The Sonnets

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY’S antipathy to the sonnet form —“I am one of those,” said Steevens, “who should have wished it to have expired in the country where it was born”¹—extended to Shakespeare’s sonnets, and there is little doubt that their vogue since is bound up partly with the delightful biographical problems to which they give rise. For the same reason, perhaps, judgement of them among their admirers has been more uneven than one would expect over poems latterly so familiar. Quiller-Couch, from the twenty he admitted to The Oxford Book of English Verse, managed to exclude one of the most magnificent, “Not mine own fears” (107), and one of the most nearly perfect, “No longer mourn” (71); as do Auden and Pearson (Poets of the English Language) from their twenty-five, of which, indeed, hardly half are given also by Q. Along with these two, the finest, I think, are 18, 30, 73, 106, 116. Concern with the sonnets’ problems should be resolutely postponed by the reader until he is familiar with these seven. None of them evinces the intellectual reach of Milton’s sonnet on his blindness [“To Mr. Cyriack Skinner Upon His Blindness”], but then this is the greatest sonnet in the language. These are the sonnets of a young man, probably; their chief defect a certain indifference to how things wind up, so that most of the couplets are weak; their chief virtues expressiveness and violent power. Some of the very simplest, like “Being your slave” (57), are among the best; and in general, despite their tiresome (though justified) claims to immortality, they strike one as proceeding from a man more or less without a pose—roughly, naked; not to speak of the humiliating privacy of some of their subject matter, which is quite different from the matter of all the other Elizabethan sonneteers.

Their manner too is plainer and more natural than that of any other real poet who wrote sonnets except Sidney. But before taking up the question of influences, dates, and identities, it will be well to summarize what they are about. Their overriding theme is Time; I mean their ordinary subject matter.

There are more than 150 sonnets in all, written evidently over a number of years; they tell no single story, and it is convenient to see their subjects as five.

1. Seventeen (1–17), addressed to a handsome young man, or boy, urge him to get a child and so perpetuate his beauty; he seems to be unmarried and presumably the plea is that he should marry also, first.

2. The bulk of the sonnets (most of 18–126) describe the poet’s “love” for a young man, apparently the same one, for already in 10.13 and 13.13 the word “love” has been used. This love is platonic—as is proved by the obscene Sonnet 20—and is returned. One learns very little about the young man. He seems to be of better birth than Shakespeare; he is fair-complexioned; his father may be dead; perhaps he gives the poet a portrait of himself (46), certainly the poet gives him a table-book (77) and receives one in return and gives it away (122). He likes the sonnets very much (72.14, 110.7) and seems to have complained so vividly when they stopped coming that four in a row (100–3) make excuse for a long silence; but other poets praise him also (78–80, 82–86). The one look we get at his personality (93–94) suggests a boy narcissistic and inexpressive. He and the poet are often separated. He is unfaithful to the poet with the poet’s mistress, but let’s make this a separate subject. Shakespeare is confident, happy, proud, jealous, reproachful, forgiving, ironic, prostrate, gloomy, resentful, hopeless, as lovers are. He is older than the boy, narcissistic also (62), hates wigs and cosmetics (68, etc.), now says his verse will live forever, now says it is far below the rival poet’s or even no good at all. It is not possible to form an opinion as to how the relationship wound up.

3. Some twenty sonnets (in 127–54, 153–54, however, being variations on a theme originally Greek, not addressed to anybody and perhaps not even Shakespeare’s) are love poems to the poet’s mistress, a married woman with black hair. These are mostly very bad poems indeed, contemptuous, trivial, and obscene.

4. Ten or so sonnets grieve over a love affair between the boy (known in sonnet literature as the Friend) and the poet’s mistress (known, absurdly, as the Dark Lady). With 133–37 probably belong 40–41, and perhaps 33–36 by the Friend. One gets the impression that she seduced him, that his name is Will (like Shakespeare’s), and that perhaps her husband’s name is Will also. Some of these are addressed to her, but whether they were ever shown her must be doubtful; one calls her “the bay where all men ride,” another (135) is among the most indecent formal poems in English.

5. Some dozen or so sonnets are so self-concerned that it seems worth abstracting them from 2, 3, 4 as having a separate subject, the poet himself. Among these are two of the sonnets’ greatest achievements, the ferocious invective against lust (129) and the grave spiritual poem numbered 146, which are not addressed to either the Friend or the Woman; the bitter, insulted outcries of 110–12, though these call to the Friend for consolation, and the life-weary 66, though there is a flick of jealousy in the last line of this.

