Shakespeare's Sonnets

Containing some of the greatest lyric poems in English literature, Shakespeares Sonnets are not just the easy love sentiments of "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." Many of the poems are bleak cries of emotional torment and spiritual exhaustion. They tell a story of the struggle of love and forgiveness against anguish and despair. It is this tragic portrait of human love that makes the sonnets immortal.

The sonnet form evolved during the high Italian Middle Ages, most famously in the vernacular lyrics of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). The form spread through Spain and France, and was skillfully refined by the French "Pléiade" poets Joachim DuBellay (1522-1560) and Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585).

The book-sized collection of sonnets, or sonnet cycle, was a familiar lyric genre at the end of the Renaissance. For precedents Shakespeare could look to the French sonnet cycles of Ronsard, Du Bellay, and in particular the two short but remarkable sonnets cycles of Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563); and in English to the cycles by Philip Sydney (1554-1586) and many minor writers such as Richard Field and John Davies.

French and Italian poets favored the "Italian" sonnet form -- two groups of four lines, or quatrains (always rhymed a-b-b-a a-b-b-a), followed by two groups of three lines, or tercets (variously rhymed c-c-d e-e-d or c-c-d e-d-e). This condensed 5-rhyme palette (a-e) creates a sweet music in the vowel-rich Romance languages, but in English the scheme can sound contrived and monotonous, particularly in a series of sonnets on the same theme:

Q1    Divers doth use, as I have heard and know,
When that to change their ladies do begin,
To mourne and wail, and never for to lin,
Hoping thereby to pease their painful woe.     

Q2 And some there be, that when it chanceth so
That women change and hate where love hath been,
They call them false and think with words to win
The hearts of them which otherwhere doth grow.

T1 But as for me, though that by chance indeed
Change hath outworn the favor that I had,
I will not wail, lament, nor yet be sad.

T2 Nor call her false that falsely me did feed,
But let it pass, and think it is of kind
That often change doth please a woman's mind.

"Divers doth use" by Sir Thomas Wyatt [c.1540]
Shakespeare followed the more idiomatic rhyme scheme that Philip Sydney used in the first great Elizabethan sonnet cycle, Astrophel and Stella (published posthumously in 1591). This scheme interlaces the rhymes of two pairs of couplets to make a quatrain, then builds the whole sonnet of three differently rhymed quatrains and a concluding couplet:

Q1    From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:     
Q2 But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Q3 Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
C Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

The Shakespearean sonnet affords two additional rhyme endings (a-g, 7 in all) so that each rhyme is heard only once. This not only enlarges the range of rhyme sounds and words the poet can use, it allows the poet to combine the sonnet lines in rhetorically more complex ways. Shakespeare often gave special emphasis to the break between the second and third quatrains (equivalent to the major break between the 8 quatrain lines and the 6 tercet lines in the Italian sonnet), but he also paired and contrasted the quatrains in many other ways, creating a great range of argumentative or dramatic effects.

Shakespeare invested the couplet with special significance. It often summarizes or characterizes the musings of the three quatrains in a sardonic, detached or aphoristic voice, standing in some way aloof from the more turbulent and heartfelt outpouring of the quatrains.



Stages of Text and Context

Study of the syntax, choice of words and allusions to contemporary events in Shakespeare's sonnets suggests that the poems were brought together as a cycle around 1603-1604, the period of Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Othello. However, some of the earliest sonnets were perhaps composed c.1593, the sonnets addressed to a sensual woman (the "dark lady" sonnets) echo passages in Love's Labour's Lost, written c.1594 and revised in 1597, and the sonnets addressed to a young man (the "fair youth" sonnets) were most likely written in 1597. Overall, the emotional conflicts the sonnets describe seem to date from throughout the 1590's. Because all the poems were likely revised right up to the time of the quarto's publication in the summer of 1609, the completed cycle stands as the cumulative reflection from Shakespeare's maturity on passions that flowered over a decade earlier in his life.

