Shakespeare: A Life (31 page)

speare (so far as we know) lacked any such military credentials as
those of two brave sonneteers who praised the earl: Barnabe Barnes,
two years before he wrote his sonnet to Southampton, had joined the
army expedition to Dieppe; and Gervase Markham was to have a captaincy
in Ireland when Southampton became Essex's General of the Horse.

In Sonnets 1-17, Shakespeare at any rate does not vaunt his
originality. He neither flatters a patron's learning, nor links him with
a vain, naïve young man. But in praising mutable human beauty, he
tests the language of praise while avoiding panegyric staleness, and
so pays tribute to a reader's good taste before pledging loyalty to
one of implicitly high rank:

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit;
Duty so great which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare in wanting words to show it. . . .

(Sonnet 26)

A 'Lord' of culture might wonder if the tired, well-worn sonnet
form
could any longer be fresh, a suitable vehicle for a poet's 'wit'. By the 1590s the form was becoming
passé.
Shakespeare writes with a sense that sonnets are indeed toys, little
games in which a mystifying poet (aided, if possible, by a publisher's
mystifications) pretends to unlock autobiographical secrets
'consecrated to silence' in an inner self.
²¹
He derides sonneteers in his plays, and lightly mocks 'wailful
sonnets' as early as Two Gentlemen. In a sense he had grown up with
sonnets: Wyatt's and Surrey's sonnets were popular in his boyhood. He
knew Thomas Watson's versions of some of Petrarch's and Ronsard's
sonnets, and Spenser Ruines of Rome, with its pleasant, fairly close
versions of Joachim Du Bellay's allusive sonnets on time and the past
in
Les Antiquités de Rome.
Spenser Ruines was of 1591. In that
year, Sidney's brilliant sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella
appeared, five years after Sidney's death, along with twenty-seven of
Daniel's smooth sonnets to Delia in a pirated edition with Nashe's
exuberant preface.

In this ' "Theater of pleasure"', wrote Nashe of the Astrophil lyrics,

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'the tragicommody of love is performed by starlight' and 'you shall find a paper stage
strewed
with pearle'.
²²

But in the deluge of English sonnets that followed, the paper-stage
became soggy. A new, wittily acerbic poetry of argument by Inns of
Court coterie poets with young John Donne at the forefront did not
bode well for the sonnet vogue. Daniel in his lyrics to Delia, for
example, had offered Shakespeare a good example of a smooth, tonally
fine English Petrarchan manner:

Seeke out some place, and see if any place
Can give the least release unto thy griefe.

Autentique shall my verse in time to come,
When yet th'unborne shall say, 'Loe where she lyes,
Whose beautie made him speake that else was dombe.'
²³

But Daniel soon despaired over that 'naked' style, and thought of
himself as an old-fashioned Elizabethan. Drayton tried to 'harden' his
own sonnets in repeated revisions. Even Meres's praise of 'sugred
Sonnets' --
sugared
meaning smooth or graceful -- would have
seemed outmoded to some at Holborn, or in the west of London, by 1598.
When Shakespeare's lyrics resurfaced in a second (pirated) edition in
1640, their editor touted them as being no More than 'Serene, cleere
and eligantly plaine', and made a virtue of outmodedness.
²⁴

Well alert to literary fashion, Shakespeare nonetheless found an old
lyric genre congenial. He does not invent a new form, but uses the
English or Surreyan form which George Gascoigne had defined in '
"Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse"' in The
Posies ( 1575), a revision of A Hundreth sundrie Flowres printed two
years earlier: 'some thinke that all Poemes (being short) may be called
Sonets', wrote Gascoigne,

as indeede it is a diminutive worde derived of
Sonare,
but yet I can beste allowe to call those Sonets whiche are of
fouretene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables. The firste
twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse meetre, and the last
twoo ryming togither do conclude the whole.
²⁵

Katherine Duncan-Jones thinks that another passage in Gascoigne's
'notes' may have caught Shakespeare's eye. This is likely in view of

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Sonnet 130 ('My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun'), though such
a lyric transforms any suggestion in a source. 'If I should undertake
to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman', declared Gascoigne, 'I would
neither praise hir christal eye, nor hir cherrie lippe, &c. For
these things are
trita & obvia
. . . I would undertake to
aunswere for any imperfection that shee hath, and thereupon rayse the
prayse of hir commendacion.'
²⁶

