Shakespeare's Sonnets and Tradition
Shakespeare's narrative poems, proudly published with dedications, are works of art. The unacknowledged (though perhaps not unauthorized) Sonnets are great poetry. The difference is more apparent when the higher achievement is considered first.
glished' the Petrarchan sonnet in the forties and fifties, yet struck a new note in their rebuke of the mistress or the king. The sonneteering vogue, however, only started with the publication of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella in 1591, followed in quick succession by Daniel's Delia (1592), Drayton's Ideas Mirrour (1594), Spenser's Amoretti (1595), not to mention a dozen minor sequences: Tofte's Laura closed the series in 1597. Shakespeare's sonnets may have been composed in this period; some of them at least were circulating in 1598, but only two had found their way into print by 1599 (in The Passionate Pilgrim) and the sonnet sequence was out of fashion when Thorpe's edition appeared in 1609.
Innovation within convention
Shakespeare wrote within a convention, but how much of the convention he left out deserves notice. With the justified exception of the narcissistic Adonis (53) [Numbers in brackets refer to the Sonnet numbers, unless otherwise stated] he banished the goodly train of gods and goddesses, so prominent in many minor sequences (Fletcher's Licia, Lynche's Diella, William Smith's Chloris, Tofte's Laura) and freely evoked by Sidney, Daniel, Drayton and Spenser. Cupid had played his pranks around Stella, Phillis, Licia, Diana, Idea, Diella, and Laura: he only appears in Shakespeare's coda, the last two sonnets, dissonant in the sequence unless we read into them unsavoury allusions to the sad end of the affair.
'Love', when addressed, is not personified as a god, and psychological or moral entities are not arrayed against each other. The military metaphors of the courtly love tradition, retained by Sidney and Spenser, have vanished. The unique moment of 'enamoration' is not recorded in the traditional way. The standard episode of the kiss, so aptly dramatized in Astrophil, is missing. The 'whining' tone Drayton himself thought fit to mock in the prefatory sonnet of Idea in 1599--a clear instance of a change in literary fashion--is never heard, even in moods of distress, and the speaker's eye, 'unus'd to flow' (30), only sheds tears for 'friends hid in death's dateless night'. There is no pastoralism, no address to a river, no catalogue of delights and no cosmological, astrological, or heraldic sonnet. The usual blazon 'Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow' ironically turns into a prophecy of the friend's undescribed beauty (106) or a semi-Bernesque portrait of the mistress (130).
Shakespeare seems to follow Gascoigne's advice, little heeded by the Elizabethan sonneteers: 'If I should undertake to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise hir christal eye, nor hir cherrie lippe, etc. For these things are trita et obvia. But I would either finde some supernaturall cause wherby my penne might walke in the superlative degree, or els I would undertake to aunswere for any imperfection that shee hath' (Certayne Notes of Instruction, 1575). Hyperbolic praise without description and the framing of excuses for the youth's faults are indeed prominent characteristics in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Yet the main innovation is perhaps that they are not 'wooing' sonnets, though some of them are sonnets of adulation. The poems addressed to the fair youth are about love returned, or love betrayed, or love revived, and the favours of the 'woman colour'd ill' are at once enjoyed and despised.  | | The poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), from a nineteenth-century engraving. Sidney was the author of the earlier influential sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. |
M. C. Bradbrook's claim (Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, 1951) that 'in addressing a friend and not a mistress, Shakespeare deprived himself at once of a good deal of the sonneteer's stock in trade' is often echoed. Yet many of the traditional themes and motifs might have been used to court a 'lovely boy'. Some of the conventions were rejected for other reasons. Others suffered a sea-change as three instances will show.
Complaints about the 'flinty heart' of the mistress, ultimately traceable to Dante's donna pietra, had filled the Elizabethan sonnet sequences. When the mistress had become the bay where all men ride, they were out of season. But when this cold indifference is ascribed to the aristocratic friend as one of those 'Who moving others are themselves as stone' (94), the conventional accusation becomes sharp insight into the ambiguities of character.
