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Shakespeare's sonnets, or simply The Sonnets comprise a collection of 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. The poems were probably written over a period of several years. All but two first appeared in a 1609 collection; numbers 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") and 144 ("Two loves have I, of comfort and despair") had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim.

The sonnets were published under conditions that have become unclear to history. For example, there is a mysterious dedication at the beginning of the text wherein a certain "Mr. W.H." is described as "the only begetter" of the poems by the publisher Thomas Thorpe, but it is not known who this man was. Also, although the works were written by William Shakespeare, it is not known if the publisher used an authorized manuscript from him, or an unauthorized copy.

The first 17 sonnets are written to a young man, urging him to marry and have children, thereby passing down his beauty to the next generation. These are called the procreation sonnets. Most of them, however, 18-126, are addressed to a young man expressing the poet's love for him. Sonnets 127-152 are written to the poet's mistress expressing his love for her. The final two sonnets, 153-154, are allegorical. The final thirty or so sonnets are written about a number of issues, such as the young man's infidelity with the poet's mistress, self-resolution to control his own lust, beleaguered criticism of the world, etc.

Mr. W.H.

The only edition of the sonnets published in Shakespeare's lifetime, the 1609 Quarto, is dedicated to one "Mr. W.H.". The reality, identity and age of this person remain a mystery and has caused a great deal of speculation.

The dedication in full reads:

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTVRER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.

T.T.

'T.T.' stands for Thomas Thorpe, the publisher; it is not certain whether Thorpe or Shakespeare wrote the dedication. The capital letters and periods following each word were probably intended to resemble an Ancient Roman inscription, thereby giving a sense of eternity and magnitude to the sonnets. In the sonnets, Shakespeare often declares that the sonnets will outlast such earthly things as stone monuments and inscriptions.(2004). Sparknotes:No Fear Shakespeare: The Sonnets. New York, NY: Spark Publishing. ISBN 1411402197. Sonnet 55 states,

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme,

126 of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed to a young man (often called the "Fair Youth"). Broadly speaking, there are two branches of theories concerning the identity of Mr. W.H.: those that take him to be identical to the youth, and those that assert him to be a separate person.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of contenders:

  • William Herbert (the Earl of Pembroke). Herbert is seen by many as the most likely candidate, since he was also the dedicatee of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works.
  • Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton). Many have argued that 'W.H.' is Southampton's initials reversed, and that he is a likely candidate as he was the dedicatee of Shakespeare's poems Venus & Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Southampton was also known for his good looks, and has often been argued to be the 'fair youth' of the sonnets.
  • Sir William Harvey, Southampton's step-father. This theory assumes that the fair youth and Mr. W.H. are separate people, and that Southampton is the fair youth. Harvey would be the "begetter" of the Sonnets in the sense that it would be he who provided them to the publisher.
  • William Himself (i.e. Shakespeare). This theory was proposed by the German scholar D. Barnstorff, but has not found much support.
  • A simple printing error for Shakespeare's initials, 'W.S.' or 'W. Sh'. This was suggested by Bertrand Russell in his memoirs, and also by Don Foster in "Master W.H., R.I.P." (PMLA 102, pp. 42-54) and by Jonathan Bate in The Genius of Shakespeare.
  • William Hall. Hall was a printer who had been responsible for printing other work that Thorpe had published (according to this theory, the dedication is simply Thorpe's tribute to his colleague and has nothing to do with Shakespeare). This theory, started by Sir Sidney Lee in his A Life of William Shakespeare (1898), was continued by Colonel B.R. Ward in his The Mystery of Mr. W.H. (1923). Supporters of this theory point out that the full name "William Hall" appears if the word "all", immediately following the initials in the dedication, is added to them. There is also documentary evidence of one William Hall of Hackney who signed himself 'WH' three years earlier, but it is not certain that this was the same man as the printer.
  • Willie Hughes. The 18th century scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt first proposed the theory that the Mr. W.H. (and the Fair Youth) was one "William Hughes", based on presumed puns on the name in the sonnets. The argument was repeated in Edmund Malone's 1790 edition of the sonnets. The most famous exposition of the theory is in Oscar Wilde's short story "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.", in which Wilde, or rather the story's narrator, describes the puns on "will" and "hues" in the sonnets, and argues that they were written to a seductive young actor named Willie Hughes who played female roles in Shakespeare's plays. There is no evidence for the existence of any such person.
  • William Haughton, a contemporary dramatist.

In his Oxford Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, Colin Burrows argues that the dedication is deliberately mysterious and ambiguous, and may have been created by Thorpe simply to encourage speculation and discussion (and hence, sales of the text). Colin Burrows, ed. The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford UP, 2002), p. 98-102-3.

Structure

The sonnets are each constructed from four stanzas of three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameterA metre in poetry with five iambic metrical feet, which stems from the Italian word endecasillabo, for a line composed of five beats with an anacrusis, an upbeat or unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line which is no part of the first foot. (the meter used also in Shakespeare's plays) with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg (this form is now known as the Shakespearean sonnet). The only exceptions are Sonnets 99, 126, and 145. Number 99 has fifteen lines. Number 126 consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked with italic brackets; I45 is in iambic tetrameters, not pentameters. Often, the beginning of the third quatrain marks the "turn", or the line in which the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany.

Characters

Most of the sonnets are addressed to a beautiful young man, a rival poet, and a dark-haired lady. Readers of the sonnets today commonly refer to these characters as the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. The narrator expresses admiration for the Fair Youth's beauty, and later has an affair with the Dark Lady. It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical. If they are autobiographical, the identities of the characters are open to debate.

