Third Monday Musing

Shockspeare

By Eric Meub

You probably know everything you need to know about Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Not too long ago I thought I did too. My Norton Anthology of English Poetry contains thirty of them. (My Complete Poems and Plays of William Shakespeare includes them all, of course, but I have a hard time turning such thin pages, so I favor the Norton.) As of a month or so ago, I had read probably half of the thirty, including some skimming. In the numbering of the Sonnets one can see that Shakespeare wrote quite a few (154 of them, in fact, when I glanced at the notes), but thirty were enough for me. Could there really, I thought, be anything profoundly different in the other 124? Shakespeare’s Sonnets are such a cornerstone of culture: don’t we all know them, to some extent, the way we know the Mona Lisa?
    I enjoy period drama. Shakespeare therefore comes up a lot. There’s that nervously charming scene in Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility when Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet) and Mr. Willoughby (Greg Wise) are getting to know one another over Sonnet 116:

                    … love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken….

And then there’s that silliest of Oscar-winners, Shakespeare in Love, where young William (Joseph Fiennes) sends his famous Sonnet 18 to Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) by her own disguised hand:

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….

That’s what a Shakespeare sonnet is, I always thought: an elegantly patterned declaration of love, full of metaphor and allusion, written from a master poet to his lady love. Well, I’ve lately found that I am much in error on the latter. Sonnets 18 and 116 (along with 124 others) were explicitly written to a man: a young man, in fact, and exceedingly attractive.
    At this point you’re either saying “This is very old news, Eric,” or “You’re making this up.” These are just about the only choices. You’ve either known this forever or you are as stunned as I was.
    Indeed, I am not making it up. There are dozens of books, perhaps hundreds, on this very subject. It turns out to be an immense field of literary scholarship. And, in all these countless volumes, there is more than just a critical consensus on the matter: the opinion is nearly unanimous that Shakespeare wrote 126 love poems (over 80% of the Sonnets) to a man (although there’s significant wriggling over the definition of “love poem”). Indeed it’s hard for any reader to dissent from this finding, as the evidence is right there on the page. Let me amend that: the evidence is on the page of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. That evidence is distinctly not on the page of my Norton Anthology.

Anthologies are the modern-day equivalents of palimpsests, in which an author is preserved by having most of his or her work erased. Anthologies that contain the Sonnets would seem to do as little damage to Shakespeare as they do to other anthologized authors. But erasure is sneaky. With other authors – Browning, let’s say – the anthologized works are taken from volumes of poetry published in his lifetime, or preserved after his death. For the most part, these poems stand alone, and although originally grouped for publication, can easily stand alone – or next to different neighbors – in an anthology.
    Sometimes the groupings of poems are more carefully arranged in a publication, often contradicting their chronology of composition. The collection’s architecture lends contrast or meaning to the poems: one thinks of Yeats. But even here, the poems are not shorn of dignity or meaning by being presented in isolation. When anthologies quote from longer works, of course, like those of Milton, Wordsworth, or Pope, the fact of extraction is made clear in the layout and notes.

   But this is not the case with Shakespeare’s Sonnets. While mention is sometimes made of the original collection, each Sonnet is almost uniformly treated as an individual production. The critical linkages between pairs of Sonnets, or among groups, are ignored, as is the logic behind the overall sequence. References to gender and theme lose their resonance from one Sonnet to another. Sonnet 18 can thus be read as a declaration of love to a woman – with no backstory whatsoever – as indeed it usually is. Granted, there are as many opinions behind the nature of Shakespeare’s sequential logic as there are experts, but without this grounding, the Sonnets are easily misunderstood.
    Shakespeare himself may have anticipated this trend, and, as many of the Sonnets – like Sonnet 18 above – make no mention of gender, he may have been content to let the sentiments find alternate future targets. Be that as it may, the topic has fueled significant theorizing on the part of scholars. Helen Vendler’s book on the Sonnets is perhaps the best of recent years, but since I wish to solicit her help in an upcoming meditation on Emily Dickinson, I will turn to one of the most recent offerings in the field: Why Lyrics Last, by Brian Boyd.

If many of the Sonnets make no reference to gender, how do we know that they were indeed written to a male instead of female recipient? First of all, there is one aspect of Shakespeare’s sonnet-series that is conclusive: in the first 126 sonnets, whenever the gender of the recipient is mentioned (many times), it is always male, never female. In the last 28 sonnets, when gender is mentioned, it is always female. The first 126 Sonnets are therefore often referred to as the Fair Youth Sonnets, and the last 28 as the Dark Mistress Sonnets.
    What set the number of the first sequence at 126? According to Boyd, “The Elizabethans regarded the number 63, known as ‘the grand climacteric,’ rather than the biblical three-score-and-ten, as the conventional span of years in a human life.” Shakespeare doubles that number as part of his theme of “doubling” the life of the young man he loves, either through the man’s fathering of a child, or through the immortalization of Shakespeare’s art. Sonnet 126, the last of the Fair Youth series, has only twelve lines, instead of the requisite fourteen. It is in the form of an envoi, closing that portion of the sequence before Sonnet 127 echoes Sonnet 1 in introducing a new subject of admiration.
    The second proof of the recipient’s masculinity lies in the nature of the subject matter. In the first seventeen Sonnets, for instance, Shakespeare (or, more correctly, the Poet) is obsessed with convincing the young man to father a child. Sonnet 1 gives us this:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory;
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thy own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
    Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
    To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

