Containing some of the greatest lyric poems in English literature, Shake-speares Sonnets are not just the easy love sentiments of "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." Many of the poems are bleak cries of emotional torment and spiritual exhaustion. They tell a story of the struggle of love and forgiveness against anguish and despair. It is this tragic portrait of human love that makes the sonnets immortal.

The Shakespearean Sonnet

The sonnet form evolved during the high Italian Middle Ages, most famously in the vernacular lyrics of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). The form spread through Spain and France, and was skillfully refined by the French "Pléiade" poets Joachim DuBellay (1522-1560) and Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585).

The book sized collection of sonnets, or sonnet cycle, was a familiar lyric genre at the end of the Renaissance. For precedents Shakespeare could look to the French sonnet cycles of Ronsard, Du Bellay, and in particular the two short but remarkable sonnets cycles of Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563); and in English to the cycles by Philip Sydney (1554-1586) and many minor writers such as Richard Field and John Davies.

French and Italian poets favored the "Italian" sonnet form — two groups of four lines, or quatrains (always rhymed a-b-b-a a-b-b-a), followed by two groups of three lines, or tercets (variously rhymed c-c-d e-e-d or c-c-d e-d-e). This condensed five rhyme palette (a-e) creates a sonorous music in the vowel rich Romance languages, but in English the scheme can sound contrived and monotonous, particularly in a series of sonnets on the same theme:

Q1		Divers doth use, as I have heard and know, When that to change their ladies do begin, To mourne and wail, and never for to lin, Hoping thereby to pease their painful woe.		a b b a
Q2		And some there be, that when it chanceth so That women change and hate where love hath been, They call them false and think with words to win The hearts of them which otherwhere doth grow.		a b b a
T1		But as for me, though that by chance indeed Change hath outworn the favor that I had, I will not wail, lament, nor yet be sad.		c d d
T2		Nor call her false that falsely me did feed, But let it pass, and think it is of kind That often change doth please a woman's mind.		c e e
"Divers doth use" by Sir Thomas Wyatt [c.1540]

Shakespeare followed the more idiomatic rhyme scheme that Philip Sydney used in the first great Elizabethan sonnet cycle, Astrophel and Stella (published posthumously in 1591). This scheme interlaces the rhymes of two pairs of couplets to make a quatrain, then builds the whole sonnet of three differently rhymed quatrains and a concluding couplet:

Q1		From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty's rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory:		a b a b
Q2		But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.		c d c d
Q3		Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament, And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest thy content, And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:		e f e f
C		Pity the world, or else this glutton be, To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.		g g

The Shakespearean sonnet affords two additional rhyme endings (a-g, 7 in all) so that each rhyme is heard only once. This not only enlarges the range of rhyme sounds and words the poet can use, it allows the poet to combine the sonnet lines in rhetorically more complex ways. Shakespeare often gave special emphasis to the break between the second and third quatrains (equivalent to the major break between the 8 quatrain lines and the 6 tercet lines in the Italian sonnet), but he also paired and contrasted the quatrains in many other ways, creating a great range of argumentative or dramatic effects.

Shakespeare invested the couplet with special significance. It often summarizes or characterizes the musings of the three quatrains in a sardonic, detached or aphoristic voice, standing in some way aloof from the more turbulent and heartfelt outpouring of the quatrains.

Stages of Text and Context

Study of the syntax, choice of words and allusions to contemporary events in Shakespeare's sonnets suggests that the poems were brought together as a cycle around 1603-1604, the period of Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Othello. However, some of the earliest sonnets were perhaps composed c.1593, the sonnets addressed to a sensual woman (the "dark lady" sonnets) echo passages in Love's Labour's Lost, written c.1594 and revised in 1597, and the sonnets addressed to a young man (the "fair youth" sonnets) were most likely written in 1597. Overall, the emotional conflicts the sonnets describe seem to date from throughout the 1590's. Because all the poems were likely revised right up to the time of the quarto's publication in the summer of 1609, the completed cycle stands as the cumulative reflection from Shakespeare's maturity on passions that flowered over a decade earlier in his life.