Fair Youth

The 'Fair Youth' is an unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. The poet writes of the young man in romantic and loving language, a fact which has led several commentators to suggest a homosexual relationship between them, while others read it as platonic love.

The earliest poems in the collection do not imply a close personal relationship; instead, they recommend the benefits of marriage and children. With the famous sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") the tone changes dramatically towards romantic intimacy. Sonnet 20 explicitly laments that the young man is not a woman. Most of the subsequent sonnets describe the ups and downs of the relationship, culminating with an affair between the poet and the Dark Lady. The relationship seems to end when the Fair Youth succumbs to the Lady's charms.

There have been many attempts to identify the Friend. Shakespeare's one-time patron, the Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton is the most commonly suggested candidate, although Shakespeare's later patron, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, has recently become popular *. Both claims have much to do with the dedication of the sonnets to 'Mr. W.H.', "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets": the initials could apply to either Earl. However, while Shakespeare's language often seems to imply that the 'friend' is of higher social status than himself, this may not be the case. The apparent references to the poet's inferiority may simply be part of the rhetoric of romantic submission. An alternate theory, most famously espoused by Oscar Wilde's short story 'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.' notes a series of puns that may suggest the sonnets are written to a boy actor called William Hughes; however, Wilde's story acknowledges that there is no evidence for such a person's existence. Samuel Butler believed that the friend was a seaman, and recently Joseph Pequigney ('Such Is My love') an unknown commoner.

The Dark Lady

Sonnets 127-52 are addressed to a woman commonly known as the 'Dark Lady' because her hair is said to be black and her skin dusky. These sonnets are explicitly sexual in character, in contrast to those written to the "Fair Youth". It is implied that the "I" of the sonnets and the Lady had a passionate affair, but that she was unfaithful, perhaps with the "Fair Youth". The poet self-deprecatingly describes himself as balding and middle-aged at the time of the affair.

Many attempts have been made to identify the "Dark Lady" with historical personalities, such as Mary Fitton or the poet Emilia Lanier. Some readers have suggested that the reference to her 'dusky' skin suggests that she may have been Spanish, or even African (for example in Anthony Burgess's novel about Shakespeare, A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life). Many people, however, continue to maintain that the Dark Lady is merely a work of fiction and never really existed in real life; they suggest that the 'darkness' of the lady is not intended literally, but rather represents the 'dark' forces of physical lust as opposed to the ideal Platonic love associated with the "Fair Youth".

The Rival Poet

The Rival Poet is sometimes identified with Christopher Marlowe or George Chapman. However, there is no hard evidence that the character had a real-life counterpart.

Themes

Shakespeare's Sonnets are frequently more earthy and sexual than contemporary sonnet sequences by other poets. One interpretation is that Shakespeare's Sonnets are in part a pastiche or parody of the three centuries-long tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets, in which the "madonna angelicata" is exchanged for a young man, or the "fair lady" for a dark lady . Shakespeare also violated many sonnet rules which had been strictly obeyed by his fellow poets: he speaks on human evils that do not have to do with love (66), he comments on political events (124), he makes fun of love (128), he parodies beauty (130), he plays with gender roles (20), he speaks openly about sex (129) and even introduces witty pornography (151).

Legacy

Coming as they do at the end of conventional Petrarachan sonneteering, Shakespeare's sonnets can also be seen as a prototype, or even the beginning, of a new kind of 'modern' love poetry. When Shakespeare was rediscovered during the 18th century — and not only in England — the sonnets, even more than the plays, became particularly important in the nineteenth century when rediscovered by Wordsworth. The outstanding cross-cultural importance and influence of the sonnets is demonstrated by the large number of translations that have been made of them. To date in the German-speaking countries alone, there have been 68 complete translations since 1784. There is no major written language into which the sonnets have not been translated, including LatinShakespeare's Sonnets in Latin, translated by Alfred Thomas Barton, verified 2005/02/27, Turkish, Japanese, Kiswahili, EsperantoShakespeare: La sonetoj (sonnets in Esperanto), Translated by William Auld, Edistudio, ISBN unknown, online advert, verified 2005/02/27, and even KlingonSelection of Shakespearean Sonnets, Translated by Nick Nicholas, verified 2005/02/27.

Selected influential sonnets

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair some time declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm`d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This is one of the most famous of the sonnets. It is referenced in the films Dead Poets Society and Shakespeare in Love and gave names to the band The Darling Buds and the books and television series The Darling Buds of May and Summer's Lease.

Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

The phrase "Remembrance of Things Past" was used for the original translation of In Search of Lost Time, over the objection of Marcel Proust.

Modern editions

Legally, the sonnets (like all of Shakespeare's work) are in the public domain. This has prompted them to be reprinted in many editions.
  • Martin Seymour-Smith (1963) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford, Heinemann Educational)
  • Stephen Booth (1977) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Yale)
  • W G Ingram and Theodore Redpath (1978) Shakespeare's Sonnets, 2nd Edition
  • John Kerrigan (1986) The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint (Penguin)
  • Katherine Duncan-Jones (1997) Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Edition, Third Series)
  • Helen Vendler (1997) The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
  • Colin Burrow (2002) The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
  • Nigel Tomm (2006) Shakespeare’s Sonnets Remixed (BookSurge)

See also

External links

Notes

Full list of sonnets

William Shakespeare | Poems of Shakespeare

Shakespeares Sonette | Sonetos de Shakespeare | Sonetele lui Shakespeare | Sonetter | 莎士比亞十四行詩

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Shakespeare's sonnets".

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