The Sins of the Sonnets

Abstract

Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. Thomas Nelson 1997. 485 pp. $45.00 $16.00 (paper) Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Harvard University Press 1997. 672 pp. $35.00 If Shakespeare's private correspondence fell out of an ancient cupboard tomorrow, with letters from "fair youth" and "dark lady" and reference to the "rival poet," their identities secure beyond doubt, it would not make much difference to reading the sonnets. Perhaps a few would seem more intimately biographical, fragments of the tangled private life of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts laid bare; but interpretations depend little on whom the poems address and which boy or woman the poet wasted his emotions over. Speculation about the missing identities has not lapsed for centuries; and centuries from now scholars will still be raking old ground, raising Southampton at Pembroke's expense, touting some Elizabethan nobody with the initials W. H., savaging scholars who hold deviant views. The scholars will get no more temperate (at least one critic has argued the dark lady was the fair youth, master-mistress Mrs. Shakespeare). Shakespeare's Sonnets was printed in 1609 for Thomas Thorpe, who had published Jonson's Sejanus and Volpone and plays by Chapman and Marston (sometime rivals to Shakespeare and each other, though Shakespeare acted in Sejanus). The print run, which may have been a thousand copies or so, was divided between two bookshops near St. Paul's (one at the sign of the Parrot-today we would call it the Parrot Bookshop). Thirteen copies now survive.* The sonnets had first been mentioned in print a decade before. In 1598, Francis Meres wrote in his field guide to current writers, Palladis Tamia, "the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & honytongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, c it is littered with errors no careful author could have ignored. Since no copy of any further printing exists, Q was probably no rousing success, certainly not the success of Venus and Adonis (1593), the pillow book for young Elizabethans that had reached its tenth printing by 1609. The Sonnets was not reprinted until 1640, and then in corrupt and incomplete fashion. Shakespeare's sonnets are divided into two groups, the first (1-126) addressed to a "fair youth," the much smaller second (127-152) to a "dark lady." These are not the poet's terms, but having grown up in the criticism they are now almost inseparable from it. These enigmatic figures might more accurately be named the "sweet boy" (or "lovely boy") and the "mistress." The sequence closes with two Anacreontic sonnets (153-154), often felt to be un-Shakespearean, followed by the poem "A Lover's Complaint," which may have had nothing to do with the sonnets, though recent critics have strongly argued the contrary. Thorpe dedicated the Sonnets to a Mr. W. H., "THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.THESE.INSVING.SONNETS." Often identified as the fair youth, Mr. W. H. has provided literary criticism with one of its fondest mysteries. Shakespeare's rhetoric was not well adapted to the sonnet. His signature violence of language, the images spinning like plates on poles, rarely survives the sonnets' casuistic wrangle of heartbreak and passion. Auden thought only forty-nine of them perfect. By my count, twentythree have changed English literature (our language wouldn't be the same without them); there are twenty-five others I'd sell my soul for, and dozens that show strange but fragmentary achievement (Shakespeare's humiliations are a poetry in themselves). …