The focus of the sonnets' homoerotic devotion was most likely William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630), a nephew of the poet Philip Sydney and the "W.H." of the dedication in Shake-speares Sonnets by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. Herbert was a prominent courtier during the reign of James I and a munificent patron of the literary arts (the Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays is dedicated to him, and he was a sponsor of the dramatist Ben Jonson). Herbert was also (as a contemporary attests) "immoderately given up to women," a confirmed bachelor who was briefly imprisoned in 1601 for making pregnant and then refusing to wed Mary Fitton, a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth.

In the summer of 1597 Herbert would have been 17 years old and under pressure from his parents to marry Bridget Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. This makes it plausible that Shakespeare, at the time age 33, initially sought to attract a patron's attention by composing for the young bachelor the first 17 sonnets (one for each year of Herbert's life) on the theme "from fairest creatures we desire increase." These formed the seed of the cycle that expanded through subsequent additions.

An obscure Stationer's Register entry hints that Shakespeare took steps to publish some of the sonnets in 1600, perhaps in response to the unauthorized appearance of two "dark lady" sonnets (138 and 144) in William Jaggard's miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). But no volume appeared. Shakespeare held the poems in manuscript until an oppressive plague epidemic (1606-10) curtailed theatrical performances and pushed him to seek supplemental publishing income -- and perhaps a gift from the tacit dedicatee -- by sending the collection to press.

If Shakespeare sought remuneration or fame in publishing his lyrics, he was disappointed. The poems went unacknowledged by Herbert, sold poorly, were not reprinted intact for over 70 years, and (with the exception of a few admirers) were neglected, misunderstood or disparaged by readers for the next two centuries. This despite signs in the text itself that Shakespeare wanted the 1609 quarto to immortalize both his poetical gifts and his relationship to his noble patron.
Readings and Misreadings

The long neglect of the sonnets seems to have been caused by their portrayal of homosexual love and heterosexual lust, their sometimes bitter tone and dark imagery, and by their thoroughgoing repudiation of many sonnet conventions -- the same qualities that brought Shakespeare admirers during the Romantic literary movement of the early 19th century.

In the sonnets Shakespeare transforms the literary stereotypes of the time -- the anguished lover and the idealized, unattainable beloved. Jacobean sonnets and epigrams had already trivialized these conventions in a mannerist excess of wit and irreality, but Shakespeare goes the other direction, stripping away the conventions with unrelenting realism.

Where formerly the lover sang to the pale moon, the limpid fountains, the brief rose of spring and the wounding child-god of Love, Shakespeare shows a lover burdened by age, toil, and regrets -- sad for lost friends and failed achievements, weary of gossip and scorn, sick with futility, ready to flee "this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell." The lover never invokes Christian faith or redemption; solace comes from the transient beauties of the world and from the lover's abiding sense of his own merit. His senses are fallible but his intellect is strong -- though it often bends the truth to justify and feed his passion.

Two loves polarize the poet's world, and here again convention is transformed. Where traditionally the sonnet beloved was a chaste, haughty and fair-complexioned goddess, Shakespeare's poet is bound to a charming but depraved nobleman and a promiscuously tormenting "dark lady." The desires that the poet can satisfy in his commerce with the woman only sicken and degrade him. Ideals he hopes to see embodied in the "fair youth" are betrayed by the youth's "common" and vicious character. As a result, the lover's mind sickens with the same moral grief and sexually fouled obsessions that torment King Lear. Yet in response to these degredations and betrayals, the poet affirms his belief that his constancy, humanity, and the power of his verse -- his spirit in words -- will triumph against time and decay. This is the vision of love and faith that the sonnets immortalize, a vision that the pathetic realism makes even more radiant.

This rugged affirmation of love's power is fatuously marginalized if we read the poems as merely homosexual or erotic true confessions. The trials Shakespeare creates for his poet -- his fictional identity -- bite much deeper.