Daniel and other sonneteers ring the changes on the Ronsardian theme of the fair one bound to repent her cruelty 'When Winter snows upon her golden hairs' (Delia, 31-4). Shakespeare acknowledges that time 'will that unfair which fairly doth excel' (5) but he looks forward to the ageing of the lovely boy in subtler ways, not only in his persuasion to marry (a Renaissance topos, unusual however in a sonnet sequence) but in his later confident assertion: 'To me, fair friend, you never can be old' (104).
A third original development allowed by the patron-poet relationship is the introduction of a Rival Poet. An awareness of the reading public had been manifested by Sidney, but competition to win the favour of a patron is a Shakespearian theme and the rivalry becomes another means of expressing an intense yearning for the friend's love. The Rival Poet sonnets however are only an episode in a story the outlines of which we see darkly as in a glass--the mirror of the poet's mind reflecting events and reflecting upon experience.
The 'story' of the Sonnets and their social world
A 'story' was not so common a feature in a Renaissance sonnet sequence. The clear pattern of Astrophil's courtship of Stella, culminating in Stella's admission of her love, yet rejection of the lover's 'desire' (66, 69, Eighth Song), is almost unparalleled. Spenser's Amoretti imply a chronological progression (cf. 60, 62, 65, 68) toward the 'happy shore' (63), only reached, however, in the Epithalamion. The other sequences are usually a kaleidoscope of the lover's moods of comfort or despair without any narrative development between the falling in love and the final admission of failure in the attempt to prevail upon the lady's inflexible virtue.
ory told by Shakespeare are clear but the details are obscure. Sonnet 144 reads like a plot summary: the poet loves 'a man right fair' and 'a woman colour'd ill'; the latter 'Tempteth my better angel from my side / And would corrupt my saint to be a devil'. This seems almost too neat to be a reflection of experience: one thinks of a morality play or of the conflict between the two 'daemons' of the Platonists. But the web of relationships proves more intricate. The difference in social class between the speaker and the youth was not called for by the triangular scheme. The actual sharing of the mistress by the two men--a situation not unknown to the epigrammatists--was without precedent in sonnets. A fourth character in the sequence is the social world. Like Donne, Shakespeare isolates the true lovers in a hostile or mocking world (71, 72, 90, 112, 124, 125). Unlike Donne, however, he usually invites the youth not to neglect the world's opinions (71, 72) though he himself rejects the world's censure (121).
As W. H. Auden put it, 'every work of art is a self-disclosure, but the Sonnets disclose more than other Elizabethan poems because they reveal so much and so little'. Had Shakespeare invented a story to build poems on, Paul Ramsey claims (The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, New York, 1979), 'it would have been more dramatic and coherent'. Perhaps not, if earlier sequences were his model. But would a poet who had invented such a story be likely to indulge in enigmatic half-disclosures and allusions, irrelevant to his main theme, as in Sonnets 94, 107, 110 and 121 among others?
As Giles Fletcher granted in the dedication of Licia, 'a man may write of love and not be in love'. Northrop Frye rightly describes love as 'a kind of creative yoga' for the imagination of the courtly poet. And when Shakespeare claims he will 'truly write' (21), he is echoing Sidney's first sonnet: the claim was part of the convention. This does not mean that love poetry never expressed the poet's true feelings. Sidney had his sonnets in mind when he stated in The Defence of Poesie: 'Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inky tribute to them'. We are often reminded that the speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets may be a persona like Spenser's Colin Clout. But Colin was supposed to speak the sentiments of Spenser, not the thoughts of other men as in Browning's Dramatis Personae. A Renaissance poet created personae when he wrote 'Heroicall Epistles' like Drayton's or like 'Sapho to Philaenis' (usually attributed to Donne); in lyric and elegiac poetry he could take a pose, feign or lie, but spoke in his own person (apart from a few love poems in which the woman is the speaker).
Sincerity in poetry does not mean autobiography but truth to oneself. The poet's awareness of self-delusion in his sonnets to the mistress (134, 137, 138, 141, 147, 148) is insistent, but it might be an artful variation on a theme harped upon in many comedies: the illusion of lovers. The tone, however, is utterly different. And the conscious attempt at self-deception in the relationship with the friend strongly suggests a personal involvement, as will later appear. The youth and the dark lady do not seem to be mere figments of the mind. Their identities, however, are unlikely to emerge with certainty out of the chronicles of wasted time. |
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