Shakespeare's sonnets
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Shakespeare's sonnets comprise a collection of 154 poems in sonnet form that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. The poems were probably written over a period of several years. All but two first appeared in a 1609 collection; numbers 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") and 144 ("Two loves have I, of comfort and despair") had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim.
The sonnets were published under conditions that have become unclear to history. For example, there is a mysterious dedication at the beginning of the text wherein a certain "Mr. W.H." is described as "the begetter" of the poems by the publisher Thomas Thorpe, but it is not known who this man was. Also, although the works were written by William Shakespeare, it is not known if the publisher used an authorized manuscript from him, or an unauthorized copy.
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Structure
The sonnets are each constructed from four stanzas of three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameterTemplate:Ref (the meter used also in Shakespeare's plays) with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg (this form is now known as the Shakespearean sonnet). The only exception is Sonnet 126, which consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked with italic brackets.
Subject matter
Most of the sonnets are addressed to a beautiful young man, a rival poet, and a dark-haired lady. Readers of the sonnets today commonly refer to these characters as the Fair Lord, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. The narrator expresses admiration for the Fair Lord's beauty, and later has an affair with the Dark Lady.
It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical. If they are autobiographical, the identities of the characters are open to debate. Some have suggested that the Fair Youth is the same person as the "Mr. W. H." referred to in the publisher's dedication, possibly William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, one of Shakespeare's patrons. Another argument is that he was a boy actor called William Hughes; this theory, based entirely in the text of the Sonnets themselves, is discussed in detail in Wilde's book "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.". The Rival Poet is sometimes identified with Christopher Marlowe or George Chapman. However, there is no hard evidence whatsoever that any of the sonnets' characters have real-life counterparts. Even the narrator himself could be a fictional device and not a reflection of Shakespeare's own feelings.
Shakespeare's Sonnets are frequently more earthy and sexual than contemporary sonnet sequences by other poets. One interpretation is that Shakespeare's Sonnets are in part a pastiche or parody of the three centuries-long tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets, in which the "madonna angelicata" is exhanged for a young man, or the "fair lady" for a dark lady Template:Fact. Shakespeare also violated many sonnet rules which had been strictly obeyed by his fellow poets: he speaks on human evils that do not have to do with love (66), he comments on political events (124), he makes fun of love (128), he parodies beauty (130), he plays with gender roles (20), he speaks openly about sex (129) and even introduces witty pornography (151).
Sexuality
Most of the sonnets are addressed to the beautiful 'Fair Lord'. A debate has ensued since their publication as to whether these sonnets are homoerotic, and whether this tells us anything about Shakespeare's own sexuality.
The sonnets addressed to the young man are certainly pasionate. In Sonnet 13, the young man is called "dear my love" and Sonnet 15 announces that the poet is at "war with Time for love of you." Sonnet 18 asks "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate," and in Sonnet 20 Shakespeare calls the young man his "master-mistress." The poems refer to sleepless nights, anguish and jealousy caused by the youth. In addition, there is considerable emphasis on the young man's beauty: in Sonnet 20, the narrator theorizes that the youth was originally a woman whom Mother Nature had fallen in love with and, to resolve the dilemma of lesbianism, added a penis ("pricked thee out for women's pleasure"), an addition the narrator describes as "to my purpose nothing." Later in the same sonnet he tells the adolescent to sleep with women, but only to love him: "mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure." The latter line implies that the narrator rules out sexual relations despite his love for the youth. However, in other sonnets addressed to the youth, such as 52, the erotic punning is particularly intense: "So is the time that keeps you as my chest, Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide, To make some special instant special blest, By new unfolding his imprisoned pride."
Not everyone has interpreted these passages as sexual. The poems can be explained as referring to intense friendship, not sexual love. In the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition, Douglas Bush writes,
- "Since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality… we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above the love of women, could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne, and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature". Template:Ref
Bush cites Montaigne, who distinguished male friendships from "that other, licentious Greek love" Template:Ref, as evidence of a platonic interpretation.
Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical but fiction, so that the "speaker" of the Sonnets should not be simplistically identified with Shakespeare himself. Nevertheless, many readers and scholars take the "I" of the Sonnets to be Shakespeare, not least because this first-person narrator declares "my name is Will" (136), as well as punning on the name "Will" elsewhere. Many readers consider the Sonnets to be the closest we can get to Shakespeare's own voice, as opposed to the voices of the characters in his plays.
