Shakespeare's sonnets

Title page from 1609 edition of "Shake-Speares Sonnets"

Dedication page from The Sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets, or simply The Sonnets, is a collection of poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. They were probably written over a period of several years. All 154 poems appeared in a 1609 collection, entitled SHAKE-SPEARE's SONNETS, comprising 152 previously unpublished sonnets and two poems, numbers 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") and 144 ("Two loves have I, of comfort and despair"), that had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim.

The Sonnets were published under conditions that have become unclear to history. Although the works were written by Shakespeare, it is not known if the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, used an authorized manuscript from him, or an unauthorized copy. Also, there is a mysterious dedication at the beginning of the text wherein a certain "Mr. W.H." is described as "the onlie begetter" of the poems by the publisher Thomas Thorpe, but it is not known who this man was. The dedication refers to the poet as "Ever-Living", a phrase which has fueled the Shakespearean authorship debate due to its use as an epithet for the deceased (Shakespeare himself used the phrase in this way in Henry VI, part 1 (IV, iii, 51-2) describing the dead Henry V as “[t]hat ever-living man of memory”). Authorship proponents believe this phrase indicates that the real author of the sonnets was dead by 1609, whereas Shakespeare of Stratford lived until 1616. Adding further to the authorship debate, Shakespeare's name is hyphenated on the title page and on the top of every other page in the book.

The first 17 sonnets are written to a young man, urging him to marry and have children, thereby passing down his beauty to the next generation. These are called the procreation sonnets. Most of them, however, 18-126, are addressed to a young man expressing the poet's love for him. Sonnets 127-152 are written to the poet's mistress expressing his love for her. The final two sonnets, 153-154, are allegorical. The final thirty or so sonnets are written about a number of issues, such as the young man's infidelity with the poet's mistress, self-resolution to control his own lust, beleaguered criticism of the world, etc.

Dedication to Mr. W.H.

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton:
Shakespeare's patron at twenty one years of age, one candidate for the "Fair Lord" of the sonnets.

The only edition of the sonnets published in Shakespeare's lifetime, the 1609 Quarto, is dedicated to one "Mr. W.H.". The reality, identity and age of this person remain a mystery and have caused a great deal of speculation.

The dedication in full reads:

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTVRER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.

- T.T.

'T.T.' stands for Thomas Thorpe, the publisher; it is not certain whether Thorpe or Shakespeare wrote the dedication. The capital letters and periods following each word were probably intended to resemble an Ancient Roman inscription, thereby giving a sense of eternity and magnitude to the sonnets. In the sonnets, Shakespeare often declares that the sonnets will outlast such earthly things as stone monuments and inscriptions. Sonnet 55 states,

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme,

126 of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed to a young man (often called the "Fair Youth"). Broadly speaking, there are two branches of theories concerning the identity of Mr. W.H.: those that take him to be identical to the youth, and those that assert him to be a separate person.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of contenders:

• William Herbert (the Earl of Pembroke). Herbert is seen by many as the most likely candidate, since he was also the dedicatee of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works.
• Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton). Many have argued that 'W.H.' is Southampton's initials reversed, and that he is a likely candidate as he was the dedicatee of Shakespeare's poems Venus & Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Southampton was also known for his good looks, and has often been argued to be the 'fair youth' of the sonnets.
• Sir William Harvey, Southampton's step-father. This theory assumes that the fair youth and Mr. W.H. are separate people, and that Southampton is the fair youth. Harvey would be the "begetter" of the Sonnets in the sense that it would be he who provided them to the publisher.
• William Himself (i.e. Shakespeare). This theory was proposed by the German scholar D. Barnstorff, but has not found much support.
• A simple printing error for Shakespeare's initials, 'W.S.' or 'W. Sh'. This was suggested by Bertrand Russell in his memoirs, and also by Don Foster in "Master W.H., R.I.P." (PMLA 102, pp. 42-54) and by Jonathan Bate in The Genius of Shakespeare. Bate supports his point by reading 'onlie' as something like 'peerless', 'singular' and 'begetter' as 'maker', ie. 'writer'.
• William Hall. Hall was a printer who had been responsible for printing other work that Thorpe had published (according to this theory, the dedication is simply Thorpe's tribute to his colleague and has nothing to do with Shakespeare). This theory, started by Sir Sidney Lee in his A Life of William Shakespeare (1898), was continued by Colonel B.R. Ward in his The Mystery of Mr. W.H. (1923). Supporters of this theory point out that the full name "William Hall" appears if the word "all", immediately following the initials in the dedication, is added to them. Under his initials, William Hall had edited a collection of the poems of Robert Southwell that was published by George Eld, Thorpe's printer for the Sonnets volume. There is also documentary evidence of one William Hall of Hackney who signed himself 'WH' three years earlier, but it is not certain that this was the same man as the printer.
• Willie Hughes. The 18th century scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt first proposed the theory that the Mr. W.H. (and the Fair Youth) was one "William Hughes", based on presumed puns on the name in the sonnets. The argument was repeated in Edmund Malone's 1790 edition of the sonnets. The most famous exposition of the theory is in Oscar Wilde's short story "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.", in which Wilde, or rather the story's narrator, describes the puns on "will" and "hues" in the sonnets, and argues that they were written to a seductive young actor named Willie Hughes who played female roles in Shakespeare's plays. There is no evidence for the existence of any such person.
• William Haughton, a contemporary dramatist.
• William Hart, Shakespeare's nephew and male heir. Hart was an actor himself and never married.

