The World of the Sonnets
Another debate will find no end: were the Sonnets printed in the right order? Yet one thing is certain: the order was not haphazard. Most obvious is the separation of the Young Man sonnets from the Dark Lady sonnets. The chronological order is broken if the triangular relationship set forth in Sonnet 144 is reflected in Sonnets 40-2. The parallels between the two main groups have been traced by C. F. Williamson (see Peter Jones, ed., Shakespeare--The Sonnets, Casebook Series, 1977). Besides, the first seventeen sonnets have a common theme--the persuasion to marry--and in each group may be found pairs or triads with thematic links (e.g. sleeplessness, 27-8; guilt, 33-5; the stolen mistress, 40-2; eye and heart, 46-7; a journey, 50-1; expectation of death, 71-2; invocation to the Muse, 100-1; the Will sonnets, 135-6), sometimes reinforced by grammatical links (5-6, 73-4, 88-90, 133-4).  | | The British Library | | The title page and facing portrait of the 1640 edition of the Poems. This small octavo volume was published by John Benson and printed by the reputable and experienced Thomas Cotes. |
Only the Young Man sonnets, however, disclose phases and openly allude to a succession of events and seasons. The quick alternation of moods appears at times improbable, but hardly more surprising than in many plays, where such an alternation is supposed to reflect the unpredictability of life. If the sequence is biographical, why should it be logical? The strongest objection to the Quarto order is Auden's: after the friend's trespasses (40-2) forgiveness was possible, love could even be more intense, but not with the 'innocent happiness' of Sonnet 53. A poet, however, may prove forgetful--or flattering--as well as forgiving.
Reading the Sonnets as a sequence has its dangers. Wordsworth complained of 'tediousness', Landor of 'weariness', Hazlitt of monotony. As Symonds observed in the age of Symbolism, 'the sonnet is not designed for a continuous narration but for the crystallization of thought around isolated points of emotion, passion, meditation, or remembrance' (Quoted by A. Golden in 'Victorian renascence: the revival of the amatory sonnet sequence 1850-1900', Genre 7, 1974, pp.133-47). The influence of context, however, cannot be neglected in the interpretation of each poem.
The key themes
Sonnets 1 to 19 constitute a prelude which subtly modulates from an invitation to marry and 'get a son', as 'beauty's legacy', to the twin promise of immortality through procreation and through poetry (17) and a declaration of the poet's love for the youth, incidental at first (10, l. 13; 13, 1. 13), then open (19), giving thereafter pre-eminence to poetry. Sonnet 20 defines the nature of the poet's passion for the 'master-mistress': love, not sex. In Sonnet 21 Shakespeare outbids Sidney's opening professions of sincerity (Astrophil, 1,3): 'Oh, let me true in love but truly write'. The following sonnets to the friend may fall into the three cycles of Northrop Frye, moving each from confidence to melancholy, though the last phase of the third cycle 'replaces disillusionment with self-knowledge'. Sonnets 56 and 97, with their suggestion of revival, are, indeed, landmarks. But one can discern shorter groups of almost equal length: 22-32 (unclouded love), 33-42 (double betrayal), 43-52 (melancholy at night and in absence), 54-65 (immortality), 66-77 (death and corruption), 78-86 (the rival poets), 87-96 (estrangement), 97-108 (love revived and strengthened). From 109 to the 'envoy' (126) self-reproach and self-apology (110-13, 117, 120, 125) combine with the Miltonic conviction 'that better is by evil still made better' (119) and the assurance that 'Love is not Time's fool' (116, 123, 124). As Rosalie Colie noted (Shakespeare's Living Art, Princeton, 1974), from Sonnet 97 onwards retrospection prevails.
Love for the youth is more than exalted friendship, a Renaissance ideal as Montaigne, Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser variously evidence. Such friendship was a privileged bond between individuals ('parce que c'estoit luy, parce que c'estoit moy', Montaigne, Essais, I.xxviii), a fellowship immune from the stresses and storms of heterosexual passion. But the love for the fair youth is at once chaste and streaked with a sense of guilt, at once a conscious straining to maintain a bond despite gross betrayal and a confident assertion that love alters not. Can it be explained?