Shakespeare borrows from other sonneteers. He even imagines rival
poets in Sonnets 78-86, but without evoking Barnes, Markham, Chapman,
Marlowe, or any others known to us; his nameless rivals belong to a
strategy of praise for a youth who grants access to a truer, purer
language than other poets use. The Sonnets are too paradoxical and
mixed to be labelled as either 'fictions' and 'literary exercises', or
as straightforward 'biographical revelations'. Helen Vendler calls
attention to 'the successive intellectual position-taking' which is a
feature of them, and yet, as she suggests, what counts is a pressure of
inwardness, or the poet's ability to transform idea into intense
experience.
²⁷
Certainly these poems take us inside Shakespeare's mind, and the real
importance of the Sonnets in his life is that they became a means of
developing his artistic sensibility. In this theatre of the mind it is
rehearsal time, as he tries out this and that, tests his style, moods,
and perceptions, brings some lyrics to the highest level of his art,
or leaves others as simpler experiments. His Sonnets partly account
for a new lyricism in his plays, and also for the More individuated
verse that he uses to give depth to his dramatis personae, and so,
especially in the 1590s, for his stunning progress as a dramatist.

Most of the first 126 sonnets focus on a lovely youth while painting
their speaker's -- or Poet's -- portrait. The topic of childbearing dies
away, as the Poet declares love's urgency. He lives for the youth, no
one else, and shares a mistress with that gentle thief: 'Take all my
loves, my love, yea, take them all' (Sonnet 40).

The lyrics are self-effacing almost to the point of masochism, oddly
troubled in emotion under smooth surfaces, and as their syntax

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becomes More complex they suggest a rather over-responsive author,
easily pained, weary of his faults, but unable to endure a friend's
disloyalty. Though pleased or touched by simple banalities of nature,
and by his mind's eye's image of the youth, he is oddly removed from
real people; he feels while observing. Adoring from a distance he is
nearly tranquil, or only at the mercy of his intellect's questioning
pictures; to be involved closely in reciprocal feeling is to know his
own worthlessness along with disquiet, turmoil, or despair. To be sure,
despair belongs to the sonnet vogue. Shakespeare's sonnets are More
flexible and varying, also More parodying, subtle, and intelligent
than those of his rivals. He sees much, holds to rather little, and
contradicts nearly everything he can say about time, love, the youth,
or the self.

In no sonnet sequence of
the 1590s is there much narrative continuity, and Shakespeare's
triangular love-story of a Poet who loves a youth and a Dark Woman
(who in their own affair betray him) is a slender one. Far More
elaborate than that 'story' are stylistic and thematic links between
groups of sonnets. To increase the psychological interest of yearning,
the author gives it a homoerotic or, at times, bisexual aspect.
Shakespeare delights in sexual ambiguity and his little parable in
Sonnet 20 is odd enough (one imagines) to stun the lovely boy's
brains. As the Poet's 'master-mistress', the youth is told he was
'first created' as a woman,

Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

Nature in her doting at first shows homoerotic feeling, which perhaps
seems natural enough to the author, but then, inclined to be
heterosexual, she gives 'one thing', or a penis, to the boy, though even
after this event the Poet's feelings remain sexual. And if never the
boy's possessor, he is 'proud as an enjoyer', as he says with sexual
innuendo:

Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure;
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starvèd for a look.

(Sonnet 75)

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The effect is to universalize his feeling without loss of context, and
to picture a deep yearning in all human love, both male and female.

Instead of describing the youth Shakespeare has the novel aim of
writing' an equivalent beauty into his lyrics. So he draws on a lucid
simplicity learned from the stage, and on imagery of the seasons, often
with irony as his Richard does. He catches the rhythm of nature
famously at his best as in Sonnet 18 ('Shall I compare thee') or writes,
with less irony and More passion:

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!

(Sonnet 97)

Or he reaches pathos in an opening line, 'From you have I been absent
in the spring', and develops it in speaking cadences and severely
simple, graphic details. Almost as often multiple meanings coalesce,
check, or reinforce each other, as in the variant words,
substance,
shadow,
and
shade
in Sonnet 53, which has the syntactical clarity of his limpid style.
Elsewhere he can include meanings that contradict themselves and find
no resolution.

