Shakespeare's Sonnets

Criticism

"If we knew when Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, we should know whether to consider him the last great sonneteer of the sixteenth century or the first of the seventeenth--the zenith of its zenith, or the leader of its decline" (Spiller 176)

"I take it that a Shakespeare sonnet is fundamentally structured by an evolving emotional dynamic...a system in motion, never immobile for long" (Vender, 22).

Shakespeare "is unusually rich in his borrowings of diction and formulas from patronage, from religion, from law, from courtship, from diplomacy, from astronomy, and so on, but he tends to be a blasphemer in all of these realms. He was a master subverter of the languages he borrowed" (Vender, 2).

"The major theme of the sonnets, more powerful even than the times of friendship, love, death, and time, is the deception purveyed by appearance" (Vender, 263).

"The stratagems of the mind's excuses are one of the great themes of the Sonnets, as are--in the best sense--the stratagems of intense speculative thought" (Vender, 381).

"The notorious truism that no two people ever concur in interpreting Sonnets is not cause for despair, but for rejoicing" (D-J 97).

"Critics' uneasiness with (overmastering) passion means an uneasiness with Shakespeare's Sonnets themselves. It is true that there is irony in the Sonnets--both irony openly voiced by the speaker himself and authorial irony suggested at the expense of the (deceived) speaker. But there are also, I believe, sonnets of hapless love--intended as such by the author, expressed as such by the speaker" (Vender, 327).

"One of the reasons we 'believe in' Shakespeare's speaker is that his 'I' is so variously defined" (Vender, 465).

"Because many readers still seek, in the anxiety of reading, a reassuring similarity of patterning among quatrains rather than a perplexing differece, and prefer to think of the Sonnets as discursive propositional statements rather than as situationally motivated speech-acts, we remain condemned to a static view of any given sonnet" (Vender, 492).

"Use of the proverbial about himself by a speaker is always a sign of his re-joining common wisdom, of leaving the error of his former ways..., of acquiescing in the conventional" (Vender, 505-506).

Reciprocity is one of the "directing metaphors" of the sequence (Vender, 546).

"The pressure on Shakespeare's part exerted on the creative imagination of the reader is one factor in the greatness of the Sonnets" (Vender, 578).

"Because the sonnets show a cycle of idealization, infatuation, and inevitable disillusion twice over, once with a male love-object and once with a female (exhausting both possibilities for their speaker) their human psychological import is essentially tragic. (The two mythical sonnets closing the entire sequence treat the cycle in the eternal comedy of Anacreontic parable.) But the moral import of the sequence is mixed. The speaker never reekers from his attachments: the last sonnet to the woman begins 'In loving thee', and the last sonnet to the man opens with 'O thou my lovely boy.' In Christian terms, the speaker shows no 'firm purpose of amendment' for sexual sin in the second sequence, nor does he exhibit, in the first sequence, a resolve to love more wisely in the future. His eye, helpless before the snare of physical beauty, and his soul, sexually aroused by promiscuity itself, are ''past cure. ''Reason seems unlikely to resume governance of either addicted eye or addicted soul" (Vender, 638).

Dedication

KDJ argues that Mr. W-H and the Young Boy are both William Herbert, Ealr of Pembroke. She says: "After three years in which London's public theaters had been closed because of plagues, Shakespeare must have even looking for the best reward possible for his precious sonnets. It is most improbable that he would have wished the book to be dedicated, sentimentally, to some obscure actor or sea-cook (the mythical 'Willie Hughes'), or a penniless kinsman (his infant nephew William Hart, or his presumed brother-in-law William Hathaway)--least of all to 'William Himself' or 'William Shakespeare.' None of these could offer him prestige and protection, or, most crucially, a substantial cash reward" (57). Hervert was Sidney's cousin and a well-established patron of poetry.

"Much has been made of the supposed impropriety of an earl's being addressed as 'Mr.' though Chambers did not feel that 'in such a document there would be anything very out of the way...in the suppression of an actual or courtesy title'" (58). KDJ's argument that the address may not include the title because it was written before Herbert's inheritance is kind of weak, but possible.

More importantly, the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays are dedicated to Herbert and his brother.

Title The genitive title of the sequence distinguishes it from all others of the time period, except for the posthumous publication of Astrophil and Stella. "There were plenty ofof other models for 'genitive' titles...but the application of such a title to a literary, poetic, text by a living writer is distinctly unusual. Its purpose may have been to draw attention to Shakespeare's fame and status" (D-J 86).

Publication

The Sonnets "were entered in the Stations' Register on May, 20th 1609 by Thomas Thorpe as 'a book called Shakespeare's sonnets'" (D-J 34).

However, "it was not until 1780 that the 1609 text was properly instated as the authoritative text" (D-J 43).

Reception

KDJ: "Whereas the early narrative poems were received with immediate enthusiasm, prompting dozens of early allusions, citations, and imitations, the Sonnets seem to have been greeted largely with silence--a silence the more surprising given Shakespeare's literary celebrity" (69).

KDJ says that the Modernist rendition has been "hostile" to the Sonnets, recalling Bunting's desecration of them at the behest of Pound and Starbuck's Space-Saver Sonnets.

Keats: "I need found so many beauties in the sonnets--they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally--in the intensity of working out conceits."

Francis Mere in 1598: "his surged Sonnets among his private friends."

The publication in 1599 by William Jaggard of The Passionate Pilgrime by W. Shakespeare only contains four of his sonnets and may have contributed to the 10 year gap between publications, since most of the poems sucked.

The Sonnets were not re-printed once during Shakespeare's lifetime, despite his fame. Venus and Adonis went through ten re-printings.

There was a "steady decline in interest in or appreciation of the Sonnets during the eighteenth century."

George Steevens, in 1793 edition of Shakespeare's plays: "We have not reprinted the Sonnets...because the strongest act of Parliament the could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service...Had Shakespeare produced no other works than these, his name would have reached us with as little celebrity as time has conferred on...that of Thomas Watson, an older and much more elegant sonneteer."

Henry Hallam (Arthur Hallam's father) in 1839: "There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced [read: homosexual] affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long sequence of sonnets...so many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not a host of other passages attest the contrary."

Oscar Wilde, who invoked them in his own defense during his trial and wrote a short story about Mr. W.H., said that he loved them "not wisely but too well."

Composition

Some of the sonnets must have been written before 1598.1603-1604. Duncan-Jones: "Severe plague outbreak and consequent loss of income make this a plausible time for Shakespeare to have once more to non-dramatic poetry" (Duncan-Jones 12).

1608-1609: "An even more severe plague outbreak...he may have finished work...during this period" (D-J 12).

Sequencing

KDJ argues that "Numerological finesses...suggest either that sonnets already written were subsequently carefully located, or that some were specially written or revised or particular positions in the sequence" (15). She says that "there is good reason to believe that the 1609 Quarto publication of Sonnets was authorized by Shakespeare himself" (33).

The "convention...assumes that the order of the sonnets as we have them is Shakespearean" (Vendler 14)

Form

Shakespeare does not often use tri- or qaudrisyllabic rhymes.

"In spite of the domination of the series by the patterns 4-4-4-2 or 8-4-2, almost every conceivable restructuring possible within fourteen lines is invented by Shakespeare in the course of the sequence" (Vender, 341).

"Though two-line units occur very often in the Sonnets, only a limited number of the poems have as their logical construction seven two-line units; usually at least one of the quatrains spreads itself, logically, over four lines (e.g of the deviation: 4, 36, 75, 133, 70, and perhaps 148)" (Vender, 324)