Homosexuality was attacked as a fashionable vice in Marston's Scourge, in Guilpin's Skialetheia, in Microcynicon, in the epigrams of Kendall and Harrington. In The Progresse of the Soule Donne traced 'sinnes against kinde' to a passion for 'outward beauty', which can be found 'in boyes' (II, 468-70). The speaker's sensitiveness to the outward beauty of the 'lovely boy' (126) is extreme in Shakespeare's sonnets; though at times overshadowed by the claims of truth or constancy, it remains the main reason for his love. Yet there is no trace of the physical excitement roused by masculine beauty in Marlowe's Hero and Leander. When the poet disclaims 'love's use' (20), he is not sly or 'sportive' but sincere. The fair youth is throughout an object of aesthetic delight, to be spoken of with the kind of wonder later ascribed to Florizel before Perdita. Like Milton's Eve, he 'summs all Delight', all the loveliness and fertility of Nature, 'the spring and foison of the year' (53). Yet the poet soon discovers that 'Suns of the world may stain' (32) and his effort from then on is to preserve the glorious vision without losing his clearsightedness. It leads him into casuistry (41-2, 134), and his self-abasement in willing slavery may leave us uneasy (57-8). If we keep in mind both the aristocratic and the religious aura of 'grace' the oxymoron 'lascivious grace' (40) best expresses the poet's response. He can condemn and praise or even bless, as 'the holy priests of Egypt bless' Cleopatra when she is wanton, 'for vilest things / Become themselves in her' (2.2.236-8).
2>Irony and contradictions
Insensitiveness to the true complexity of this response has led many critics to over-emphasize the presence of irony. The poet, no doubt, admits ambivalence when he speaks of his love and hate (35), and the patron-poet, master-slave relationships complicate the traditional odi et amo, differently echoed in the Dark Lady sonnets. Resentment, veiled or flaring up, is present, but later diverted against the world's 'rank thoughts' (121), informers and slanderers, or 'dwellers on form and favour' (125). When the poet seems to praise those 'Who moving others are themselves as stone' (94), probable irony is confirmed by the couplet--though Shakespeare seems to have admired those who are not passion's slaves more than modern critics do. The tone is unmistakable in 'Farewell-- thou art too dear for my possessing. . .' (87). But ironic readings can be unduly multiplied; for a Renaissance poet 'ironia or the Drie Mock' (Puttenham) was a trope supposed to be clearly perceptible.
To mute the claims of irony is not to deny the contradictions: ecstatic assertions of constancy are constantly belied by other sonnets. Not the friend and the mistress alone, but the poet himself is the offender: the sonnets in which he confesses his inconstancy and 'unkindness' (117-20) are an obvious parallel to the sonnets on the young man's fault (32-6) and apparently irreconcilable with the fixity triumphantly claimed for love in the immediately preceding sonnet (116) and in the following ones (123, 124). To discover that 'ruin'd love' can be 'built anew' (119) does not justify the assertion that love is 'ever-fixed' and 'never shaken' (116). That the poet is speaking of his own love, which can endure the 'alteration' found in the friend, is clear: 'my dear love' in Sonnet 124 is the poet's love, not the youth addressed as 'dear my love' in Sonnet 13. But we have just seen that the poet's heart was not free from 'wretched errors' (119). Shall we read Sonnet 116 as an exhortation rather than a statement? Or shall we interpret the whole sequence as a search 'for a style that may attain a constancy beyond the material and moral vicissitudes of human existence', as in John D. Bernard's subtle essay? (' "To constancie confin'd": the poetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets', PMLA, 94, 1979, pp. 77-90). That Shakespeare's faith in love is nourished by aesthetic ecstasy in poetic creation in the Sonnets as in the fifth act of Antony and Cleopatra may be granted, but Bernard's claim of an 'analogy with Dante' in the 'act of recording his final, ineffable vision' is questionable. Shakespeare is only recording the moments when the experience of human love is so intense that it is apprehended as immutable essence. But the vision is not mystic though the language is increasingly religious (106, 'prefiguring'; 108, 'hallowed'; 125, 'oblation'). In the envoy to the Young Man sequence the fair youth, who has 'grown' for three years at least and waded deep in the mire of human existence, is again addressed as 'my lovely boy'. Is not the poet trying to summon up the remembrance of an image of loveliness that first moved him to love, in a spirit of wonder not unlike the profane ecstasy felt by Joyce's Stephen Daedalus at the sight of the wading girl, 'touched with the wonder of mortal beauty' (my italics)? Only for a while will the youth be 'boy eternal' as in the dream of Polixenes: Nature's 'quietus is to render thee', to surrender beauty to 'death's dateless night'.