In his 2002 Oxford Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, Colin Burrow argues that the dedication is deliberately mysterious and ambiguous, possibly standing for "Who He", a conceit also used in a contemporary pamphlet. He suggests that it may have been created by Thorpe simply to encourage speculation and discussion (and hence, sales of the text).

Structure

The sonnets are each constructed from three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter (a meter used extensively in Shakespeare's plays) with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg (this form is now known as the Shakespearean sonnet). The only exceptions are Sonnets 99, 126, and 145. Number 99 has fifteen lines. Number 126 consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked with italic brackets; 145 is in iambic tetrameters, not pentameters. Often, the beginning of the third quatrain marks the "turn", or the line in which the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany. This is sometimes known as the volta.

Characters

Most of the sonnets are addressed to a beautiful young man, a rival poet, and a dark-haired lady. Readers of the sonnets today commonly refer to these characters as the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. The narrator expresses admiration for the Fair Youth's beauty, and later has an affair with the Dark Lady. It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical. If they are autobiographical, the identities of the characters are open to debate. Various scholars, most notably A. L. Rose, have attempted to identify the characters with historical individuals.

Fair Youth

Main article: Shakespeare's sexuality

The 'Fair Youth' is an unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. The poet writes of the young man in romantic and loving language, a fact which has led several commentators to suggest a homosexual relationship between them, while others read it as platonic love.

The earliest poems in the collection do not imply a close personal relationship; instead, they recommend the benefits of marriage and children. With the famous sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") the tone changes dramatically towards romantic intimacy. Sonnet 20 explicitly laments that the young man is not a woman. Most of the subsequent sonnets describe the ups and downs of the relationship, culminating with an affair between the poet and the Dark Lady. The relationship seems to end when the Fair Youth succumbs to the Lady's charms.

There have been many attempts to identify the Friend. Shakespeare's one-time patron, the Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton is the most commonly suggested candidate, although Shakespeare's later patron, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, has recently become popular [1]. Both claims have much to do with the dedication of the sonnets to 'Mr. W.H.', "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets": the initials could apply to either Earl. However, while Shakespeare's language often seems to imply that the 'friend' is of higher social status than himself, this may not be the case. The apparent references to the poet's inferiority may simply be part of the rhetoric of romantic submission. An alternative theory, most famously espoused by Oscar Wilde's short story 'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.' notes a series of puns that may suggest the sonnets are written to a boy actor called William Hughes; however, Wilde's story acknowledges that there is no evidence for such a person's existence. Samuel Butler believed that the friend was a seaman, and recently Joseph Pequigney ('Such Is My love') an unknown commoner.

The Dark Lady

Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to a woman commonly known as the 'Dark Lady' because her hair is said to be black and her skin "dun". These sonnets are explicitly sexual in character, in contrast to those written to the "Fair Youth". It is implied that the speaker of the sonnets and the Lady had a passionate affair, but that she was unfaithful, perhaps with the "Fair Youth". The poet self-deprecatingly describes himself as balding and middle-aged at the time of the affair.

Many attempts have been made to identify the "Dark Lady" with historical personalities, such as Mary Fitton or the poet Emilia Lanier, who was Rowse' favoured candidate. Some readers have suggested that the reference to her "dun" (a dull, grayish, brown color) skin and "black wires...on her head" suggests that she was black (for example in Anthony Burgess's novel about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun). Many people, however, continue to maintain that the Dark Lady is merely a fictional character who never really existed in real life; they suggest that the "darkness" of the lady is not intended literally, but rather represents the "dark" forces of physical lust as opposed to the ideal Platonic love associated with the "Fair Youth".

