Shakespeare in Love?

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?’

Consequently, every comma and dash of the sonnets has been subjected to scrutiny, scanned for biographical consequence. This has led to some notable follies. It takes a special kind of insensitivity to suggest, as does the assiduous editor of my New Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, that the lines

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

'may have been apt to a prematurely bald man as the Stratford bust suggests Sh. to have been’, but such statements are not unusual. (Incidentally, the recently unveiled Cobbe portrait shows Shakespeare with a handsome set of locks. But then it might not actually depict Shakespeare.)

In his own introduction to an edition of the sonnets published in 1964, W.H. Auden put the case against such biographical readings:

Probably, more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world. Indeed, they have become the best touchstone I know for distinguishing the sheep from the goats, those, that is, who love poetry for its own sake and understand its nature, from those who only value poems either as historical documents or because they express feelings or beliefs of which the reader happens to approve.

To establish the identity of the Fair Youth or the Dark Lady or the Rival Poet, continues Auden, would be to throw no light at all on the quality or even the meaning of the sonnets. Nor would it matter particularly if Germaine Greer, say, could establish beyond doubt that some of the sonnets are addressed to Anne Hathaway. Indeed, and as Jonathan Bate suggests in his recent (and brilliant) Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare: ‘When Shakespeare’s purpose is to write about the power of art to defeat the ravages of time or the feeling of loss or rejection or disillusionment in love, the identity of the addressee is immaterial.’

Not all critics are so preoccupied. Some—Helen Vendler, Auden himself and, most notably, William Empson—have eschewed the biographical approach in favour of a technical one that treats the sonnets as individual artefacts to be criticised in isolation. The danger of this approach, perhaps, is that context will be forgotten altogether, but this is by no means inevitable. The important thing is to recognise that unless new information comes to light about the identity of W. H., then the identity of W. H. or of anyone else referred to in the sonnets is liable to remain a mystery. The sonnets are all we have and, more important, all we need. Moreover, the question of who is addressed is less important than the question of who is doing the addressing, and this is a literary question not a biographical one. It makes no difference who the Fair Youth is. But the question of who the poet is, of what version of himself he is putting forward, is genuinely fascinating.

It is my contention that the voice of the sonnets is the voice of a poet and not of a lover, or at least that the love expressed in the sonnets is of secondary importance in the overall scheme. In the popular imagination or consciousness, Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love, are even in some sense symbolic of it, such that Cole Porter in ‘You’re the Tops’ compares his lover to a ‘Shakespeare sonnet’. (Then again, he also compares her to Mickey Mouse and a Bendel Bonnet.) But this is something of a simplification. As has been noted, it is very likely that Shakespeare was involved in a bid for patronage. As Bate suggests in Soul of the Age, such bids were apt to conflate or collapse the language of courtship and the language of courtiership. Love poems, in other words, were very often coded bids for patronage or preferment. (Certainly Shakespeare had money on his mind: financial terms pepper the sonnets, such that one imagines the poet unable to tear his eyes from the accounts.) Thus, whatever Shakespeare felt or didn’t feel for this golden-haired boy, the strong possibility that cash was a factor in his motivation should be borne in mind. That this lends a certain tension to the sonnets will, I think, be readily admitted, as indeed will the proposition that this poetic ‘conflict of interest’ may account for the peculiar sense of a double focus in many of the poems, as if the poet were trying to reconcile the need for flattery with his own integrity.

The Fair Youth himself is never described physically, a fact that appears to have caused some friction between the poet and his would-be patron, who seems as a consequence to have transferred his attentions and indeed affections to the Rival Poet. Of course, this adds a layer of mystery to the mystery-enshrouded publication. But as well as adding a layer of mystery, it also lends to the sonnet sequence a certain literary sophistication. For the strong predilection among sonneteers was for precisely the kind of physical inventory—‘your eyes are like sapphires, your lips are like rubies, your teeth are like pearls …’—of which our poet refuses to partake. Nor does Shakespeare merely refuse to rehearse the well-worn sonnet conventions. He is also concerned to challenge them. Sonnet 130, for example, begins: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, / Coral is far more red, than her lips’ red, / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun: / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head …’ Furthermore, and as Bate suggests, this critique of the conventions associated with the sonnet was not confined to Shakespeare’s poetry. It appears to inform his drama, too. In Twelfth Night, for example, Olivia enumerates her own corporeal attributes in what is perhaps a sarcastic allusion to the perfunctoriness of the conventional sonnet (‘item, two lips, indifferent red’). Evidently, Shakespeare was not content merely to go through the poetic motions.