It is worth saying at once that all five of these subjects figure also, or find reflection, in Shakespeare’s long poems and his early and middle plays, and two generalizations connected with this fact should find place here, before we dive into problems. In the first place, Shakespeare’s sonnets, taken as a whole, do not make an artistic impression—as do those of Michelangelo, say, whether addressed to the young Roman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, to Vittoria Colonna, to Our Lord, or to Love; the poet’s effort differs wildly in degree, there is no steady attention to craft; numerous as they are, the best like the worst appear to be thrown off, impulsive. Second, they follow no general model. Since Malone and then Dowden mistakenly thought Samuel Daniel their model, let me quote two experienced modern authorities.² “The definite element of intrigue that is developed here,” Lee wrote in 1898 of 40–42, “is not found anywhere else in the range of Elizabethan sonnet-literature.”³ “The essential originality of these lyrics,” Rollins summed up in his invaluable New Variorum edition of 1944, “is astonishing to most hardened students of Elizabethan sonnet cycles.”⁴

The sonnets were not published until long after they were written, towards the very end of Shakespeare’s career, in 1609, when the publisher Thomas Thorpe brought them out, as “Never before Imprinted,” with a publisher’s dedication to “Mr W.H.” as their “onlie begetter.” They, or some of them, had had a certain currency in manuscript, however, at least a dozen years earlier; one [no. 94, 1.14: “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”] had been quoted in King Edward III [II.i.41], pr. 1596, several [including nos. 138 and 144] had been printed in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599. Hypnotized by the idea that Mr. W.H. is the Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare’s patron in 1593–94, most scholars have wanted to date most of the sonnets in the early-middle 1590s and later. Leslie Hotson’s revolutionary demonstration, therefore, that three of the most mature probably were written in 1588–89 has been slow to gain acceptance, after some initial enthusiasm.⁵ Perhaps his solidest argument concerns the “pyramid” sonnet, 123, which, proving “pyramid” a regular term for obelisk, he takes to refer to the famous obelisks disintered by the Pope’s order and re-erected at Rome, one each year, during 1586–89; these were a European marvel, by which Shakespeare was not impressed. Then, showing that the year 1588 was a year of which the coming had been feared for more than a century, he refers the “mortal moon” of 107 to the terrible Armada of that year, which seemed to approach in crescent shape and was happily dispersed (“hath her eclipse endur’d”). These two datings are accepted by McManaway (1950).⁶ Hotson’s third argument, taking 124 to be about Henri III of France and the Jesuit priests executed for their supposed intrigues against the life of the Queen, puts this sonnet at the same time and ought to be related to Baldwin’s dating of The Comedy of Errors. It is Sonnet 104 that celebrates three years of friendship with the young man (this I think not a conventional but an actual period of time, whatever may be quoted from Horace, Ronsard, etc.). If we could have more faith in the publisher’s order for the sonnets, wrong though it obviously is in some respects, it would look as if most of them were written during the late 1580s. At any rate, they are early. The insulted sonnets, 110–12, seem a response to Greene’s attack on Shakespeare in 1592, and I fail to understand why this was never noticed until Fripp pointed out the pun in “o’er-green” ⁷; compare Greene’s insolent “Shake-scene” with the poet’s “my name receives a brand.” Of course this is too early for Southampton (as the recipient), whom it is clear that Shakespeare hardly knew in 1593.

As for the identity of the Friend, we are at the mercy of Thorpe’s dedication. If it was a product of gossip or is wrong, the problem closes before it has begun. Various circumstances and details suggest that Thorpe’s publication, though duly entered, was unauthorized: the dedication’s being his, brackets being placed (as if for two missing lines) after the obviously complete (though only 12line) couplet-poem 126, the fact that the book caused no stir and was therefore conceivably suppressed, the improbability of the middle-aged respectable Shakespeare’s releasing such poems. It is an unsolved mystery where Thorpe got his copy: who would have had both the Friend’s poems and the Woman’s?⁸ But the dedication has a confident air (“TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING SONNETS M^r. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OVR EVER-LIVING POET”) and some support is given to the first initial at least by the name “Will” in 135.

Even so, no plausible candidate has ever been suggested. For Southampton there was never anything except his admitted patronage of Shakespeare and the fact that many other poets dedicated work to him (78.3–4). But his initials (Henry Wriothesley) have to be reversed, and his name is not Will; like Gray and Reed, I find it incredible that a nobleman of high rank is addressed in 20⁹; like Alden I think it preposterous to imagine an actor speaking of “leaving alone,” through his death (66.14), such a personage¹⁰; and Hotson’s dating now puts him out of the question. For William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, there was never anything worth mentioning.¹¹ Behind the widespread desire to have one of the chief men of the kingdom addressed in the sonnets of Shakespeare, one is bound to suspect the same kind of snobbery that would like to father Shakespeare’s plays on somebody of like rank.