The focus of the sonnets' homoerotic devotion was most likely William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630), a nephew of the poet Philip Sydney and the "W.H." of the dedication in Shake-speares Sonnets by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. Herbert was a prominent courtier during the reign of James I and a munificent patron of the literary arts (the Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays is dedicated to him, and he was a sponsor of the dramatist Ben Jonson). Herbert was also (as a contemporary attests) "immoderately given up to women," a confirmed bachelor who was briefly imprisoned in 1601 for making pregnant and then refusing to wed Mary Fitton, a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth.

In the summer of 1597 Herbert would have been 17 years old and likely under pressure from his parents to marry Bridget Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. This makes it plausible that Shakespeare, age 33 at the time, initially sought to attract a patron's attention by composing for the young bachelor the first 17 sonnets (one for each year of Herbert's life) on the theme "from fairest creatures we desire increase." These formed the seed of the cycle that expanded through subsequent additions.

An obscure Stationer's Register entry hints that Shakespeare took steps to publish some of the sonnets in 1600, perhaps in response to the unauthorized appearance of two "dark lady" sonnets (138 and 144) in William Jaggard's miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). But no volume appeared. Shakespeare held the poems in manuscript until an oppressive plague epidemic (1606-10) curtailed theatrical performances and pushed him to seek supplemental publishing income — and perhaps a gift from the tacit dedicatee — by sending the collection to press.

If Shakespeare sought remuneration or fame in publishing his lyrics, he was disappointed. The poems went unacknowledged by Herbert, sold poorly, were not reprinted intact for over 70 years, and (with the exception of a few admirers) were neglected, misunderstood or disparaged by readers for the next two centuries. This despite signs in the text itself that Shakespeare wanted the 1609 quarto to immortalize both his poetical gifts and his relationship to his noble patron.

Readings and Misreadings

The long neglect of the sonnets seems to have been caused by their portrayal of homosexual love and heterosexual lust, their sometimes bitter tone and dark imagery, and by their thoroughgoing repudiation of many sonnet conventions — the same qualities that brought Shakespeare admirers during the Romantic literary movement of the early 19th century.

In the sonnets Shakespeare transforms the literary stereotypes of the time — the anguished lover and the idealized, unattainable beloved. Jacobean sonnets and epigrams had already trivialized these conventions in a mannerist excess of wit and irreality, but Shakespeare goes the other direction, stripping away the conventions with unrelenting realism.

Where formerly the lover sang to the pale moon, the limpid fountains, the brief rose of spring and the wounding child god of Love, Shakespeare shows a lover burdened by age, toil, and regrets — sad for lost friends and failed achievements, weary of gossip and scorn, sick with futility, ready to flee "this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell." The lover never invokes Christian faith or redemption; solace comes from the transient beauties of the world and from the lover's abiding sense of his own merit. His senses are fallible but his intellect is strong — though it often bends the truth to justify and feed his passion.

Two loves polarize the poet's world, and here again convention is transformed. Where traditionally the sonnet beloved was a chaste, haughty and fair complexioned goddess, Shakespeare's poet is bound to a charming but depraved nobleman and a promiscuously tormenting "dark lady." The desires that the poet can satisfy in his commerce with the woman only sicken and degrade him. Ideals he hopes to see embodied in the "fair youth" are betrayed by the youth's "common" and vicious character. As a result, the lover's mind sickens with the same moral grief and sexually fouled obsessions that torment King Lear. Yet in response to these degredations and betrayals, the poet affirms his belief that his constancy, humanity, and the power of his verse — his spirit in words — will triumph against time and decay. This is the vision of love and faith that the sonnets immortalize, a vision that the pathetic realism makes even more radiant.

This rugged affirmation of love's power is fatuously marginalized if we read the poems as merely homosexual or erotic true confessions. The trials Shakespeare creates for his poet — his fictional identity — bite much deeper.