As Boyd says, “a first time reader, knowing the poet is male, and that the sonnets are usually addressed to beloveds, would assume that Shakespeare addresses a woman – especially as he implicitly classes the addressee as one of the ‘fairest creatures’ – until the oxymoronic ‘tender churl’ of line 12 indicates that ‘thou’ must be male.” This maleness of the addresses is seemingly bemoaned in Sonnet 20:

A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
    But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
    Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

The pun on the word “prick” makes it clear which “one thing” Nature added. What is strange is that, because of the tangled syntax in the final six lines, it is almost possible to read this as a poem about a woman instead of a man: a woman gifted perhaps with a superior intellect (according to the prejudices of the times) that is a delight to her female comrades, let’s say. Read in the company of its fellows in the sequence, however, there can be no doubt about the subject’s masculinity.
    At the same time, this Sonnet makes it clear that Shakespeare is neither gay nor bisexual by any conventional terms. In spite of his love for – or obsession with – the young man, he finds the fellow’s genitals inconvenient, and to his “purpose nothing.” Meanwhile, elsewhere in the series, we find the Poet and the Young Man sharing a mistress, in Sonnet 42:

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her because thou know’st I love her,
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suff’ring my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss:
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross.
    But here’s the joy: my friend and I are one;
    Sweet flattery! The she loves but me alone.

The conventional reader, while dismayed at the poet’s priorities of affection, may be comforted here by the word “friend.” But Shakespeare often quite explicitly refers to the young man as his lover, to which the Pelican Shakespeare attaches this note: “the word had a broad range of meaning, from ‘dear friends (of either sex)’ to ‘seekers or recipients of patronage’ to ‘sexual partners,’ and everything in between.” I would like to ask the Pelican editors if they truly believe Shakespeare wrote 126 painstakingly constructed sonnets to a “dear friend.” On this count, at least, the lady doth protest too much.
    Regarding the matter of patronage, however, the editors may have a point. In Sonnet 26, Boyd finds “the note of exaggerated deprecation of self and exaggerated exaltation of the other common in the dedicatory epistles of late Elizabethan poets to their patrons.”

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit;
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought (all naked) will bestow it,
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tattered loving
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect.
    Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
    Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets represent the culmination of a literary genre that was first perfected by Petrarch and then amplified by Sidney, Spenser, and others. But, as Boyd rather clinically notes, this is more than a literary hobby, it is tied to sexual selection: “Should a woman have any one of her comparatively few eggs fertilized, she will normally be tied to the child’s gestation for nine months and to its rearing for years. She therefore has good reason to be extremely selective about whose sperm she lets near her eggs.” The sonnet sequence is thus the literary equivalent of an animal courtship exhibition. The Poet must prove himself by very important criteria: immediate devotion and long-term staying power. In Petrarch’s sonnet sequence, the lady is “valued not only for her unparalleled beauty but also for her resistance, her selectivity, her unparalleled virtue, even while Petrarch demonstrated his exceptional persistence, through all those sonnets, as if in proof of his incomparable commitment.” The idea is that persistence and intelligence in poetry equates to persistence and intelligence in safeguarding the woman and her children.
    If that is the norm, then what is Shakespeare up to, writing reams of such gorgeous stuff to a young man? Boyd contends that he wrote his Sonnets and arranged the sequence to maximize their lyric intensity. To do so he stripped them of all their baggage, of anything that might conventionalize the emotions depicted through association with the work of previous sonneteers. First of all he chose literary recipients who are the converse of the prototype: a woman who is not fair, a fair one who is not a woman. He then subverted all hints of a narrative plot – a strategy that is contrary, not only to the Petrarchan model, but to all the rest of Shakespeare’s copious oeuvre. A Sonnet about the Fair Youth’s infidelity, for instance, is followed by a rhapsody of praise, as if the prior indiscretion had never occurred. A key ingredient to this non-narrative is, of course, constant surprise. The readers of his sequence, expecting a lady love, would be much astonished from the very first page. Finally, Shakespeare chose themes utterly incongruous to the sonnet model: fatherhood, wantonness, explicit sexuality, etc.
    By thus overturning conventions of narrative, theme, and addressee, Shakespeare could command a more attentive reading of emotional flux. The sequence was thus his great departure from his verse and dramatic narratives, his opportunity to place under a lens, one at a time, the variations of love, respect, jealousy, humility, and all the expectations and setbacks of romantic attachment, brought into sharper relief by the unconventionality and emotional complexity of the context he has staged.
    The Young Man’s identity doesn’t much matter. In many of his Sonnets, Shakespeare claims his art will make the youth immortal. But the boy is barely described, while Shakespeare’s art in immortalizing him can truthfully only claim to succeed in immortalizing Shakespeare himself. To conclude Sonnet 18:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breather or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

    Of course, there is another option to all the theorizing: one can imagine, as Shakespeare wrote the line above, that he was looking in a mirror. Now that would be shocking.

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Copyright © 2014 by Eric Meub

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