the few hints we find in Shakespeare of a sympathy and nostalgia for the old religion.

‘Death’s second self’ here means night-time but reminds us of Macbeth’s description of sleep, ‘The death of each day’s life’, and the phrase ‘That seals up all in rest’ also calls to mind Macbeth’s calling on darkness to ‘scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day’. It is a reference to the abhorrent custom of sealing or sewing up the eyes of falcons to keep them tame. But in this sonnet it also suggests the sealing up of a tomb, especially following on ‘Death’s second self’.

The final strong image of youth lying in its own ashes harks back to the relentless character of Time, who simultaneously nourishes the body by bringing it to maturity while hastening it towards death.

The final couplet smacks of emotional blackmail and could be paraphrased as: ‘Note all this and make sure you appreciate me because you won’t have me for long.’ A more generous reading might be: ‘I know that you are aware of this and that is why you love me so much.’ Given the overall tone of the narrative and the relationship, I incline towards the first option.

Now let’s look at number 147, which I mentioned earlier:

My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please:

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I, desperate, now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic mad with ever more unrest,

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

This is the nadir of the poet’s frustration and rage concerning the Dark Lady. It is a wild, despairing and lethal outpouring and breaks the conventional sonnet structure by having one thesis only and driving it through to the end, building in emotional pitch and frenzy to the hammer-blow monosyllables of the final couplet, so full of hatred and contempt. It’s amazing how flexible Shakespeare can make the constricting sonnet form by writing in such varied tempi and emotional states. It is a sick mind speaking, one addicted to sex, full of self-disgust and flailing about trying to find the exit. It reminds me of the sexual revulsion of the mad Lear, which again expresses itself in gross and obscene language:

Down from the waist they are centaurs,

Though women all above:

But to girdle do the gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiend’s:

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit,

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption . . .

For a complete change of pace, consider Sonnet 138:

When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her, though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutored youth

Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:

On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?

And wherefore say not I that I am old?

O Love’s best habit is in seeming trust,

And age in love loves not t’ have years told.

Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

How different in tone to the last sonnet! This one is easygoing, world-weary and worldly-wise, the poet laughing wryly at his own vanity and his mistress’s infidelities, cynically accepting that cohabitation can only work if based on deceit and wilful ignorance.

I particularly like the playful use of ‘simply I credit her false-speaking tongue’ (i.e. I play the simpleton), butting against ‘thus is simple truth suppressed’ (i.e. the plain, obvious truth). The spontaneity of the questions in lines eight and nine is very natural, followed by a sighing ‘O’ that leads to the cynical assurance that, to avoid trouble, it is best to pretend to believe whatever your lover tells you.

The final couplet expresses a lazy contentment with the charade as long as you’re getting enough sex (playing on the double meaning of I lying with her and she lying with me).

These are just three random examples of the wit and wisdom contained in the sonnets. Every reader must perforce arrive at an original and individual response to them. Even more than in the plays we have to confront ourselves. There are no trappings or distractions—just us and the text. And we’re all in there somewhere.