Despite the alternative interpretations, the poems' orientation disturbed at least one seventeenth century reader: in 1640, John Benson published a second edition in which he changed most of the pronouns from masculine to feminine so that readers would believe nearly all of the sonnets were addressed to the Dark Lady. Benson’s modified version soon became the best-known text. It was not until 1780 that Edmund Malone re-published the sonnets in their original forms. Template:Ref
The question of the sonnets' sexuality was first openly articulated in 1780, when George Steevens, upon reading Shakespeare's description of a young man as his "master-mistress" remarked, "it is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation". Template:Ref Other English scholars, dismayed at the possibility that their national hero might have been a "sodomite," concurred with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comment, around 1800, that Shakespeare’s love was "pure" and in his sonnets there is "not even an allusion to that very worst of all possible vices." Template:Ref
Critics in Continental Europe were also surprised. In 1834, a French reviewer asked, "He instead of she?… Can I be mistaken? Can these sonnets be addressed to a man? Shakespeare! Great Shakespeare? Did you feel yourself authorized by Virgil’s example?"
The controversy continued in the 20th Century. By 1944, the Variorum edition of his Sonnets contained an appendix with the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators. C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" (although he added that his sonnets were still not the poetry of "full-blown pederasty") and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the 16th century literature." Template:Ref
Legacy
Coming as they do at the end of conventional Petrarachan sonneteering, Shakespeare's sonnets can also be seen as a prototype, or even the beginning, of a new kind of 'modern' love poetry. When Shakespeare was rediscovered during the 18th century — and not only in England — the sonnets, even more than the plays, became particularly important in the nineteenth century when rediscovered by Wordsworth. The outstanding cross-cultural importance and influence of the sonnets is demonstrated by the large number of translations that have been made of them. To date in the German-speaking countries alone, there have been 68 complete translations since 1784. There is no major written language into which the sonnets have not been translated, including LatinTemplate:Ref, Turkish, Japanese, Kiswahili, EsperantoTemplate:Ref, and even KlingonTemplate:Ref.
Selected influential 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 some time declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm`d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This is one of the most famous of the sonnets. It is referenced in the films Dead Poets Society and Shakespeare in Love and gave names to the band The Darling Buds and the books and television series The Darling Buds of May and Summer's Lease.
Sonnet 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
The phrase "Remembrance of Things Past" was used for the original translation of In Search of Lost Time, over the objection of Marcel Proust.
Modern editions
- Martin Seymour-Smith (1963) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford, Heinemann Educational)
- Stephen Booth (1977) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Yale)
- W G Ingram and Theodore Redpath (1978) Shakespeare's Sonnets, 2nd Edition
- John Kerrigan (1986) The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint (Penguin)
- Katherine Duncan-Jones (1997) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Edition, Third Series)
- Helen Vendler (1997) The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
- Colin Burrow (2002) The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
- Nigel Tomm (2006) Shakespeare’s Sonnets Remixed (BookSurge)
External links
- The Sonnets – full text and commentary.
- Shakespeare Sonnets with search capabilities
- The Sonnets – plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
- Free audiobook from LibriVox
- Complete sonnets of William Shakespeare – Listed by number and first line.
Notes
- Template:Note A metre in poetry with five iambic metrical feet, which stems from the Italian word endecasillabo, for a line composed of five beats with an anacrusis, an upbeat or unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line which is no part of the first foot.
- Template:Note Shakespeare: La sonetoj (sonnets in Esperanto), Translated by William Auld, Edistudio, ISBN unknown, online advert, verified 2005/02/27
- Template:Note Selection of Shakespearean Sonnets, Translated by Nick Nicholas, verified 2005/02/27
- Template:Note Shakespeare's Sonnets in Latin, translated by Alfred Thomas Barton, verified 2005/02/27
- Template:Note Crompton, Louis, Homosexuality and Civilization, pp. 379
- Template:Note Rollins 1:55
- Template:Note Rollins 2:232-233
- Template:Note Pequigney, pp.64
- Template:NoteWas Shakespeare gay? Sonnet 20 and the politics of pedagogy.
- Template:Note Montaigne, p. 138
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