Sonnets Essay

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Whether or not the pronoun "I" is explicitly present in their individual texts, all of the 154 verse pieces that comprise Shakespeare's sonnets are presumably narrated by a single persona. The narrator of the sonnets has a distinctive character and appears to partake in an ongoing story that revolves around his Platonic relationship to a "fair youth" and is later complicated by his carnal relationship with a "dark lady." Although the pendulum has swung back and forth over centuries of interpretation, throughout the history of Shakespeare sonnet criticism we find a deep division between critics who presume that there is an autobiographical basis to these poems and those holding that the narrator is a fictional device. The former are encouraged in their identification of the narrator as the poet himself by the fact that the sonnets are the only work in which Shakespeare wrote in the first person singular. Beyond this, however, the collective evidence that it is Shakespeare himself speaking about his own actual life in the sonnets is purely circumstantial and internally inconsistent. The predominant (but not universal) opinion among modern Shakespeare scholars is that the sonnets are to be read apart from their creator's biography. Nevertheless, the issue here has not been conclusively settled, the autobiographical thesis is intriguing and a brief consideration of the "I" problem in the Sonnets furnishes us with insight as to how they have been presented and read over the ages.

While they were first published as Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609, it is fairly well established that this set of 154 poems was written in its entirety by Shakespeare during an early period in his career, probably over a succession of years between 1592 and 1598. The Shakespeare who wrote the Sonnets would therefore be a relatively young man in his late twenties or early thirties, having already written and staged a few plays, but turning to verse for the private enjoyment of private patrons as a means of cashing in on the sonnet fad that swept through the Elizabethan court in the 1590s. It is the claim of those who identify Shakespeare as the narrator "I" of the sonnets that actual persons and events from this period in the Bard's life are represented in these poems. Working on that premise, many scholars have sought to identify the "fair youth" addressed in the first 126 sonnets, the "dark lady" addressed in the following 28 (or 26) sonnets, and the "rival poet" to whom periodic references are made in the "fair youth" poems. Shakespeare himself left but a single clue in a cryptic dedication of the 1609 collection to a "Mr. W.H." (although there is some doubt about the authenticity of even this slight inscription). On the basis of this fragment, ingenious efforts have been made to "find" the presumed patron of the Sonnets among Shakespeare's contemporaries, William Herbert (the Earl of Pembroke) and Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton) being the prime candidates. Affirmations concerning a possible relationship between Shakespeare and one of these noblemen have been sought from biographies and other records of these men, particularly Southampton, but the correspondences are not clear enough or strong enough to justify equating any historical person with the young man of the Sonnets. On even thinner bases, similar labors have been devoted to discovering the respective real identities of the "dark lady" and the "rival poet." From a complementary angle, scholars have looked to the text of the Sonnets for allusions to current events of the 1590s, constructing elaborate arguments to sketch out historical parallels. These too have fallen well short of proof. When the early twentieth-century Shakespeare scholar Edmund K. Chambers stated, "more folly has been written about the Sonnets than about any other Shakespearean topic," he undoubtedly had these autobiographical endeavors in mind.

As for Shakespeare himself, he left no autobiography, diary or personal record of his life, nor did any of his contemporaries provide any first-hand account of it, the first comprehensive life of Shakespeare being written more than one hundred and fifty years after his death. Anecdotes and oral traditions, deductions from historical chronicles, and occasional traces of what may be autobiographical allusions in his plays, have helped to flesh out Shakespeare's life, but sharp disputes persist among historians over the validity of many these details.

Turning to the sonnets themselves, the most direct (but still suspect) connection between Shakespeare and the narrative persona occurs in #135 and #136, both of which include the italicized word/name "Will" at multiple points, the latter concluding "for my name is Will." Some scholars have detected poetic allusions to historical persons and events in the Sonnets. Thus, for example, the narrator's reference to the "mortal moon" in line 5 of Sonnet #107 is taken by many scholars as an allusion to Queen Elizabeth, England's monarch in the 1590s who was associated with the virgin moon goddess Diana, line 5 through 8 of this piece poetically describing affairs of state in the later part of her reign. These are, however, mere shards in support of the assertion that Shakespeare is writing about his own life in the Sonnets.

The strongest (but far less) direct textual evidence for identifying the narrator of the sonnets with Shakespeare is vocational. Shakespeare was a poet, the narrator is a poet, poetry is a primary subject in more than two dozen of the sonnets. We know further that, like all Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare produced his non-dramatic verse for private patrons and was in competition with other talented artists for personal financial sponsorship and "affection." These same general circumstances are described by the narrator as his own, for he depends on the "fair youth" for support and frequently mentions vying with his rival. Moreover, the sonnets contain many references to the stage at large and the Elizabethan theater in particular, most notably in Sonnets #110, #111, and #112, where the narrator admits that he has gone to the theater and appeared as an actor on its stage.

Beyond this, there is the story that seems to unfold off-stage. It appears to have a cohesive plot that is partially summarized in Sonnet #144. The plot is thinly reflected in the tandem sonnet cycles, but its broad outlines are plausibly realistic. As some scholars have suggested, if this running story line was purely fictional, Shakespeare would have made it more coherent and dramatic. Thus the omissions, vagaries and absence of clear-cut turning points in the plot are taken by proponents of the autobiographical school as indirect support for their stance that Shakespeare and the narrator of the sonnets are one and the same. On the other hand, we know with a high degree of confidence that Shakespeare had not yet reached middle age when he composed the sonnets, while the narrator of the sonnets seems to be a significantly older person in the autumn of his years.

Allowing that the issue of whether Shakespeare is the narrator of the sonnets or even referring to facets of his life through the narrator aside, we know that it was during the Romantic Age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that critics first became preoccupied with an autobiographical "I." Thus, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth expressed the predominate view of the Sonnets during his life-time, that here "Shakespeare unlocked his heart." It was in 1780 that Edmund Malone published the first edition of the Sonnets complete with notes in which he encouraged his readers to approach these poems as self-representations. The eighteenth century was a period in which diaries, journals, and letters were highly popular literary forms, readers being interested in texts reflecting the lives of their authors. This focus spilled over into Shakespeare scholarship, and the working presumption was that the narrator and the author of the sonnets shared an identity.

But by the mid-point of the nineteenth century, the tide turned against autobiographical readings of the Sonnets, and it did so largely on moral grounds. The Sonnets make reference to a number of acts that the Victorians found offensive, including adultery, perjury, and (possible) homosexuality, the narrator acknowledging in Sonnet #112, for example, that his own brow is stamped with "vulgar scandal." Not only did the suggestion that Shakespeare himself was involved in such transgressions offensive to moralistic Victorians, it was at odds with the literary historian James Boswell's assertion that about Shakespeare that "at no time was the slightest imputation cast upon his moral character." More broadly, the received image of Shakespeare's character was that of a gentle, benevolent man while the narrator of the sonnets exhibits an array of ugly traits, from self-pity to envy. Nineteenth century Shakespeare critics separated the author from the text of the Sonnets, reading them as literary exercises and philosophical discourses.

Today, while the vestiges of debate remain (and there are still attempts to prove an autobiographical basis for the sonnets), the issue has been subordinated altogether. The tendency of modern Shakespeare criticism, as with modern literary interpretation as a whole, is to view the Sonnets as a text that exists independently of its author. The regnant approach is to focus on how the formal and semantic properties of the sonnets are designed to evoke a response from the reader, with the reader supplying (or even creating) the core meaning of the text. From this perspective, the question of whether the narrator is in any way or to any extent Shakespeare writing behind the mask of a fictional persona is essentially irrelevant.