The Sonnets and Other Poems (2 page)

The rape of Helen led to the fall of Troy; the rape of Lucrece leads to the rise of the Roman republic. This parallel is the immediate relevance of the sequence concerning Lucrece and the painting. But its profounder relevance is aesthetic as much as historical. Shakespeare concentrates on the art of the painter, the “imaginary work,” the “Conceit deceitful, so compact,” in order to suggest that art may be a lie which outdoes the truth of nature—not a malicious lie, but a comforting one. The comfort has ultimately to be ours, not Lucrece’s. To be true to history, she must commit suicide. And even in the sections of the poem when we are to imagine her gaining comfort through her communion with Philomel and Hecuba, a moment’s reflection reveals that the emotions are ours, not hers. To put her in front of a picture is to remind us that we are in front of an artwork ourselves, a verbal picture, an exemplary rather than a particular truth. That is how rhetoric and tragedy work: emotion is created in the listener. The narrative of Lucrece works for us as the image of Hecuba works for her and will work again for the Player in
Hamlet
.

Shakespeare was much possessed by death, even when—as in
Venus and Adonis
and the comedies
—
he wrote in the genres of life and love. Venus expostulates against Death because he is the destroyer of beauty. She proposes to Adonis that the beautiful have a duty to reproduce themselves, not to hoard their loveliness in the manner of a miser (or, in the bawdy subtext, a masturbator):

The first seventeen of Shakespeare’s sonnets are a set of variations on the same theme. Throughout the entire collection of 154 sonnets, there is a frequent return to questions first explored in
Venus and Adonis
: not only mortality and endurance, beauty and its transience, but also the paradoxes of self and other, truth and delusion, in the dynamics of desire. Adonis’ eyes are “Two glasses” (i.e. mirrors) where Venus “herself herself beheld / A thousand times.” At the climax of the sonnet sequence, a key pun plays on the same idea: “For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie.” The relationship between “I” and “eye,” inner self and the object of the gaze, is an obsession in the sonnets, while “perjured” is an example of another hallmark of the collection, the application of legal language to the promises made and broken by lovers. So, for instance, in Sonnet 30 (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”), term after term has legal connotations (“sessions,” “summon,” “dateless,” “canceled,” “expense,” “grievances,” “account,” “restored”).

It is probable that Shakespeare began composing sonnets soon after writing
Venus and Adonis
. Several poems in the form are woven into
Romeo and Juliet
and
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, plays that he wrote soon after the theaters reopened in 1594. The testimony of Francis Meres provides firm evidence that others were circulating in manuscript by 1598. But the collection entitled
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
was not published until 1609. We know neither whether it was authorized nor whether its arrangement of the sequence was purposeful. Some of the sonnets, however, clearly belong together as pairs or groups, in that successive poems sometimes allude to each other or enact variations on a similar theme.

Though we cannot necessarily trust the order in which the sonnets appear in the 1609 volume, there does seem—as one would expect from the hand of the dramatist—to be a plotline running through the sequence and a “character” to each of the personae. The first 126 poems appear to be written to a man or conceivably a succession of men. The narrative extends over a considerable period of time and runs a full gamut of emotions. The person addressed is younger than Shakespeare and of higher rank. He is lovely and the image of his mother: “Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime.” The first seventeen poems are exhortations to breed, in the manner of Venus’ address to Adonis: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.” There is then a modulation toward the idea that the poet’s own work of praise may enable the young man to escape the ravages of time and death. Some sort of relationship is then imagined, with the youth in a position of power and the poet in one of supplication. Absence, travel, “disgrace,” melancholy, estrangement and reunion are variously implied. The young man appears to have an affair with the poet’s mistress, thus abusing the bond of friendship. But he is eventually forgiven: “Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all: / What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” Later, the poet is discomposed by a rival who claims to have been taught by spirits to write “Above a mortal pitch” and who, with “the proud full sail of his great verse,” wins the patronage of the fair youth. The sequence ends with its key motif of the battle between love and time. The final poem to the youth is two lines short of the sonnet form’s customary fourteen. It ends with a pair of empty brackets, signaling some kind of closure or lacuna.

Sonnets 127–52, by contrast, explore the poet’s relationship with a mistress, a dark-complexioned and sexually voracious woman who has “raven black” brows. Sometimes her dark beauty is wittily defended against the blond Elizabethan ideal, but more frequently these poems are filled with self-abnegation, misogyny, a lingering sense of the sour taste that comes after sex, and disgust at the way in which the body rules the spirit. The woman is accused of infidelity, including an apparent affair with the “man right fair” who is the poet’s “better angel”—this seems to allude back to the purported relationship between “friend” and “mistress” in the earlier sequence. Some of the “dark lady” poems are searingly honest about the deceptions that may occur between lovers: “O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust…Therefore I lie with her and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” Others are dazzlingly playful, notably 135–36, with their multiple punning on senses of the word “Will,” including a persistent play on Shakespeare’s own name. The final two sonnets are imitations of a Greek epigram about the fire of love being quenched in a cool well, with clear allusion to the Elizabethan custom of taking mercury baths as a cure for syphilis. The implicit suggestion is that the poet has been venereally infected by the “dark lady.”

