Shakespeare

Certain sequences are united by mood and tone rather than by story, and there are various lacunae that make interpretation more like supposition. It is not even clear that the sonnets are addressed to the same persons throughout. One of them, No. 145, appears to have been written to Anne Hathaway at a much earlier date, and there may be other unknown recipients. And of course many of them may have been addressed to no one in particular. In certain places Shakespeare seems to be taking on the conventional themes of sonneteering – the eternal conflicts between Body and Soul, Love and Reason, are just two examples – in implicit competition or rivalry with other poets. The last sonnets on the theme of the “Dark Lady” have been read as an exercise in anti-sonneteering, in which the conventions of the form are used to overturn the usual subject matter. There are hints of supreme dramatic levity here, in the sheer triumph of inventiveness that these sonnets evince. Shakespeare was already well known for his gift of dramatic soliloquy – it was one of his additions to the play on Sir Thomas More – and it is perfectly natural that he should take that form of internal debate and project it upon a sequence of poems. He was trying out different possibilities within the range of human feeling. We might say that, in the sonnets, he imagined what it would be like to be in the situations he describes. If a consummate actor wrote poetry, this is what it would be like.

There are very clear associations between the sonnets and some of the earlier plays, which seem to clinch the argument that Shakespeare began his sequence in the mid-1590s at the time when the fashion for sonneteering was at its height. There are particular associations with The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost and the disputed Edward the Third. A dramatic replay of the scenario in the poems, where a compromised poet seeks the love of a high-born young man, occurs in the relationship between Helena and Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well; it is one of the patterns that Shakespeare’s imagination formed. There are of course complete sonnets in Love’s Labour’s Lost, suggesting the complementarity of Shakespeare’s invention; in that play there is also a dark beauty, Rosaline, who may or may not be related to the unfaithful lady of the poetic sequence. We can only say with certainty that Shakespeare was playing with the dramatic possibilities of a black mistress. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, also, Valentine renounces Silvia for the sake of his friendship with Proteus; it is another formative situation replicated in the sonnets. When in the ninety-third sonnet the narrator refers to himself behaving “like a deceived husband,” he is following the pattern of many of Shakespeare’s plays.

The poems are perhaps best seen as a performance. All of them are informed by a shaping will, evincing an almost impersonal authority and command of the medium. Shakespeare seems to have been able to “think” and write in quatrains without effort, which presupposes a very high degree of poetic intelligence. No one would have read such a sequence for autobiographical revelations – they were quite foreign to the genre – and at this late date it would be anachronistic to look for any outpouring of private passion or private anguish. It was in fact only in the early nineteenth century, at the time of the Romantic invention of the poetic selfhood, that the sonnets were considered to be vehicles for personal expression. We may recall Donne’s words on his own love poetry: “You know my uttermost when it was best, and even then I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.”⁴ It is of some interest that, on five occasions in his plays, Shakespeare associates poetry with “feigning.” So on the sonnets themselves we may remark with the Clown in As You Like It (1582) that “the truest poetrie is the most faining.”

What had perhaps begun as a private exercise, commissioned by the Pembrokes, then became an enduring project; sonnets were added at intervals, some of them being dated as late as 1603, until they were finally arranged for publication by Shakespeare himself. In fact the first reference to Shakespeare writing “sugred Sonnets among his private friends”⁵ appeared in 1598. Some of them were then printed in an anthology of 1599, entitled The Passionate Pilgrime by W. Shakespeare; it was suggested at a later date that Shakespeare had been “much offended” with the publisher of this unofficial or pirated edition “that altogether unknowne to him presumed to make so bold with his name.”⁶ Shakespeare may have been particularly irate because the volumes contained other, manifestly inferior, poems that were not composed by him.