He also begins to
reveal the price he pays to write as he does, and the oddities of his
imagination and memory. He exaggerates feeling; but Tudor drama rested
on the ability of poets to plumb recesses of motivation that are
obscure, and feeling, of every kind, was a guide. He can bring human
loss, debilitating grief, and dead and lamented friends to bear on
ardour. 'Thy bosom is endearéd with all hearts', the lovely boy is
told,

Which I by lacking have supposéd dead,
And there reigns love, and all love's loving parts,
And all the friends which I thought buriéd.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie!

(Sonnet 31)

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Even if it is a poetic conceit that the lovely boy is a 'grave' of
love, the lines offer an unforced view of memory. For Shakespeare,
memory has concentrative and animating effects; those 'supposed' dead
or 'thought' buried, as it were, return. They seem reborn, because
what was once felt for them is recovered forcefully in memory, and
this emotive force has creative uses as in picturing the boy or the
fond Poet's ardour. If Shakespeare's memory works in this way, things
'removed' in time or space have startling freshness for him, and his
creative resources are immense. Anne Shakespeare is in the Sonnets
apparently, since the turmoil of his courtship (for example) is
memorially recoverable as he writes of love and betrayal.

Is the self-effacing artist, in some way, a victim of the imagined
being or emotion into which the past momentarily pours? The lovely boy
is fickle, but the Poet is obsessed with his own faults, his
selfconceit or worn face, 'Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity'
(Sonnet 62). 'Being your slave' and 'your vassal', as the Poet repeats,
'O let me suffer' (Sonnets 57-8). Parted from any sight of the youth,
he is subject to restless, petty moods, or feels 'outcast' and 'all
alone', almost self-despising, and summons up regrets:

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.

(Sonnet 30)

This in the language of patronage may imply that a patron's love or aid
is needed for one's well-being; indeed the melancholy in the Sonnets
is often conventional -- but their anxiety, restlessness, and sense of
time lost are not.

Death is a
promise of stasis and of deliverance from hope, desire, and shame
alike. An elegiac note in the Sonnets was to surprise John Keats, but
the author's tone is seldom More assured than when he takes up death's
law,

But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away

(Sonnet 74)

or church-bells ringing out death, as in plague-time,

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No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world

(Sonnet 71)

or death's bleak, beautiful season with a possible allusion, after all, to 'our ruined monasteries':

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.

(Sonnet 73)

Yet the Poet's odd exhilaration belies any death-wish; he tirelessly
forecasts his demise to play on a boy's shallow heart. And images of
death work as symbols of thematic integration which the Poet's splendid,
varying reflections do not quite achieve: he imagines a time 'When
all the breathers of this world are dead' (Sonnet 81) and the lovely
boy -- his follies of less account -- will 'live' in lyrics that never
deny his beauty. These sonnets rest in no other less ironic truth; and
the author perhaps acknowledges the moral failure he sees in their
tentativeness, and in his inability to hold fast to anything but a
picture of removed, faulty beauty. 'My name be buried where my body
is', writes Shakespeare, 'For I am shamed by that which I bring forth'
(Sonnet 72).

That would not have hurt
him in the eyes of a noble patron, and in Sonnets 127-52 -- mainly to
the Dark Woman -- he is implicitly harder on himself. His sexuality
is perhaps More overt; he might be obsessed with sexual experience
since he has included bawdy puns even in poems on ideal love. In a
degrading affair and unable to break off his liaison, the Poet has
ruminated nearly to 'madness'. His Dark Woman is a composite portrait,
with details of her colouring or eyebrow mourners' echoing Sidney's
seventh sonnet to Stella. We hear of her in incongruous reports. She
can be 'thy sweet self' -- or she cups her hand over the virginal's
jacks prettily -- but in a lightly or ( More often) mordantly joking
perspective she is also ugly, with her dun breasts, sallow face, and
cosmetics, 'black as hell', dangerous, vile, and whorish, a 'bay where
all men ride' with so foul a face as to prove Cupid a blind fool, and
love a 'false plague' or self-deceiving disease.

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