To see the homoerotic allusions in context, consider Michel de Montaigne's love for his friend Étienne de la Boétie and the inconsolable grief he felt many years after la Boétie died:

For in truth, if I compare all the rest of my life--though by the grace of God I have spent it pleasantly, comfortably, and (except for the loss of such a friend), free from any grievous affliction, and full of tranquillity of mind...--if I compare it all, I say, with the four years which were granted me to enjoy the sweet company and society of that man, it is nothing but smoke, nothing but dark and dreary night. Since the day I lost him, I only drag on a weary life. And the very pleasures that come my way, instead of consoling me, redouble my grief for his loss.... We went halves in everything; I was already so formed and accustomed to being a second self everywhere that only half of me seems to be alive now (Essais: On Friendship).

This passage -- which obviously parallels the core despair of the sonnets -- is not homosexuality in the erotic way, but something entwined with the pursuit of spiritual, cultural and masculine ideals: rebirth in an admirable brother. It's beside the point to say that sodomy was a mortal sin in the Renaissance. By focusing on sexuality or impiety, we kill this manly virtue with a modern misinterpretation.

It's important to keep in mind that most of the sonnets are not explicit as to whether the beloved is a "fair youth" or a "dark lady" (as confirmed by the easy quotation of "fair youth" poems in a heterosexual context). Though the synopsis below refers to the "fair youth" explicitly, the poems acquire a deeper resonance if we read them as describing the perilous course of love in a transient and degrading world as it is lived and felt by the lover -- not as it is focused on a specific love object.

The Story the Sonnets Tell

At the opening of the cycle, the poems bear witness to the virtue that the "fair youth" could exert through his influence over so many hearts, lives and careers. This is the opening into the poet's love. Physically superb, radiantly youthful, politically ascendant, socially powerful, the fair youth represents nearly everything that Shakespeare's culture valued in external life accomplishments and courtly character. To highlight this idealization, the fair youth's perceived virtues are carefully contrasted with the poet's "too sullied" and demeaning real world existence.

At first the poet treats lightly the youth's fundamental flaw, the selfishness apparent in his refusal to wed and procreate. But the initial idealization makes horrific the poet's gradual recognition and then public denunciation of the youth's vicious, shallow and selfish character. The poet's ideal becomes a pathetic illusion, and the poems describe a pervasive spiritual strangulation that goes far beyond amorous disappointment. It is this existential exhaustion that the poet struggles to overcome.

The sensual betrayal of the "dark lady" counterpoints the spiritual betrayal by the young man. With the woman (whose historical identity is unknown) the poet's "betrayal" is inward and visceral, as his lust turns into an addict's remorse. As in King Lear, Shakespeare sometimes makes the point with distastefully literal dirt: but for Shakespeare literal is lower. Lust is a kind of humiliation that his already tormented spiritual existence would gratefully go without. The poet is not only betrayed by the youth's vicious character: he is betrayed by his own. Most important, the "dark lady" characterizes a merely sexual desire, to make clear the difference between lust and the profound longing that reached out to the "fair youth."

The figure of lust, of desire that turns to revulsion, is only one of many conflicts in the poet's existence: he also confronts the struggle between beauty and "devouring time," youth and age, the heart and the eye, truth and passion, torment and steadfastness, duty and fatigue. As in Shakespeare's greatest plays, the core themes are amplified through parallel subplots and images.

Although apparently confessional, even the most agitated poems show literary skill and control. The episodic patterns of narrative repetition and reversal create a vague sense that the poet is recording his life in the moment, as events change. There is an undercurrent of time's change rather than a clear narrative line; an exploration of spiritual facts rather than a sequence of human events. As a whole the cycle assembles its themes in a majestic cumulative vision.

Amid his suffering, the poet's dignity emerges in his high-minded endurance, in the strength of his love, his forgiveness, his dry humor, and his powerful verse. The "fair youth" sonnets conclude with an awed realization of the power of genuine love to triumph over any suffering. Love is precious not because the youth is worthy or because the erotic impulse is sweet to fulfill, but because love alone can overcome life's unrelenting waste and futility:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Whatever is the source of the strength the poet finds, it is this immortal truth and beauty that the sonnets magnificently celebrate.