Context
Life and
Times of William Shakespeare
Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature
and certainly the most important playwright of the English Renaissance, William
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in
Warwickshire, England. The son of a successful middle-class glove-maker,
Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no
further. In 1582, he married
an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he
left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and
playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare
eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part owner of the
Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603)
and James I (ruled 1603-1625); he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed,
James granted Shakespeare’s company the greatest possible compliment by
endowing them with the status of king’s players. Wealthy and renowned,
Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At
the time of Shakespeare’s death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as
the apogee of Renaissance theatre.
Shakespeare’s
works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following
his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest
poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented
admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s
life; but the paucity of surviving biographical information has left many
details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have
concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays in reality were written by
someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular
candidates—but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial,
and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the
absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the
author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this
body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have
transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to
affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.
The
Sonnets
Shakespeare’s
sonnets are very different from Shakespeare’s plays, but they do contain
dramatic elements and an overall sense of story. Each of the poems deals with a
highly personal theme, and each can be taken on its own or in relation to the
poems around it. The sonnets have the feel of autobiographical poems, but we
don’t know whether they deal with real events or not, because no one knows
enough about Shakespeare’s life to say whether or not they deal with real
events and feelings, so we tend to refer to the voice of the sonnets as “the
speaker”—as though he were a dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear.
There are
certainly a number of intriguing continuities throughout the poems. The first
126 of the sonnets seem to be addressed to an unnamed young nobleman, whom the
speaker loves very much; the rest of the poems (except for the last two, which
seem generally unconnected to the rest of the sequence) seem to be addressed to
a mysterious woman, whom the speaker loves, hates, and lusts for
simultaneously. The two addressees of the sonnets are usually referred to as
the “young man” and the “dark lady”; in summaries of individual poems, I have
also called the young man the “beloved” and the dark lady the “lover,”
especially in cases where their identity can only be surmised. Within the two
mini-sequences, there are a number of other discernible elements of “plot”: the
speaker urges the young man to have children; he is forced to endure a
separation from him; he competes with a rival poet for the young man’s
patronage and affection. At two points in the sequence, it seems that the young
man and the dark lady are actually lovers themselves—a state of affairs with
which the speaker is none too happy. But while these continuities give the
poems a narrative flow and a helpful frame of reference, they have been
frustratingly hard for scholars and biographers to pin down. In Shakespeare’s
life, who were the young man and the dark lady?
Historical
Mysteries
Of all the questions surrounding Shakespeare’s life, the sonnets
are perhaps the most intriguing. At the time of their publication in 1609
(after having been written most likely in the 1590s and shown only to a small
circle of literary admirers), they were dedicated to a “Mr. W.H,” who is
described as the “onlie begetter” of the poems. Like those of the young man and
the dark lady, the identity of this Mr. W.H. remains an alluring mystery.
Because he is described as “begetting” the sonnets, and because the young man
seems to be the speaker’s financial patron, some people have speculated that
the young man isMr. W.H. If his initials were
reversed, he might even be Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, who has
often been linked to Shakespeare in theories of his history. But all of this is
simply speculation: ultimately, the circumstances surrounding the sonnets,
their cast of characters and their relations to Shakespeare himself, are
destined to remain a mystery.
The Sonnet Form
A sonnet is a fourteen-line
lyric poem, traditionally written in iambic pentameter—that is, in lines ten
syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The sonnet form first became popular during the
Italian Renaissance, when the poet Petrarch published a sequence of love
sonnets addressed to an idealized woman named Laura. Taking firm hold among
Italian poets, the sonnet spread throughout Europe to England, where, after its
initial Renaissance, “Petrarchan” incarnation faded, the form enjoyed a number
of revivals and periods of renewed interest. In Elizabethan England—the era
during which Shakespeare’s sonnets were written—the sonnet was the form of
choice for lyric poets, particularly lyric poets seeking to engage with
traditional themes of love and romance. (In addition to Shakespeare’s
monumental sequence, the Astrophel and Stellasequence
by Sir Philip Sydney stands as one of the most important sonnet sequences of
this period.) Sonnets were also written during the height of classical English
verse, by Dryden and Pope, among others, and written again during the heyday of
English Romanticism, when Wordsworth, Shelley, and particularly John Keats
created wonderful sonnets. Today, the sonnet remains the most influential and
important verse form in the history of English poetry.