To see the homoerotic allusions in context, consider Michel de Montaigne's love for his friend Étienne de la Boétie and the inconsolable grief he felt many years after la Boétie died:

For in truth, if I compare all the rest of my life—though by the grace of God I have spent it pleasantly, comfortably, and (except for the loss of such a friend), free from any grievous affliction, and full of tranquillity of mind...—if I compare it all, I say, with the four years which were granted me to enjoy the sweet company and society of that man, it is nothing but smoke, nothing but dark and dreary night. Since the day I lost him, I only drag on a weary life. And the very pleasures that come my way, instead of consoling me, redouble my grief for his loss.... We went halves in everything; I was already so formed and accustomed to being a second self everywhere that only half of me seems to be alive now (Essais: On Friendship).

This passage — which obviously parallels the core despair of the sonnets — is not homosexuality in the erotic way, but something entwined with the pursuit of spiritual, cultural and masculine ideals: rebirth in an admirable brother. It's beside the point to say that sodomy was a mortal sin in the Renaissance. By focusing on sexuality or impiety, we kill this manly virtue with a modern misinterpretation.

It's important to keep in mind that most of the sonnets are not explicit as to whether the beloved is a "fair youth" or a "dark lady" (as confirmed by the easy quotation of "fair youth" poems in a heterosexual context). Though the synopsis below refers to the "fair youth" explicitly, the poems acquire a deeper resonance if we read them as describing the perilous course of love in a transient and degrading world as it is lived and felt by the lover — not as it is focused on a specific love object.

The Story the Sonnets Tell

At the opening of the cycle, the poems bear witness to the virtue that the "fair youth" could exert through his influence over so many hearts, lives and careers. This is the opening into the poet's love. Physically superb, radiantly youthful, politically ascendant, socially powerful, the fair youth represents nearly everything that Shakespeare's culture valued in external life accomplishments and courtly character. To highlight this idealization (and allude to a patronage relationship), the fair youth's perceived virtues are explicitly contrasted with the poet's "too sullied" and demeaning real world existence.

This idealization treats lightly the youth's fundamental flaw, his selfishness in refusing to wed and procreate. But this initial idealization makes horrific the poet's gradual recognition and then public denunciation of the youth's vicious, shallow and selfish character. The poet's ideals become a pathetic illusion, and the poems describe a pervasive spiritual strangulation that goes far beyond amorous disappointment. It is this existential exhaustion that the poet struggles to overcome.

The sensual betrayal of the "dark lady" counterpoints the spiritual betrayal by the young man. With the woman (whose historical identity is unknown) the poet's "betrayal" is inward and visceral, as his lust turns into an addict's remorse. As in King Lear, Shakespeare sometimes makes the point with distastefully literal dirt: but for Shakespeare literal is lower. Lust is a kind of humiliation that his already tormented spiritual existence would gratefully go without. The poet is not only betrayed by the youth's vicious character: he is betrayed by his own. Most important, the "dark lady" characterizes a merely sexual desire, to make clear the difference between lust and the profound longing that reached out to the "fair youth."

The figure of lust, of desire that turns to revulsion, is only one of many conflicts in the poet's existence: he also confronts the struggle between beauty and "devouring time," youth and age, the heart and the eye, truth and passion, torment and steadfastness, duty and fatigue. As in Shakespeare's greatest plays, the core themes are amplified through parallel subplots and images.

Although apparently confessional, even the most agitated poems show literary skill and control. The episodic patterns of narrative repetition and reversal create a vague sense that the poet is recording his life in the moment, as events change. There is an undercurrent of time's change rather than a clear narrative line; an exploration of spiritual facts rather than a sequence of human events. As a whole the cycle assembles its themes in a majestic cumulative vision.

Amid his suffering, the poet's dignity emerges in his high minded endurance, in the strength of his love, his forgiveness, his dry humor, and his powerful verse. The "fair youth" sonnets conclude with an awed realization of the power of genuine love to triumph over any suffering. Love is precious not because the youth is worthy or because the erotic impulse is sweet to fulfill, but because love alone can overcome life's unrelenting waste and futility:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Whatever is the source of the strength the poet finds, it is this immortal truth and beauty that the sonnets magnificently celebrate.
 

Synopsis

I made this selection of my favorite sonnets because I wanted to have them where I could revisit them online, on the road or late at work.

I've summarized the cycle in a commentary on the narrative patterns and poem groupings. Shakespeare often pairs poems thematically, or uses one poem to answer a question or respond to a claim posed by the previous. These pairs are indicated by a "+" sign.

The numbers link to versions of the sonnets in the quarto text with minimal modernization.

The Fair Youth Poems

[ 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5 + 6 : 7 : 8 : 9 : 10 : 11 : 12 : 13 : 14 : 15 + 16 : 17 ]

The sonnets open in a public, ceremonial tone. They graciously entreat a noble and beautiful young man (the "fair youth") to sire a child who will preserve his physical virtues after he is old or dead. (Conception implies the contract of marriage, which is never mentioned explicitly.) Most of the important themes or key images in the sonnet cycle are first expressed here in stylized terms: beauty's passing, the human desire to preserve beauty against time and decay, the deferential relationship between the fair youth and the poet who speaks the sonnets, the connections among people that the desire to preserve beauty motivates, the power of verse to persuade and memorialize, and (gently expressed) the narcissism and selfishness that underlies the youth's indifference to the poet's requests.

[ 18 : 19 : 20 : 21 : 22 : 23 : 24 : 25 ]

The poet discards his ceremonial tone for a new tone of personal declaration. Gone is any mention a child who will immortalize the young man's beauty: now the poet's verses will serve this role. The poems also render superfluous a woman to bear the fair youth a son. The poet openly declares his attachment to the young man, "the master-mistress of my passion" [20]. And because of the ways that the young man affects the poet — increasing the power of the poet's verse but inhibiting the poet's ability to express his love directly — the poet's character and suffering also begin to enter the picture.

[ 26 : 27 + 28 : 29 : 30 : 31 : 32 ]

The poet begins to speak of the troubles or griefs he endures — his vassalage to the fair youth, "weary with toil" and in an "outcast state" — for which his love of the youth is often (but not always) a consolation. To foreshadow the unequal reciprocation of feelings that will follow, the poet openly declares his love for the youth and even offers his poems to the youth as a reminder of the poet's love after his death, reversing the memorializing role the poems were assigned in the opening sonnets.

[ 33 : 34 : 35 : 36 ]

A chill falls over the relationship. Perhaps the fair youth has not publicly reciprocated the poet's tributes or has turned his favors elsewhere. The youth's narcissism and self centeredness have afflicted the poet directly, but for now he is mild and forgiving in his reproaches.

[ 37 : 38 : 39 ]

A brief return to the conventionalized and selfless tributes to the fair youth. The poet acts as if the youth's behavior has not deeply affected his feelings.

[ 40 : 41 : 42 ]

The poet is again troubled by the youth's behavior: he is faithless, and the poet seeks reasons to justify or palliate this fact. The youth is also faithless with a woman who was loved by the poet — perhaps the "dark lady" of later sonnets — but the loss of her affection seems inconsequential.

[ 43 : 44 + 45 : 46 + 47 ]

A fantasy interlude as the poet withdraws into himself — into dreams [43], into a description of his own eye and mind in a struggle to portray the beloved [47]. The implicit reality is that the love is absent, and these inward reveries take his place.

[ 48 : 49 : 50 + 51 : 52 ]

A sad passage bracketed by two sonnets figuring the beloved as a valuable stolen from the poet's heart [48]. The distance between the youth and poet is large; though the poet still loves, he now openly considers the time when he will fall completely out of the youth's favor [49].

[ 53 : 54 : 55 : 56 ]

A sunny respite from the agitation of the previous poems, the poet again speaks of his love in a serene, selfless and majestic tone. And once again the poems take up their proper role as tributes to and memorializations of the fair youth.

[ 57 : 58 ]

A jarring shift of tone: the poet describes himself as an unrebelling slave, waiting patiently for the return of the fair youth, who again is sadly absent — we assume with another lover.

[ 59 : 60 ]

Verses that directly contemplate the humbling chasm of time by looking backward to the poets of antiquity and forward to the ages that will still read the poet's verse.

[ 61 ]

A single mention of the youth's absence and unfaithfulness, sufficient to remind us of the poet's tormented helplessness.

[ 62 : 63 : 64 : 65 ]

A subtly hostile passage. The poet speaks harshly of his own sin and ambivalently considers how his poetry will perserve the beloved's image — in black ink — after the fair youth is dead.

[ 66 : 67 + 68 : 69 + 70 ]

The first cankerous eruption at the center of the fair youth cycle. The poet speaks of his weariness with the injustices and griefs of the world and for the first time cries openly for death; the fair youth "dost common grow" and his deeds add to his outward beauty "the rank smell of weeds" [69].

[ 71 + 72 : 73 + 74 : 75 : 76 : 77 : 78 ]

As if passing beyond his torments, the poet achieves a valedictory insight. He realizes the themes of death and passing time affect him personally. He speaks of his aging and the briefness of life, the limited range of his poetical powers, and his nearing demise. He is letting go of life in part because of his disappointments in love, yet he is also letting go of bitterness and regret, even urging the fair youth to forget him if memories of the poet would cause him pain.

[ 79 : 80 : 81 : 82 + 83 : 84 + 85 : 86 ]

The poet describes various consequences of his displacement by a rival poet from the fair youth's favor. The cause is perhaps the poet's own barren verse, or lack of merit, or the indescribable virtues of the beloved, or the withdrawal of the beloved's affections.

[ 87 : 88 + 89 + 90 : 91 ]

An interlaced sequence of sonnets, forming a single self critical monolog, in which the poet exhorts the fair youth to abandon him if he is unworthy, and announcing that the poet will yield to whatever judgment or punishment the fair youth wishes to impose on him — effectively making himself the scapegoat for the failure of their relationship.

[ 92 + 93 : 94 : 95 : 96 ]

The second, final outburst of galling despair and derision, the dark climax of the "fair youth" sequence. The poet turns from submission to a bitter catalog of the youth's falseness and dissipation, which is even more repulsive because the youth had once seemed so pure: "lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds" [94]. But it is life itself, not merely the fair youth, that stands accused here.

[ 97 + 98 : 99 ]

Poems that apparently commence after a long absence from the fair youth; perhaps the poet has traveled to heal his wounds. The poet speaks of distance and time, spring, flowers, and a thaw in the seasons of the heart. His final healing has begun.

[ 100 + 101 : 102 : 103 : 104 : 105 : 106 : 107 : 108 ]

The poet stands at last revealed in his true nobility of character. After so much suffering, he gently chides his dormant muse to sing again, and turns his song to renewed declarations of his unconquerable love. The beloved has aged; he is no longer the fair youth of the first sonnets, nor the dissipated libertine who tormented the poet's heart, yet the poet's love for him remains. The tone is calm, accepting, and strong, rising to tributes that transcend physical age and corporeal desire: "to me, fair friend, you never can be old" [104]. Now he speaks of his love as a fact that simply is, no longer as something he must struggle to master or escape, but as something miraculous in its powers to endure.

[ 109 : 110 : 111 : 112 ]

The poet describes some of the circumstantial consequences of the separation between himself and the "fair youth" now grown old. The poet has followed his life elsewhere, in paths perhaps less glorious or less honorable than he or the fair youth had expected. Hints of the healing that has occurred between the two men appear in the kindnesses the "fair youth" shows to the poet — "O for my sake do you with Fortune chide" [111], "your love and pity doth th'impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow" [112].

[ 113 : 114 ]

A pair of stylized poems describing a contest between the poet's eye and mind, similar to sonnets 43-47. The conceit is darkened by the idea that the eye is serving a poisoned cup of flattery to the mind, which the mind drinks willingly, uncaring of the truth.

