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1.SHAKESPEARE
’
S SONNETS
The Title-page of the first
edition of Shakespeare’s
sonnets
Although Shakespeare is today best known for his plays, his sonnets still
rank among the world’s best-loved poems. Shakespeare’s sonnets were
published for the first time as a collection in 1609, although two (numbers
138 and 144) had previously been printed in a volume of Elizabethan verse
called
The Passionate Pilgrim
(1599). The 1609 collection of sonnets was
dedicated to “Mr. W.H.,” the “only begetter of these . . . sonnets.” The
dedication was signed by “T.T.,” (Thomas Thorpe, the publisher). Thorpe
may have secured a copy of the poems that had been circulating among
Shakespeare’s friends, or he may somehow have obtained Shakespeare’s own
manuscripts. In addition to 154 sonnets, the volume contained “A Lover’s
Complaint.” In this poem, too-little read today, a woman tells a herdsman the
story of her seduction and later abandonment by her lover. The presence of a
“Complaint” in a book of sonnets was a well-recognized practice, and
Shakespeare’s sonnets and “The Lover’s Complaint” were undoubtedly
intended to be read together.
English poet and dramatist William Shakespeare sometimes played with
existing conventions of courtly love in his sonnets. Courtly love sonnets, a
tradition stemming back to 13th-century Italy, often depict a pure love for an
idealized, inaccessible woman. By contrast, in love poems such as sonnet
85
130, Shakespeare describes a far more tangible and imperfect woman. The
songs that appear in Shakespeare’s plays can be sweet, playful, lascivious,
and absurd. Following are a selection of four of Shakespeare’s sonnets and
two of his songs, “Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred” and “Where the Bee Sucks,
There Suck I.”
The first 126 sonnets are apparently addressed to a handsome young
nobleman, presumably the author’s patron. The poems express the writer’s
selfless but not entirely uncritical devotion to the young man.
The next 28 sonnets are written to a “dark lady,”
whom the poet seemingly cannot resist. Another
figure in the sequence is the “rival poet.” Scholars
have spent much time trying to identify the specific
figures the sonnets address, but it is unlikely that
the sonnets are so personal. More likely, the sonnet
offered Shakespeare a structure for experiments in
lyric verse that enabled him to play with familiar
conventions of feeling and poetry. Although no
systematic narrative develops in the sonnets,
there is a thematic link between the “young man”
group and the “dark lady” group. The youth and the
William Herbert, the Earl of
mistress betray the poet, and at one point the author
Pembruck, the nephew, one of the
berates the young man for stealing the dark lady
prototypes of the young man
from him. Miscellaneous sonnets treat various
in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
other themes, most notably the rending effects of
time and the eternalizing possibilities of art. The form of the poems is an
English variation of the traditional fourteen-line sonnet. The lines, which
each have ten syllables, are arranged into three quatrains, or groups of four
lines, and a final couplet of Sir Phillip Sidney, one of the (two successive
lines that rhyme). The rhyme scheme of the sonnets is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. A
theme is developed and elaborated in the quatrains, and a concluding thought
is presented in the couplet. Sonnet 116 is typical of the form and excellence
of the poems:
«Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
86
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved».
The poet himself prophesied in Sonnet 55: “Not marble nor the gilded
monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rime.” The appreciation of the
sonnets’ power and beauty by successive generations confirms this prophecy.
Shakespeare’s sonnets continue to be read and enjoyed, and they remain among
the greatest poetic achievements in the English language.
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