The surviving documentary evidence about Shakespeare’s life is not very exciting. Beyond the bare facts of birth, marriage, parenthood, and death recorded in parish registers, most of the surviving papers are legal and financial documents: real estate transactions, records of his shareholding in his theater company, payments for performances at court, a steady stream of minor litigation. Not the sort of thing to reveal the heart and soul of the artist. What we know about the life does not help us to understand the greatness of the work. At the same time, since plays are plays, in which feelings and opinions belong to the characters and not the author, the dramatic works cannot be used as reliable evidence of the nature of the man. Indeed, one of the things most valued about Shakespeare is what John Keats called his lack of “personality”: his ability to mask his own face, to dissolve himself into his characters, to be now Othello and now Iago, now Prince Hal and at the same time Falstaff.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are a source of endless biographical fascination because they seem to be the one work in which he speaks in his own voice. “Scorn not the sonnet,” William Wordsworth would write two centuries later: “With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” So it is that the sonnets are often believed to bear a wholly different relationship to Shakespeare’s biography from that of the rest of his literary work. There is, however, no intrinsic reason why a sonnet—a highly artificial literary form—should not be a dramatic performance just as a play is. It may perfectly well be argued that for an Elizabethan poet to dash off a sequence of sonnets was a kind of exercise, a proof of artistic skill akin to the work of a composer writing a set of variations on a musical theme. If Shakespeare could imagine Hamlet and Romeo and Viola, he could also have invented the “plot” and “characters” of his sonnets. Robert Browning responded to Wordsworth’s claim: “If so, the less Shakespeare he!” Maybe the sonnets are best read as assays of Shakespeare’s art, demonstrations of the gift of seemingly effortless facility that the Italian theorist of courtship Baldassare Castiglione called
sprezzatura
: “A singer who utters a single word ending in a group of four notes with a sweet cadence, and with such facility that he appears to do it quite by chance, shows with that touch alone that he can do much more than he is doing.”

We do not know whether the sonnets are dramatic performances written out of sheer
sprezzatura
or poetic reimaginings of real figures and events. Unlike several contemporary sonneteers, Shakespeare does not name names. Because he is so guarded, the circumstances of composition have provoked centuries of speculation. The young man to whom the bulk of the poems are addressed may or may not be synonymous with the mysterious “Mr. W. H.” named in the collection’s dedication. The traditional candidates for the role of addressee are the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Southampton, though neither of them was a “Mr.” A provocative case has been made for the possibility that “Mr. W. H.” is actually a misprint for “Mr. W. S.” and that in the dedication Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, is merely acknowledging Shakespeare as the “only begetter” of the sonnets (“begetting” was a common metaphor for authoring).

Dozens and dozens of male Elizabethan poets wrote sonnet sequences, but only Shakespeare and Richard Barnfield addressed their poems explicitly to a man. Barnfield wrote in the explicitly homoerotic tradition of ancient Greek pastoral poetry, whereas Shakespeare’s sequence emphasizes the spiritual aspects of the poet’s love for the fair youth. The only sonnets in the collection where “Will” is actually in bed with a lover are addressed to the dark lady. The young man’s “thing” (which has been “pricked out” by nature) is, says the poet in Sonnet 20, “to my purpose nothing”—though this is supremely ambiguous, since it could mean either that he is not interested in a physical relationship or that the prick serves him in the same way as a woman’s “nothing” (vagina). Taken in their entirety, the sonnets associate heterosexual desire with consummation and disgust, homoerotic attraction with spirituality and an intensity that derives in large measure from the impossibility of consummation. Tempting as it may be to infer Shakespeare’s sexuality from this duality, it might be better to read the opposition between dark lady and fair youth as a dramatic device: one is a “character” representing desire in its sexual manifestation, the other in its idealizing and spirituality.

From the Earl of Surrey’s profession of love for a certain “Geraldine” through the identification of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Stella” as Lady Penelope Rich, sixteenth-century readers were tantalized with the question of whether love poetry was an exercise of the wits—in imitation of Virgil or Petrarch or Sidney—or whether there was a real-life story behind a sonnet sequence and, if there was, what was the identity of the players. Some poets positively relished leaving all possibilities open. Giles Fletcher tried to have it both ways in the title of his collection of 1593:
Licia, or Poems of love in honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his lady, to the imitation of the best Latin poets
. Imitations of the best classical examples, but also addressed to a specific lady.

And was he really in love? A prefatory address to the reader explains that:

So Giles Fletcher may just be “trying his humour,” persuading you by his art that he is in love when actually he is not. Or he may really be in love, though if he is in love, it may only be a matter of chance if the poems fall into the hands of the person he loves. His pose is that he does not care whether they do or not. What he really wants to do is show you, the reader, how clever he is.

And the identity of his beloved?

Fletcher’s watchwords are “if” and “may be.” His refusal to explain himself is a key element of his self-conscious art. Who is Licia, what is she? Perhaps a goddess, perhaps a mortal, perhaps an allegory of Learning or intellectual Discipline, perhaps a patroness, perhaps a college, perhaps nothing.

Fletcher’s refusal to unshadow Licia’s identity should be remembered by everyone who tries to decode Shakespeare’s sonnets. It may be granted that we would be on fairly safe ground in assuming that Shakespeare’s dark lady is not an allegorical representation of “a college” (he wasn’t, unlike most contemporaneous sonneteers, a university man), but we cannot rule out the possibility that she is not so much a real person as an embodiment of Venus. Or that she is Shakespeare’s conceit and portends nothing beyond her reality in the text itself.

So too with the “fair youth” who seems to be the addressee of most of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He does not
have
to be a real person. He may be a figuration of a patron, ideal or real. Or he may be an earthly shadowing of Adonis or an imitation of Alexas, the lovely boy addressed in one of the most influential poems of classical antiquity, Virgil’s second
Eclogue
. The climactic sonnet in Shakespeare’s sequence to his beautiful young “friend” begins “O thou, my lovely boy,” which is a translation of Virgil’s “O formose puer.”