Shakespeare

Hegel said that the great characters of Shakespeare are “free artists of themselves” engaged in fresh and perpetual self-invention; they are surprised by their own genius, just as Shakespeare was surprised when the words of Falstaff issued from his pen. He did not know where the words came from; he just knew that they came. It has become unfashionable in recent years to discuss Shakespeare’s characters as if they somehow had an independent existence, outside the boundaries of the play; but it was not unfashionable at the time. Falstaff and his comic colleagues proved so successful that they were brought back by Shakespeare, for an encore, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

There is perhaps a further connection between Falstaff and Shakespeare. The relation of the fat knight to Prince Hal has often been taken as a comic version of the relationship between Shakespeare and the “young man” of the sonnets in which infatuation is succeeded by betrayal. The twin “act” of older and younger man in that sonnet sequence has also been related to Shakespeare’s longing for his dead son. These were some of the forces in his life that, in this period, propelled him towards a supreme poetic achievement.

CHAPTER 52 You Haue Not the Booke of Riddles About You. Haue You?

Are Shake-speares Sonnets authentic representations of Shakespeare’s inner experience, or are they exercises in the dramatic art? Or do they exist in some ambiguous world where both art and experience cannot be distinguished? Could they have begun as testimonies to real people and real actions, and then slowly changed into a poetic performance to be judged on its own terms?

There were many models for their composition. Shakespeare was entering a crowded arena where poets and poetasters regularly published sequences of sonnets to various real or unreal recipients. The unofficial publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, in 1591, was an indication of the demand for such works; the pirated edition was withdrawn but in its preface the sonnets were described by Nashe as “a paper stage strewed with pearl … whiles the tragicomedy of love is performed by starlight.” ¹ This suggests the overwhelming theatricality or artificiality of the genre, for which the expression of private passion was by no means a necessary condition. They were primarily designed to display the wit and ingenuity of the poet, and to test his ability in handling delicate metres or sustained conceits. The publication of Sidney’s collection was followed by Samuel Daniel’s Delia, Barnaby Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe, William Percy’s Coelia, Drayton’s collection of fifty sonnets entitled Idea’s Mirror, Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa, Henry Constable’s Diana and a host of other imitators. Sonneteering had become the English literary fashion.

Many of these sonneteers characteristically make use of legal imagery in the course of their poetical love-making. This may perhaps be part of their vocabulary as members of the various Inns of Court, but it suggests some instinctive doubling of law and love in sixteenth-century England. Shakespeare’s own sonnets are filled with the language and imagery of the law. But his mercantile and legalistic mind is at odds with his generous muse, just as his plays often stage the contention of faith and scepticism; from that strife emerges his greatness.

Of course he may not have wanted his sonnets to be printed; there was, after all, an interval of approximately fifteen years between composition and publication. Like Fulke Greville, whose sonnet sequence Caelica languished in a drawer, he may have considered them to be private exercises for a select audience. But this does not imply that they are accounts of an authentic passion; Fulke Greville’s poems are governed by a literary rather than a real mistress.

One sonneteer, Giles Fletcher, admitted that he had embarked upon the poetic enterprise, “only to try my humour”;² that may also be the explanation for Shakespeare’s performance. There is evidence that throughout his career he was inclined to experiment with different forms of literature simply to prove that he could successfully adapt them to his purposes; there was a strong streak of competitiveness in his nature, already manifested in his overreaching of Marlowe and of Kyd, and the sonnet had in this period become the paramount test of poetic ability. So Shakespeare used many of the stock themes – the beauty of the beloved, the cruelty of the beloved, the wish to confer upon him or her the immortality of great verse, the pretence of age in the poet, and so on – and gave them a dramatic emphasis while at the same time handling the form of the sonnet superbly well. He sat down and wrote the best sonnets of all.