Shakespeare by Paul Edmondson

Author:Paul Edmondson [Edmondson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Criticism
ISBN: 9781782831037
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2015-05-06T14:00:00+00:00

‘SUGARED SONNETS’

Shakespeare’s Sonnets continue to inspire complicated reactions as well. It has too often been assumed that those published in 1609 represent a coherent sequence that tells the story of Shakespeare’s life. Many readers find it impossible to disassociate the first person of the Sonnets, the ‘I’, from Shakespeare himself. The matter is complex. The ‘I’ both is and is not Shakespeare some or all of the time; art both is and is not autobiographical.

A dominant and still popular reading strategy (since the late eighteenth century) has been to try to identify real-life protagonists in the Sonnets – ‘the young man’, ‘the dark lady’ and ‘the rival poet’ – and then to find people in Shakespeare’s life who might take those roles. But this is a limited, simplistic and short-sighted way of approaching some of the greatest, most varied and nuanced poems in the English language. In fact only twenty of them are unambiguously addressed to a male subject (real or imagined) and only seven of them definitely concern a female subject, but even these poems need not be addressed to the same male and female subjects. The remaining one hundred and twenty-seven Sonnets might be addressed to either a male or a female – that is, they have a universal application – or they are abstract and addressed to no one (for example Sonnets 94, 116 and 146). Even though Sonnet 144 mentions two loves, one of ‘comfort’ (‘a man right fair’), and one of ‘despair’ (‘a woman coloured ill’), that does not mean that only those two lovers (real or imagined) should be applied biographically to all one hundred and fifty-four poems, but this is what most critics have done for around two hundred and fifty years. Instead, we ought to be able to imagine as many different addressees as there are sonnets for them, since the terms of address within them vary.

Close analyses of their language and style suggest that the Sonnets were not written in the order in which they are printed which contradicts any notion that they represent an intended sequence. Rather, they are an anthology. In 1598, the clergyman and scholar, Francis Meres, referred to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’ in his book Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury. Either Meres himself was one of Shakespeare’s ‘private friends’, or he had caught sight or heard of some sonnets by Shakespeare being passed around literary London. The Sonnets were not published until a decade later and may or may not include the poems to which Meres refers. In any case, Shakespeare could have been revising his poems at any point up until their appearance in 1609.

Far more life-giving than any biographical reading is to accept Shakespeare’s Sonnets as poems written on diverse occasions, some to or for real people (like Sonnet 128 perhaps), others as poetical essays (such as Sonnet 116). Some of them might well include personal confessions (perhaps Sonnet 36); others might be sketches for speeches that Shakespeare never augmented or set into a fully dramatic context.

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