Thorpe’s phrase “onlie begetter” is wrong anyway, a product of the same impulse that led him to hide the sonnets to the Dark Woman at the end of the book. Who she was, nobody knows. There are several indications that George Chapman may be the chief Rival Poet, but they are slight and uncertain.¹²

Shakespeare’s sonnets take the easy, alternating-rime form, as against the severe Petrarchan octet-and-sestet, and a deliberate aesthetic is audible in 21, 76, 82, 130: anti-Petrarchan, realistic, plainspoken. Insofar as they have a master, it seems to me to be Sidney. We are thinking now of style, not material. Certain features may be noted. “O” is a mannerism, occurring some fifty times.¹³ Feminine rime is rare (20 and 87 are exceptional), the average being just over one to a sonnet.¹⁴ Shakespeare is very fond of monosyllables; Rollins makes the number of lines entirely monosyllabic about one-tenth of the whole, noticing that Nashe as sternly reprehended their use as Gascoigne (Certain Notes of Instruction, 1575) recommended it: “The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne.”¹⁵ The poet’s blunt force is in good measure due to this practice, almost never to something else he goes in for, legal quibbling. His form is sometimes loose; 66 and 129 are not real quatrain sonnets, as [H. C.] Beeching observed.¹⁶ Certain anomalies occur: the mediocre couplet of 36 is repeated, perhaps by an error, at the end of 96¹⁷; 99 has fifteen lines; the tinkling 145 [in tetrameters] may not be Shakespeare’s; 61 and 120 employ inexact rime. Shakespeare’s weakness in couplets has been mentioned; 87 is a brilliant exception, and there are others.

As for the sources, of idea and language, the sonnets contain few allusions and make no show of learning. The indebtedness of a batch of middle sonnets (44–45, 59–60, 63–64) to Book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,in the translation of Arthur Golding [1567], is exceptional. Shakespeare must have been reading this as he wrote—sonnets can be written three or four a day if one has the habit—or have pretty well memorized the fifty lines (250–300) mostly drawn on. Sources for the major symbol of the sonnets—the beloved as Rose—and their chief symbolic preoccupations—with Time, with Truth-and-Beauty, with substance and shadow, with the lovers as One—can hardly be identified with precision in the welter of neo-Platonic and Renaissance thought, especially since even these large themes are taken up and then laid down again by the poet. They form no solid substratum. The very meagre influence of Christian thought is noticeable. Sonnet 4 uses the parable of the Talents [Matthew 25:14–30]; there are real references to the resurrection of the body and to “my heaven” in 55.13 and 110.13; and twice Shakespeare complains that his friend’s infidelity has laid him on the “cross.” This is all, and little enough, except for 105, which is decidedly blasphemous (it three times parodies the Trinity, and as one critic [G. G. Loane] has pointed out, the extraordinary line “To one, of one, still such, and ever so” is a doxology)¹⁸ and 121, which sounds as if it had been written by a villain. On the staggering “I am that I am” in 121, adapting God’s name (Exodus 3:14), Mackail says: “These words are in effect Shakespeare’s single and final self–criticism … beside them even the pride of Milton dwindles and grows pale: for here Shakespeare, for one single revealing moment, speaks not as though he were God’s elect, but as though he were God himself.”¹⁹

The sonnets’ glories are not from books, and rather from instinct than thought. Here is 73, in the original spelling and pointing (one error corrected, one spelling altered for clarity):

That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold,
When yellow leaues, or none, or few doe hange
Vpon those boughes which shake against the could,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twi-light of such day,
As after Sun-set fadeth in the West,
Which by and by blacke night doth take away,
Deaths second selfe that seals vp all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lye,
As the death bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nurrisht by.
This thou perceu’st, which makes thy loue more strong,
To loue that well, which thou must leaue ere long.

The fundamental emotion here is self-pity. Not an attractive emotion. What renders it pathetic, in the good instead of the bad sense, is the sinister diminution of the time concept, quatrain by quatrain. We have first a year, and the final season of it; then only a day, and the final stretch of it; then just a fire, built for part of the day, and the final minutes of it; then—entirely deprived of life, in prospect, and even now a merely objective “that,” like a third-person corpse!—the poet. The imagery begins and continues as visual—yellow, sunset, glowing—and one by one these are destroyed; but also in the first quatrain one heard sound, which disappears there; and from the couplet imagery of every kind is excluded, as if the sense were indeed dead, and only abstract, posthumous statement is possible. A year seems short enough; yet ironically the day, and then the fire, makes it in retrospect seem long, and the final, immediate triumph of the poem’s imagination is that in the last line about the year, line 4, an immense vista is indeed invoked—that of the desolate monasteries strewn over England, sacked in Henry’s reign, where “late”—not so long ago! a terrible foreglance into the tiny coming times of the poem—the choirs of monks lifted their little and brief voices, in ignorance of what was coming—as the poet would be doing now, except that this poem knows. Instinct is here, after all, a kind of thought. This is one of the best poems in English.