Two kinds of sonnets have been most common in English poetry, and
they take their names from the greatest poets to utilize them: the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet is
divided into two main parts, called the octave and
the sestet. The octave is eight lines long, and
typically follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, or ABBACDDC. The sestet occupies
the remaining six lines of the poem, and typically follows a rhyme scheme of
CDCDCD, or CDECDE. The octave and the sestet are usually contrasted in some key
way: for example, the octave may ask a question to which the sestet offers an
answer. In the following Petrarchan sonnet, John Keats’s “On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer,” the octave describes past events—the speaker’s previous,
unsatisfying examinations of the “realms of gold,” Homer’s poems—while the
sestet describes the present—the speaker’s sense of discovery upon finding
Chapman’s translations
Motifs
ART VS. TIME
Shakespeare, like many sonneteers, portrays time as an enemy of
love. Time destroys love because time causes beauty to fade, people to age, and
life to end. One common convention of sonnets in general is to flatter either a
beloved or a patron by promising immortality through verse. As long as readers
read the poem, the object of the poem’s love will remain alive. In
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15, the
speaker talks of being “in war with time” (13): time
causes the young man’s beauty to fade, but the speaker’s verse shall entomb the
young man and keep him beautiful. The speaker begins by pleading with time in
another sonnet, yet he ends by taunting time, confidently asserting that his
verse will counteract time’s ravages. From our contemporary vantage point, the
speaker was correct, and art has beaten time: the young man remains young since
we continue to read of his youth in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Through art, nature and beauty overcome time. Several sonnets use
the seasons to symbolize the passage of time and to show that everything in
nature—from plants to people—is mortal. But nature creates beauty, which poets
capture and render immortal in their verse. Sonnet 106 portrays the speaker reading poems from the past and
recognizing his beloved’s beauty portrayed therein. The speaker then suggests
that these earlier poets were prophesizing the future beauty of the young man
by describing the beauty of their contemporaries. In other words, past poets
described the beautiful people of their day and, like Shakespeare’s speaker,
perhaps urged these beautiful people to procreate and so on, through the poetic
ages, until the birth of the young man portrayed in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In
this way—that is, as beautiful people of one generation produce more beautiful
people in the subsequent generation and as all this beauty is written about by
poets—nature, art, and beauty triumph over time.
STOPPING THE MARCH TOWARD DEATH
Growing older and dying are inescapable aspects of the human
condition, but Shakespeare’s sonnets give suggestions for halting the progress
toward death. Shakespeare’s speaker spends a lot of time trying to convince the
young man to cheat death by having children. In Sonnets 1–17, the
speaker argues that the young man is too beautiful to die without leaving
behind his replica, and the idea that the young man has a duty to procreate
becomes the dominant motif of the first several sonnets. In Sonnet 3, the speaker continues his urgent prodding and concludes, “Die
single and thine image dies with thee” (14). The
speaker’s words aren’t just the flirtatious ramblings of a smitten man:
Elizabethan England was rife with disease, and early death was common.
Producing children guaranteed the continuation of the species. Therefore,
falling in love has a social benefit, a benefit indirectly stressed by
Shakespeare’s sonnets. We might die, but our children—and the human race—shall
live on.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SIGHT
Shakespeare used images of eyes throughout the sonnets to
emphasize other themes and motifs, including children as an antidote to death,
art’s struggle to overcome time, and the painfulness of love. For instance, in
several poems, the speaker urges the young man to admire himself in the mirror.
Noticing and admiring his own beauty, the speaker argues, will encourage the
young man to father a child. Other sonnets link writing and painting with
sight: in Sonnet 24, the
speaker’s eye becomes a pen or paintbrush that captures the young man’s beauty
and imprints it on the blank page of the speaker’s heart. But our loving eyes
can also distort our sight, causing us to misperceive reality. In the sonnets
addressed to the dark lady, the speaker criticizes his eyes for causing him to
fall in love with a beautiful but duplicitous woman. Ultimately, Shakespeare
uses eyes to act as a warning: while our eyes allow us to perceive beauty, they
sometimes get so captivated by beauty that they cause us to misjudge character
and other attributes not visible to the naked eye.
