Shakespeare's Sonnets
Context
Life
and Times of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a
prosperous leather merchant in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire,
England. He attended grammar school, married an older woman named Anne
Hathaway, and eventually left Stratford for London to pursue a career in
theater. Legend has it that Shakespeare began his career by holding the reins
of horses for theater patrons; in any event, he quickly worked his way up
through the ranks of his chosen profession. By the early seventeenth century,
he had written some of the greatest plays the world has ever seen, and was,
along with Ben Johnson, the most popular writer in England. He owned his own
theater, the Globe, and amassed enough wealth from this venture to retire to
Stratford as a wealthy gentleman. He died in 1616, and was hailed by Johnson
and others as the apogee of theater during the Renaissance of Queen Elizabeth's
reign.
Shakespeare's works were collected and
printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the
early eighteenth century his reputation as the supreme poet ever to write in
English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his
works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life; and the paucity of
surviving biographical information has meant that many details of Shakespeare's
personal history are shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this
fact that someone else in reality wrote Shakespeare’s plays--Francis Bacon and
the Earl of Oxford are is the two most popular candidates--but all the
so-called evidence for this claim is strictly circumstantial, and the theory is
not taken seriously by many scholars. Today, Shakespeare is remembered for the
wealth of magnificent poetry and drama he left the world--for Hamlet, Romeo and
Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and many other plays, and for his
extraordinary sequence of 154 lyrics, which we group together as Shakespeare's
sonnets.
The
Sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are very different from
Shakespeare's plays, but they do contain dramatic elements and an overall sense
of story. Each of the poems deals with a highly personal theme, and each can be
taken on its own or in relation to the poems around it. The sonnets have the
feel of like autobiographical poems, but we don't know whether they deal with
real events or not, because no one knows enough about Shakespeare's life to say
whether or not they deal with real events and feelings, so we tend to refer to
the voice of the sonnets as "the speaker"--as though he were a
dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear.
There are certainly a number of intriguing
continuities throughout the poems. The first 126 of the sonnets seem to be
addressed to an unnamed young nobleman, whom the speaker loves very much; the
rest of the poems (except for the last two, which seem generally unconnected to
the rest of the sequence) seem to be addressed to a mysterious woman, whom the
speaker loves, hates, and lusts for simultaneously. The two addressees of the
sonnets are usually referred to as the "young man" and the "dark
lady"; in summaries of individual poems, I have also called the young man
the "beloved" and the dark lady the "lover," especially in
cases where their identity can only be surmised. Within the two mini-sequences
there are a number of other discernible elements of "plot": the
speaker urges the young man to have children; he is forced to endure a
separation from him; he competes with a rival poet for the young man's
patronage and affection. At two points in the sequence, it seems that the young
man and the dark lady are actually lovers themselves--a state of affairs with
which the speaker is none too happy. But while these continuities give the
poems a narrative flow and a helpful frame of reference, they have been
frustratingly hard for scholars and biographers to pin down. In Shakespeare's
life, who were the young man and the dark lady?
Historical
Mysteries
Of all the questions surrounding
Shakespeare's life, the sonnets are perhaps the most intriguing. At the time of
their publication in 1609 (after having been written most likely in the 1590s
and shown only to a small circle of literary admirers), they were dedicated to
a "Mr. W.H," who is described as the "onlie begetter" of
the poems. Like those of the young man and the dark lady, the identity of this
Mr. W.H. remains an alluring mystery. Because he is described as
"begetting" the sonnets, and because the young man seems to be the
speaker's financial patron, some people have speculated that the young man is
Mr. W.H. If his initials were reversed, he might even be Henry Wriothesley, the
Earl of Southampton, who has often been linked to Shakespeare in theories of
his history. But all of this is simply speculation: ultimately, the
circumstances surrounding the sonnets, their cast of characters and their
relations to Shakespeare himself, are destined to remain a mystery.
Shakespeare's Sonnets
The
Sonnet Form
A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem,
traditionally written in iambic pentameter--that is, in lines ten syllables
long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: "Shall I
compare thee to a summer's day?" The sonnet form first became popular
during the Italian Renaissance, when the poet Petrarch published a sequence of
love sonnets addressed to an idealized woman named Laura. Taking firm hold
among Italian poets, the sonnet spread throughout Europe to England, where,
after its initial Renaissance "Petrarchan" incarnation faded, the
form enjoyed a number of revivals and periods of renewed interest. During In
Elizabethan England --the era during which Shakespeare's sonnets were
written--the sonnet was the form of choice for lyric poets, particularly lyric
poets seeking to engage with traditional themes of love and romance. (In
addition to Shakespeare's monumental sequence, the Astrophel and Stella
sequence by Sir Philip Sydney stands as one of the most important sonnet
sequences of this period.) Sonnets were also written during the height of
classical English verse, by Dryden and Pope, among others; and written again
during the heyday of English Romanticism, when Wordsworth, Shelley, and
particularly John Keats created wonderful sonnets. Today, the sonnet remains
the most influential and important verse form in the history of English poetry.