William Wordsworth was unimpressed by these sonnets. He wrote that,

These sonnets, beginning at 127, to his Mistress, are worse than a puzzle-peg. They are abominably harsh, obscure & worthless. The others are for the most part much better, have many fine lines, very fine lines & passages. They are also in many places warm with passion. Their chief faults, and heavy ones they are, are sameness, tediousness, quaintness, & elaborate obscurity.

Ngaio Marsh's book Death at the Dolphin features a playwright, Peregrine Jay, who portrays a sexual relationship between the Dark Lady and Shakespeare in his latest work.

The Rival Poet

The Rival Poet is sometimes identified with Christopher Marlowe or George Chapman. However, there is no hard evidence that the character had a real-life counterpart. The Poet sees the Rival as competition for fame and patronage. The sonnets most commonly identified as The Rival Poet group exist within the Fair Youth series in sonnets 78-86. Shakespeare also violated many sonnet rules which had been strictly obeyed by his fellow poets: he speaks on human evils that do not have to do with love (66), he comments on political events (124), he makes fun of love (128), he parodies beauty (130), he plays with gender roles (20), he speaks openly about sex (129) and even introduces witty pornography (151).

Legacy

Coming as they do at the end of conventional Petrarachan sonneteering, Shakespeare's sonnets can also be seen as a prototype, or even the beginning, of a new kind of 'modern' love poetry. During the eighteenth century, their reputation in England was relatively low; as late as 1805, The Critical Review could still credit Milton with the perfection of the English sonnet. As part of the renewed interest in Shakespeare's original work that accompanied Romanticism, the sonnets rose steadily in reputation during the nineteenth century.

The outstanding cross-cultural importance and influence of the sonnets is demonstrated by the large number of translations that have been made of them. To date in the German-speaking countries alone, there have been 70 complete translations since 1784. There is no major written language into which the sonnets have not been translated, including Latin, Turkish, Japanese, Kiswahili, Esperanto, and even Klingon.

The sonnets are often referenced in popular culture. For example in a 2007 episode of Doctor Who, entitled The Shakespeare Code, Shakespeare began a good-bye to Martha Jones in the form of Sonnet 18, referring to her as his dark lady. This is intended to indicate that Martha is the famed Dark Lady from these sonnets.

Selected sonnets

Below are several selected sonnets.

Sonnet 18

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.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair some time declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This is one of the most famous of the sonnets. It is referenced in the films Venus, Dead Poets Society, Shakespeare in Love, Clueless, and the Doctor Who episode "The Shakespeare Code". It also gave names to the band The Darling Buds and the books and television series The Darling Buds of May and Summer's Lease.

Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restored and sorrows end.

The phrase "Remembrance of Things Past" was used for the original translation of In Search of Lost Time, over the objection of Marcel Proust.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Sonnet 154

The little Love-god lying once asleep

Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,
Whilst many nymphs that vow'd chaste life to keep
Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand
The fairest votary took up that fire
Which many legions of true hearts had warm'd;
And so the Generall of hot desire
Was sleeping by a virgin hand disarm'd.
This brand she quenched in a cool well by,
Which from Love's fire took heat perpetual,
Growing a bath and healthful remedy
For men diseased; but I, my mistress' thrall
Came there for cure, and this by that I prove,

Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.

Modern editions

Legally, the sonnets (like all of Shakespeare's work) are in the public domain. This has prompted them to be reprinted in many editions.

• Martin Seymour-Smith (1963) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford, Heinemann Educational)
• Stephen Booth (1977) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Yale)
• W G Ingram and Theodore Redpath (1978) Shakespeare's Sonnets, 2nd Edition
• John Kerrigan (1986) The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint (Penguin)
• Katherine Duncan-Jones (1997) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Edition, Third Series)
• Helen Vendler (1997) The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Colin Burrow (2002) The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
• Nigel Tomm (2006) Shakespeare’s Sonnets Remixed (BookSurge)

See also

• George Bernard Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets

Pop culture

Shakespeare's sonnet Dark Lady has variously been attributed to both Uhura (SNW story If I Lose Thee...) and Martha Jones (Doctor Who episode The Shakespeare Code).

External links

• The Sonnets – Compare two sonnets side-by-side, see all of them together on one page, or view a range of sonnets (from Open Source Shakespeare)
• The Sonnets – Full text and commentary.
• The Sonnets – Plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
• Shakepeare's Sonnets Overview of each in modern English
• Free audiobook from LibriVox
• Complete sonnets of William Shakespeare – Listed by number and first line.
• Gerald Massey - 'The Secret Drama of Shakspeare's Sonnets (1888 edition)
• Discussion of the identification of Emily Lanier as the Dark Lady
• Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up "Remix" Shakespeare's sonnets
• 'The Monument' by Hank Whittemore a new interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets