When we talk about Love: Shakespeare's Sonnets

 

O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, first published in 1609, were written over a period of at least ten years and were in all likelihood passed around court in manuscript form before they were consolidated into the 154-poem sequence that has been handed down to us. Critics usually divide the sequence into three parts. Sonnets 1-17 are addressed to a young male patron and encourage him to marry and have children, sonnets 18-126 explore the poetic speaker’s homoerotic desire for this young man, and in 127-152 the amatory focus shifts to the speaker's sexual relationship with a “Dark Lady.” The sequence closes with two sonnets that loosely adapt classical allegories about Cupid. This general division, while useful, can misrepresent the sequence—obscuring the complex range of relationships depicted in the poems and too often erroneously assuming that the sonnets reflect Shakespeare's “real” life and loves.

The first 17 sonnets, which set the tone for the entire sequence, for example, are directed toward the mysterious “W.H.” of the dedication and promise him poetic immortality. The joke of these poems is, of course, that Shakespeare refuses to name the young man he ostensibly immortalizes in verse—leaving scholars today still scratching their heads when it comes to the question of the identity of the young man. Similarly, the intense homoeroticism of the sonnets addressing “the master mistress of my passion” should not be read as an invitation to speculate on Shakespeare’s sexual proclivities any more than we should believe, as Dr. John Ross writes, in the Journal of Clinical and Infectious Diseases, that “Shakespeare’s Writings Indicate He May Have Had Syphilis.” As one critic points out, on the basis of the “evidence” put forth by Ross, we might as easily assert that Shakespeare was a woman, and quite possibly Queen Elizabeth herself.

Renaissance poets did not share our assumptions about narrative, style, and language. While we tend to value originality, "sincerity," direct speech, a clear storyline with a point, and true to life realism, Renaissance writers shared none of these values. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the novelty of the story was not nearly as important as the virtuosity of the technique with which one told it. Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe, for example, characterized these tightly structured 14-line poems written in iambic pentameter as “infinite riches in a little room.”

Also, authorship in the Renaissance was primarily governed by a patronage system, which meant that when authors wrote for publication, they did so to curry favor with those who had the means to support them. In Shakespeare’s day, the formal conventions of Renaissance poetry reflected the ethos of the Elizabethan court. Elizabeth I inspired an atmosphere of highly stylized and politically-inflected adulation. Courtiers vied for the coveted attention of the queen by composing a flood of artistic works in her honor, ranging from Spenser's The Faerie Queen to the famous Armada Portrait. Sincere love and admiration was rarely the motive behind the fierce production of these artistic celebrations of Elizabeth as a quasi-mythical figure. Instead, art was a battleground upon which the game of political intrigue was played out by Elizabeth and her courtiers.

In short, our conception of love poetry as a sincere effusion of natural feeling scribbled out in the heat of passion and despair was not one that Renaissance poets shared. Given the stylistic formality and highly politicized aspects of the genre, Shakespeare's Sonnets should be read as a remarkably comprehensive presentation of erotic possibility.

--Kathy Romack, Assistant Professor of English, University of West Florida