Two kinds of sonnets have been most common in
English poetry, and they take their names from the greatest poets to utilize
them: the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet
is divided into two main parts, called the octave and the sestet. The octave is
eight lines long, and typically follows as rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, or
ABBACDDC. The sestet occupies the remaining six lines of the poem, and
typically follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD, or CDECDE. The octave and the
sestet are usually contrasted in some key way: for example, the octave may ask
a question to which the sestet offers an answer, or any number of other
possible divisions for example. In the followings Petrarchan sonnet, John
Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," the octave describes
past events--the speaker's previous unsatisfying examinations of the
"realms of gold", Homer's poems--while the sestet describes the
present--the speaker's sense of discovery upon finding Chapman's translations:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of
gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which
bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of
one wide expanse have I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his
demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I
heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then
felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like
stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd
at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The Shakespearean sonnet, the form of sonnet
utilized throughout Shakespeare's sequence, is divided into four parts. The
first three parts are each four lines long, and are known as quatrains, rhymed
ABAB; the fourth part is called the couplet, and is rhymed CC. The
Shakespearean sonnet is often used to develop a sequence of metaphors or ideas,
one in each quatrain, while the couplet offers either a summary or a new take
on the preceding images or ideas. In Shakespeare's Sonnet 147, for instance,
the speaker's love is compared to a disease. In the first quatrain, the speaker
characterizes the disease; in the second, he describes the relationship of his
love-disease to its "physician," his reason; in the third, he
describes the consequences of his abandonment of reason; and in the couplet, he
explains the source of his mad, diseased love--his lover's betrayal of his
faith:
My
love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the
disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the
ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to
please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not
kept,
Hath left me, and I desp'rate now
approve
Desire is death, which physic did
except.
Past cure am I, now reason is past
care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest,
My thoughts and my discourse as
madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly
expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
In many ways, Shakespeare's use of the
sonnet form is richer and more complex than this relatively simple division
into parts might imply. Not only is his sequence largely occupied with
subverting the traditional themes of love sonnets--the traditional love poems
in praise of beauty and worth, for instance, are written to a man, while the
love poems to a woman are almost all as bitter and negative as Sonnet 147--he
also combines formal patterns with daring and innovation. Many of his sonnets
in the sequence, for instance, impose the thematic pattern of a Petrarchan
sonnet onto the formal pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, so that while there
are still three quatrains and a couplet, the first two quatrains might ask a
single question, which the third quatrain and the couplet will answer. As you
read through Shakespeare's sequence, think about the ways Shakespeare's themes
are affected by and tailored to the sonnet form. Be especially alert to
complexities such as the juxtaposition of Petrarchan and Shakespearean
patterns. How might such a juxtaposition combination deepen and enrich
Shakespeare's use of a traditional form?
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of
May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a
date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven
shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime
declines,
By chance or nature's changing course
untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou
owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in
his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou
growest:
So
long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So
long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Summary
The speaker opens the poem with a question
addressed to the beloved: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
The next eleven lines are devoted to the such a comparison. In line 2, the
speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer's
day: he is "more lovely and more temperate." Summer's days tend
toward extremes: they are shaken by "rough winds"; in them, the sun
("the eye of heaven") often shines "too hot," or too dim. And
summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the a withering of
autumn, as "every fair from fair sometime declines." The final
quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that
respect: his beauty will last forever ("Thy eternal summer shall not
fade...") and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how that the
beloved's beauty will accomplish this feat not perish: because it is preserved
in the poem, which will last forever--, it will live "as long as men can
breathe or eyes can see."
Commentary
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in
the sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in
English. Among Shakespeare's works, only lines such as "To be or not to
be" and "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" are better
known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or
most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise
of the beloved has guaranteed its place.
On the surface, the poem is on the surface
simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to
unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and
temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the "eye of heaven"
with its "gold complexion"; the imagery throughout is simple and
unaffected, with the "darling buds of May" giving way to the
"eternal summer" the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too,
is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration
or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause--almost
every line ends with some punctuation that affects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets
not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The
"procreation" sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the
speaker's realization that the young man might not need children to preserve
his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17,
"in my rhyme." Sonnet 18, then, is the first "rhyme"--the
speaker's first attempt to preserve the young man's beauty for all time. An
important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of
the sequence) is the power of the speaker's poem to defy time and last forever,
carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved's
"eternal summer" shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in
the sonnet: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see," the speaker
writes in the couplet, "So long lives this, and this gives life to
thee."
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Questions
for Study
1.
Sonnet 18 is one of the most famous poems in the English language. Why do you
think this is the case? How does the speaker use natural imagery to create a
picture of the young man's beauty?
2. In
Sonnet 1, the speaker argues that the only way for the young man to defy the
ravaging power of time is to reproduce, but in later sonnets, he seems to think
that the permanence of his poetry will preserve the young man's beauty for all
time. Why is the speaker so concerned with the ravages of time? How do the
sonnets portray time? How can they claim to defy it?
3.
Discuss the portrayal of beauty in the sequence as a whole. Is beauty an
immortal ideal, or is it vulnerable to time? How is beauty valued differently
in a poem like Sonnets 1, 18, and 60 than in a poem like Sonnet 146? How does
"beauty" contrast with "worth"? How is beauty treated in
Sonnet 130?
4.
Sonnet 94 is one of the most difficult, and in many ways one of the most
ambiguous, of all the sonnets. What are the speaker's feelings for the people
"that have pow'r to hurt and will do none"? What is the significance
of the summer's flower?
5.
Compare and contrast two "moral" sonnets, 129 and 146. How does the
latter poem's anxiety about outward appearance relate to the formers ashamed
admission of lust?
6.
Discuss the theme of love in the sonnets. Do the young man sonnets express a
different ideal of love than the dark lady sonnets? Is the ideal of love
described in Sonnet 116--without which the speaker "never writ, nor no man
ever loved"-- constant throughout the sonnets?
7.
Think about the ways in which the speaker uses the sonnet form to embody a
series of metaphors. How do poems such as Sonnet 60 and Sonnet 73 divide their
metaphors among the various parts of the sonnet?
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