[ 115 : 116 : 117 : 118 : 119 : 120 : 121 : 122 : 123 : 124 : 125 ]

A final majestic summation of the poet's spiritual journey. He describes how his love has inexplicably continued to grow, transcending Time and decay in its eternally rejuvenating power. He excuses his own wanderings, his resort to "bitter sauces" to cure love's excesses; he condemns the "limbecks foul as hell" where he drank his intoxication. He inventories the faults of men, of himself, of his beloved; proclaims his own unbowed constancy; and contrasts his love to the petty changes of politics and fashion. Thus, the poet concludes with quietly triumphant summation of his individual dignity.

[ 126 ]

A six couplet poem, a half formed sonnet, marks the conclusion of the "fair youth" poems. The poet invokes Nature's power to overcome time and decay through love and procreation, though this triumph creates a debt that only beauty's demise can repay.

The Dark Lady Poems

[ 127 : 128 ]

We enter a new love cycle, this time with the poet praising a woman who is voluptuous, delectable, and promiscuous. Her "raven black" eyes signal that "fairness" (virtue) is no longer esteemed; and praise of her is praise of the secret allure of vice. Music (rather than painting) is the master art of their affections.

[ 129 : 130 : 131 : 132 ]

The poet contemplates the effects of his lust for the dark lady, at times despising the debasing effect it has on him. The lady is attractive because she is sexually eager (hardly beautiful enough to justify the hold she exerts on him), and black in her behavior as well as appearance.

[ 133 + 134 ]

The dark lady has ensnared the poet's friend, and in this romantic triangle the lover seeks to extricate one from the other. (Here the "dark lady" poems seem to describe the same relationship as the "fair youth" poems 40-42, making clear that the sonnet cycle should not be read as a temporal sequence of events.)

[ 135 + 136 ]

Irritatingly mannered poems that ring chiming puns on the various meanings of the word "will" (including the name "Will").

[ 137 : 138 : 139 + 140 : 141 ]

A contemplation of the sensory and psychological deceptions that sustains the poet's love for the dark lady. Deception must characterize their love, because she is neither fair nor honest, yet somehow she has captured his love and trust. Indeed, he begs her to deceive him in order to spare his heart any disillusionment; and because he is deceived, he concludes that he does not really perceive her with his senses but with his foolish heart.

[ 142 : 143 : 144 : 145 : 146 : 147 + 148 : 149 : 150 : 151 : 152 ]

A loosely grouped series of poems that dwell again on the "two loves" who betray the poet with each other. The poet's passion for the dark lady instigates a moral contest between love and hate, as the poet describes her capacity to deceive and pain him. The poet bewails the inconstancy or falsity of his senses, and his willing collaboration in his own deception. In short, the poet is in hell — tormented, degraded, acting consciously to prolong his own punishment — and in this chaos there is no spiritual progression for his soul to make. On that note the "dark lady" sonnets come to an end.

Envoi

[ 153 + 154 ]

Shakespeare makes mannerist quaint fun, and distances us a little from the darkness we have endured, by painting mythical figures in an ironically conventional style. Yet even within these enameled images, his burning love cannot be quenched.

Sources

For a long time disparaged by critics, the quarto edition is now believed to be an intelligent printer's careful editing of a difficult manuscript, probably in Shakespeare's hand.

Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1997). Among modern editions, The Arden Shakespeare is most faithful to the original text, and includes the late poem "A Lover's Complaint," apparently written as a thematic pendant to the sonnet sequence. Inexplicably, though the annotations are superb, the book lacks an index of first lines.

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Helen Vendler offers another conservative modernization of the 1609 text to accompany her intensive critical dissection of every poem. Facsimilies of the quarto let us see the poems exactly as they first appeared. The book includes a CD of Vendler reading over 60 of the best sonnets, though not always (to my ear) to best effect.

The pronunciation of Shakespeare's time would sound broad to our ears — much like a Scots dialect. I look forward to a reading of the sonnets by a male actor using the historical dialect and diction to convey the full range of rage, futility, contemplation and devotion these poems contain.

Last revised December 5, 1998 : © 2005 Bruce MacEvoy