In the Fair Youth sonnets in particular, the love expressed will often strike one as artificial or insincere. Of course, we must tread carefully here: the sonnets are more than four centuries old and it may be that we are ill-equipped to understand the conventions attendant on poetry written by one man for another. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is something bloodless about the Fair Youth poems. For one thing, one cannot discern in these sonnets anything resembling sexual desire. Only in some of the poems to the Dark Lady does one feel the hot breath of authentic passion, as in the sonnet (129) beginning ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ (note, for example, the panting assonance of ‘Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme’). Again, it may be a question of convention. But it may also be that genuine feelings were experienced only fitfully. At the very least, one is forced to admit that much of the praise in the sonnets is perfunctory. There are times, indeed, when Shakespeare sounds like an eighteenth-century Poet Laureate: ‘There lives more life in one of your fair eyes, / Than both your poets can in praise devise.’

It’s possible that Shakespeare found himself trapped by the technical aspects of the English sonnet. If so, he would not be the only one. For whereas the Petrarchan sonnet, which divides very naturally into octave and sestet and has a certain ‘rightness’ to it (such that Don Paterson, in his introduction to 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney, notes its close mathematical correspondence to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, which recur with conspicuous regularity throughout the natural and non-natural worlds), is an incomparable tool for conveying emotion, the English sonnet—three quatrains and a couplet—tends to lend itself to more abstract thought. Indeed, in the hands of inferior poets, the English sonnet tends to become a three-pronged argument and a concluding epigram. Consequently, it can sometimes seem rather glib. As Bate puts it in Soul of the Age: ‘The very form offered an incentive to multiplication and digression that encouraged sonnets to be expressions of their authors’ wit and ingenuity as much as—perhaps more than—outpourings of their real feelings.’

So does the English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet militate against the expression of emotion? No, not necessarily. For one thing the poet can still divide his poem into octave and sestet, retaining the traditional ‘volta’—or change of mood—at about line nine. Here, for example, is Shakespeare himself in one of his most famous sonnets. There is nothing pat, or trite, about this:

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 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 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.

Note how the concluding couplet is not an epigrammatic summary of everything that has gone before but an additional salvo of thought and feeling. Clearly, Shakespeare could, when inspired, use the English sonnet form to excellent and emotional effect. But the point is very few of the sonnets achieve this level of excellence. What, then, is the essential difference between the best and the weakest sonnets and what does this tell us about Shakespeare’s inspiration?

Never less than technically brilliant, it is the technical brilliance of the sonnets that has made them slightly suspect to some ears. Syntactically dense, semantically playful, many are little more than exercises—ingenious conceits ingeniously set out but devoid of genuine sentiment. ‘They seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally—in the intensity of working out conceits,’ wrote Keats, just one of a number of Romantic poets to have noticed a lack of emotion in the sonnets, most particularly in those sonnets—those expressing love—in which emotion is most insisted upon. Conversely, it is precisely those sonnets that tackle subjects other than love, or that tackle the subject of love more generally, that seem to me the most successful from the point of view of authentic emotion. The principal subjects are mortality and posterity, and mortality as it relates to posterity, which is to say the power of art to overcome our inexorable decay.

The importance of this theme is demonstrated by the fact that, in the opening sonnets, Shakespeare’s attempts to convince the Fair Youth to settle down and conceive a son—in order, so he says, that succeeding generations may partake of his preternatural beauty—slowly give way to the theme of poetry’s own capacity to record that beauty. Progeny and poetry are linked explicitly, as in the lines, ‘But wherefore do not you a mightier way / Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time? / And fortify your self in your decay / With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?’ (my italics.) In the next sonnet (17), Shakespeare reiterates: ‘But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice—in it and in my rhyme.’ In sonnet 11, sexual reproduction is linked to the paraphernalia of writing. Nature, writes Shakespeare, ‘carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.’ Just as a man conceives a son who carries his likeness into the future, so the poet, in writing a poem, bestows upon that poem’s subject a degree of immortality. And not only upon the poem’s subject but also upon the poem’s creator, which is to say upon himself. Indeed, this latter point is crucial to an understanding of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which can be read as the cri de Coeur of a poet suddenly and anxiously alive to his significance as a literary artist.

