Shakespeare in Love?

Richard King December 21

Shakespeare’s sonnets have long been the subject of endless conjecture, not only for their poetry and technical brilliance, but also for the biographical details behind them. There are dozens of theories about the beautiful ‘Fair Youth’ and the mysterious ‘Dark Lady’ to which the verses are addressed, including speculations about the poet’s sexuality and intent, as well as his romantic or platonic love. In the latest issue of Meanjin, Richard King looks at these arguments anew, and makes his own case for this much-loved volume of work. You can read the full essay on our editions page – a brief extract is below.

Four hundred years ago this year, a book of poems appeared in Quarto (which is to say in a small edition about the size of a modern paperback), probably without the author’s knowledge and almost certainly without his consent. This book, which is often referred to as Q, consisted of 154 sonnets and bore an oblique dedication or inscription: TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSUING SONNETS MR W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH. This dedication is signed T. T., for Thomas Thorpe, the publisher. About the identity of Mr W. H. there has been much informed conjecture, and not a little wild speculation. About the author of the poems, however, there is very little disagreement. He, of course, is William Shakespeare. Or, as the printer prefers, Shake-Spear.

Even before one gets to the poems a number of mysteries present themselves. Who was Mr W. H.? William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather? And what did ‘onlie begetter’ mean? Inspiration for? Procurer of? Even ‘ever-living poet’ isn’t without its difficulties, as it wasn’t customary to refer to a living poet as ‘ever-living’. Might it refer to Ovid, or to Horace? Many academics have built their careers on attempting to answer such questions as these—more, it seems, than have built their careers on an appreciation of the sonnets themselves. As Michael Schmidt writes in Lives of the Poets, ‘no title page in history has been more pored over’.

These preliminary mysteries are as nothing, however, to the mysteries presented by the sonnets themselves, which appear to fall into two distinct groups. Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to an unknown young man, the Fair Youth; sonnets 127 to 154 to a mystery woman, the Dark Lady. The poet addresses both in amorous language, and both are accused, or appear to be accused, of sexual infidelity, probably, though by no means certainly, with each other. Elsewhere in the poems, Shakespeare alludes to, but does not elucidate, some scandal or controversy, and also refers to a Rival Poet, whose attempts to win the Fair Youth’s affections rouse our poet to jealous self-defence. (It’s probable that both Shakespeare and his rival, whatever ‘love’ they felt for the Youth, were also engaged in a bid for patronage.) In short, the sonnets are an emotional jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces obstinately but tantalisingly missing. Or rather, the sonnets would appear to be comprised of a number of different jigsaw puzzles. And while some pieces can be fitted together, the whole remains a stubborn conundrum. ‘There are many footprints around the cave of this mystery,’ wrote Sir Walter Raleigh in his life of Shakespeare; ‘none of them pointing in an outward direction.’

So little is known about Shakespeare’s life that the playwright is effectively anonymous, a fact that has sanctioned all manner of theories—some of them wilfully controversial—as to Shakespeare’s true identity. Naturally, then, the appeal of the sonnets is linked to their biographical content and the critic-as-sleuth is much in evidence. From A.L. Rowse’s Stakhanovite unearthings in William Shakespeare and Shakespeare the Man to students thrilled by the possibility that Shakespeare was gay or at least bisexual, the explicators are thick on the ground. Little wonder that writers of fiction have also taken up the subject. In ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, Oscar Wilde speculates on the identity of the mystery dedicatee, while Anthony Burgess, in Nothing Like the Sun (which takes its title from sonnet 130), suggests that the Dark Lady may have been of African origin. Nor was Burgess under any illusions as to the prurient character of such investigations. As he put it in a magazine article: ‘[I]s there one person living who, given the choice between discovering a lost play of Shakespeare’s and a laundry list of Will’s, would not plump for the dirty washing every time?’

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