Mortality and time
Had not the so-called 'procreation sonnets' sounded the note of mortality from the opening pages and announced the war with Time (15)? In their poignancy, their sombre magnificence, Shakespeare's 'mutability sonnets' are condensed 'Mutabilitie Cantos' where Time fails to rest on the pillars of Eternity. Sackville's Induction and Bellay's Ruines of Rome in Spenser's paraphrase are their background. (See A. K. Hieatt, 'The genesis of Shakespeare's Sonnets; Spenser's Ruines of Rome: by Bellay', PMLA, 98, 1983, pp. 800-14. The case, however, is overstated.) The world of the Sonnets is a world enclosed in time. Whether applied to poetry (18, 38) or love (108), 'eternal' seems to mean no more than lasting to the end of time, 'even to the edge of doom' (116), 'to the ending doom' (55). 'You live in this,' the poet tells the friend, 'till the judgment that yourself arise' (55). We hear of 'time's thievish progress to eternity' (77), but an Eternity all breathing human passion far above. Unlike Donne, Shakespeare never contemplates 'a love increased there above' ('The Anniversarie'); unlike Lord Herbert, he never hopes his love will be perfect 'where / All imperfection is refin'd' ('An Ode upon a Question mov'd'). Christian dogma--Judgement Day, the Resurrection--is accepted, yet the other world is excluded from the world of the Sonnets. Heaven and hell are in this life. In the great sonnet on Lust (129), 'heaven' is sensual bliss, as 'that kiss which is my heaven to have' (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.296-7). Hell is not what may come after death but 'the hell of time' experienced through a friend's unkindness (120). Sonnet 146 does not reflect 'an ironic humanism': C. A. Huttar's defence of the traditional Christian interpretation is convincing.' ('The Christian basis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146', Shakespeare Quarterly19, 1968, pp. 355-65.) Yet even here the prospect of eternal life is only opened negatively.
Sin-consciousness, however, is present. Incidental in the Young Man sequence, it pervades the sonnets to the mistress, with the exception of playful and probably early variations on the already conventional theme of black beauty. With sarcastic wit and passionate unrest these sonnets convey the sad self-awareness of a lover who spurns himself for loving. Desire cries for food, not in Sidney's natural fashion, but with an 'uncertain sickly appetite' (147), foretasting the nausea that follows 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame'.
Though self-consciousness and sex nausea were general phenomena among poets of the Donne generation they reflected personal experience. Occurrences of the word 'self' are not only more frequent in Shakespeare's sonnets (0.58 per sonnet) than in Daniel's (0.34), Drayton's (0.08 in Ideas Mirrour, 1594, against 0.41 in Idea, 1619), Sidney's (0.46) and Spenser's (0.48), but more significant as in 'Thou of thy selfe thy sweet selfe dost deceave' (4), a significance too often masked by modern printing. The poet seems to progress from a criticism of self-love in the narcissistic youth (1, 3, 4) and in himself (62) to self-analysis and self-reproach in the inward-turning later sonnets (109-12, 117-20) and defiant self-acceptance, 'I am that I am', in Sonnet 121. This is not, however, the self-centredness of Donne: the speaker has achieved self-realization first by making his 'love engrafted' to the friend (37), then by hitching it to the star of love itself as an absolute (116).
That the Sonnets 'record the intense immediacy' of an individual caught in a situation is true, but it is the immediacy of 'rumination', a term aptly used by the poet himself (64). The predominance of second person pronouns does not create drama: it can be found in verse letters, which some of the Sonnets seem to be. The interlocutor is removed in time and space and hardly ever supposed to speak. No temporal action is developing within the poem as in Donne's dramatic recreation of a scene, either present--'Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes'--or past: 'Comming and staying show'd thee, thee'. Sidney's sonnets had been more dramatic, though in a rhetorical way, when like the Roman poets he addressed characters standing by (92, 'Be your words made (good sir) of Indian ware'; cf. 14, 20, etc.) or focused attention on the moment of experience: 'Come let me write. . .' (34, cf. 40). Sonnet 50, written on horseback like Donne's 'Riding Westward', is hardly typical of Shakespeare's usual manner: a meditation in which time is suspended so that past, present, and future can be apprehended together as in the definition of lust 'had, having, and in quest to have' (129). Yet the Sonnets, though not dramatic in the stricter sense, come increasingly close to spoken language with remarkably Donne-like openings: 'That thou hast her, it is not all my grief (42), 'When thou shalt be disposed to set me light' (88), 'So now I have confess'd that he is thine' (134). |
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