In one sense, all art is an attempt to freeze time, to render a likeness so that it may be revisited or record an emotion so that it may be re-experienced. But of poetry this is especially true, or rather it is true in a special way. The reason for this has to do with its origins. Poetry affords illiterate societies a way of recording information. Rhyme and meter are aids to memory. Perhaps it is only natural, then, that the theme of immortality, and of poetry’s ability to confer immortality, should come up so often in the poetry of the great. From Anonymous to Auden, the notion that poetry represents a sort of stay against eternity is commonly encountered as a theme in its own right.

So too with Shakespeare—the Shakespeare of the sonnets. The sonnets, indeed, are crammed with references to the enduring power—the permanence—of poetry. To take a few examples at random: sonnet 63 concludes with the lines ‘His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green’, while sonnet 100 contains the petition, ‘Return, forgetful Muse, and straight redeem / In gentle numbers time so idly spent’. These lines are from sonnet 55:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

And here, in full, is sonnet 60:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crookéd eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

That this sonnet is one of the best in the sequence and also one of the most impersonal is, in my view, no coincidence. Not until the final line is the Youth afforded a mention. Here, indeed, we find the poet looking past his immediate object to more general themes of death and decay. That this is accompanied by an increase in quality seems to suggest that it is those themes and not the Youth that interest the poet—that the poet experiences the wider focus as something of a liberation. The same may be said of the sequence as a whole. The less personalised the sonnet the better it is.

One clue as to Shakespeare’s state of mind when composing his 154 sonnets is the way he refers, as it were, to his day job. The sonnets are peppered with disparaging references to drama and to make-up in particular, which Shakespeare uses as a metaphor for the kind of sickly art he despises. In sonnet 110, he writes: ‘Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there, / And made myself a motley to the view’—a reference to his appearances on stage. Why he took such a low view of drama cannot be known and so shouldn’t detain us. But that Shakespeare did take such a view is consistent with his deepening interest in non-dramatic poetry. Was Shakespeare thinking of his own posterity? And had such thoughts attached themselves to the sonnets written to his would-be patron? As noted earlier, the sonnets dealing with the theme of poetry’s permanence are more successful when set in the context of death and decay and the passing of time; those that attempt to link the theme to the Fair Youth’s immortality are, in general, less successful. It is likely that many of the sonnets were written in the early seventeenth century. Shakespeare, then, was no longer a young man. That questions of posterity and questions of age should be linked in his mind is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising in the circumstances to find Shakespeare wrestling with the age-old question of poetry’s time-defeating qualities. It is, as Anthony Burgess suggests, ‘the common stock of all poets—the opposition of the moving river to the static stone, the agony of transience, the need to build something on which to rejoice’.

I don’t say Shakespeare wasn’t in love, but I don’t think the 126 sonnets addressed to the Fair Youth convince us that he was. Bate suggests that Shakespeare’s sonnets may have appealed to a courtly milieu in which bisexuality was newly fashionable. Certainly he makes a convincing case. But all any critic can do—all any reader of poetry can do—is listen for the note of authenticity, cast his being towards the poem and wait for the divine afflatus, which comes in suddenly, like a sea breeze. When I do this with Shakespeare’s sonnets, I hear not a lover’s voice but a poet’s, concerned, above all, for the survival of his craft—that fragile, storm-tossed ‘saucy bark’ set free on an ocean of inspiration. For so it must have seemed to him, when the name of Shakespeare was known about town as that of a reasonably respectable playwright but hadn’t yet contracted its aura of artistic infallibility and could still be misspelled by professional printers. Now we are more likely to talk of the ‘proud sail’ of Shakespeare’s verse, as Shakespeare himself describes the efforts of the Rival Poet to woo the Fair Youth. But Shakespeare never had any guarantee that his name would be remembered to history. Or, indeed, that four hundred years on academics would still be mining his sonnets for veiled references to premature hair-loss.