Readers’ eyes are as significant in the sonnets as the speaker’s
eyes. Shakespeare encourages his readers to see by providing vivid visual
descriptions. One sonnet compares the young man’s beauty to the glory of the
rising sun, while another uses the image of clouds obscuring the sun as a
metaphor for the young man’s faithlessness and still another contrasts the
beauty of a rose with one rotten spot to warn the young man to cease his
sinning ways. Other poems describe bare trees to symbolize aging. The sonnets
devoted to the dark lady emphasize her coloring, noting in particular her black
eyes and hair, and Sonnet 130 describes
her by noting all the colors she does not possess. Stressing the visual helps
Shakespeare to heighten our experience of the poems by giving us the precise
tools with which to imagine the metaphors, similes, and descriptions contained
therein.
Sonnet 130
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.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Summary: Sonnet 130
This sonnet compares the
speaker’s lover to a number of other beauties—and never in the lover’s favor.
Her eyes are “nothing like the sun,” her lips are less red than coral; compared
to white snow, her breasts are dun-colored, and her hairs are like black wires
on her head. In the second quatrain, the speaker says he has seen roses
separated by color (“damasked”) into red and white, but he sees no such roses
in his mistress’s cheeks; and he says the breath that “reeks” from his mistress
is less delightful than perfume. In the third quatrain, he admits that, though
he loves her voice, music “hath a far more pleasing sound,” and that, though he
has never seen a goddess, his mistress—unlike goddesses—walks on the ground. In
the couplet, however, the speaker declares that, “by heav’n,” he thinks his
love as rare and valuable “As any she belied with false compare”—that is, any
love in which false comparisons were invoked to describe the loved one’s
beauty.
Commentary
This
sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, plays an elaborate joke on the
conventions of love poetry common to Shakespeare’s day, and it is so
well-conceived that the joke remains funny today. Most sonnet sequences in
Elizabethan England were modeled after that of Petrarch. Petrarch’s famous sonnet
sequence was written as a series of love poems to an idealized and idolized
mistress named Laura. In the sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her worth,
and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors based largely on
natural beauties. In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already become
cliche (as, indeed, they still are today), but they were still the accepted
technique for writing love poetry. The result was that poems tended to make
highly idealizing comparisons between nature and the poets’ lover that were, if
taken literally, completely ridiculous. My mistress’ eyes are like the sun; her
lips are red as coral; her cheeks are like roses, her breasts are white as
snow, her voice is like music, she is a goddess.
In many ways, Shakespeare’s sonnets subvert and reverse the
conventions of the Petrarchan love sequence: the idealizing love poems, for
instance, are written not to a perfect woman but to an admittedly imperfect
man, and the love poems to the dark lady are anything but idealizing (“My love
is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease” is
hardly a Petrarchan conceit.) Sonnet 130 mocks the typical Petrarchan metaphors by
presenting a speaker who seems to take them at face value, and somewhat
bemusedly, decides to tell the truth. Your mistress’ eyes are like the sun?
That’s strange—my mistress’ eyes aren’t at all like the sun. Your mistress’
breath smells like perfume? My mistress’ breath reeks compared to perfume. In
the couplet, then, the speaker shows his full intent, which is to insist that
love does not need these conceits in order to be real; and women do not need to
look like flowers or the sun in order to be beautiful.
The rhetorical structure of Sonnet 130 is important to its effect. In the first quatrain,
the speaker spends one line on each comparison between his mistress and
something else (the sun, coral, snow, and wires—the one positive thing in the
whole poem some part of his mistress is like. In the
second and third quatrains, he expands the descriptions to occupy two lines
each, so that roses/cheeks, perfume/breath, music/voice, and goddess/mistress
each receive a pair of unrhymed lines. This creates the effect of an expanding
and developing argument, and neatly prevents the poem—which does, after all,
rely on a single kind of joke for its first twelve lines—from becoming
stagnant.
