Sos Bagramyan
Shakespeare is often remembered for his dramatic writing and not for his poetry. Even though his dramatic verse is considered poetic in form and feeling, few people pay much attention to the sonnets and even fewer read The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis . Individual sonnets are fairly well known; sonnet 18, which begins with the lines “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”, is probably Shakespeare’s best known poem. The sonnets as a complete sequence, however, give the reader a look into the mind of a fascinating character and, above all else, a reevaluation of the sonnet as a medium of love poetry.
The flourishing of the sonnet tradition began with Petrarch (1304-1374) in Italy . Petrarch’s writings set the standard for writing quality sonnets and his popularity helped spread the sonnet form across Europe . Every sonneteer was conscious of Petrarch and his legacy when they wrote their own sonnet sequence. When Shakespeare’s sonnets were published in 1609, Thomas Wyatt had already introduced the sonnet as a poetic form to England and Philip Sidney, Michael Drayton, and Edmund Spenser had already published their own sonnet sequences. The sonnet form had been firmly canonized into the English poetic tradition and Shakespeare had not only Petrarch with whom to be compared with regard to writing high quality sonnets, but some of England ‘s best poets as well. Even with an impressive group of poets to compete with, Shakespeare took sonnets to aesthetic frontiers his predecessors could not.
It is tempting to read Shakespeare’s sonnets as autobiographical, or at least as works that are semi-autobiographical. Of the 154 sonnets, the first 126 are written to a young man (the Young Man sonnets) and the rest of the sonnets are written to a dark haired woman (the Dark Lady sonnets). Of all the sonnets in the sequence, the Dark Lady sonnets are considered by many to be superior to the Young man sonnets. This is probably because they are more dynamic and more often reveal deep rooted anxieties in the speaker’s mind moreso than the Young Man sonnets. However, one should not neglect the Young Man sequence. Certainly sonnet 73 is among Shakespeare’s best, and it is addressed to the young man. The quality of the poetry does not change when one moves from the Young Man to the Dark Lady sonnets more than does the nature of the poetry. The Young Man sonnets are predominantly contemplative or meditative in nature whereas the Dark Lady sonnets reveal more anxiety and frustration. They offer the reader different experiences, and one should be conscious of what the sonnet is trying to accomplish before trying to pass an aesthetic judgment.
When reading poetry, one should always separate the speaker of the poem from the poet himself. This is especially true in the case of Shakespeare because he is famous, or rather infamous, for leaving very few traces of himself in his creative writing. Of Shakespeare’s most complex and interesting characters, the speaker of the sonnet certainly among them. The sonnet form is a very personal form, written in a personal voice and meant to show the thought processes and inner struggles an individual goes through because of love or friendship.
Many try to speculate about the homosexual undertones of the Young Man sonnets, and some try to link this to Shakespeare’s personal life. These sorts of endeavors are dubious for a few reasons: First, homosocial relations in the Renaissance were far more different and ambiguous than homosocial relations today and one cannot take Shakespeare’s praises the anonymous patron of the sonnet sequence into the realm of unfounded speculation. Secondly, and more important, the speaker is a character created by Shakespeare as are the dark lady, the young man and the rival poet (among a cast of other minor characters), who all interact in the mind of the speaker and are revealed to the reader in the most ingenious and novel ways. To fully understand how Shakespeare utilizes the sonnet form, one must go back to Petrarch.
The Petrarchan sonnet is broken into two parts, the octave (the first eight lines) and the sestet (the last six lines). Between the eighth and ninth lines the speaker changes his perspective or the direction in which his train of thought moves in the sonnet. This point of the poem is called the volta , which literally means “turn” in Italian. In contrast, the Shakespearean sonnet has four parts, three quatrains composed of alternating rhyme with a couplet at the end. The Shakespearean sonnet, thus, is more versatile than the Italian sonnet, and has the potential to show more sides of the speaker’s psychology than does its Italian counterpart. Shakespeare was not the first person to utilize what is now called the Shakespearean sonnet, but he was the poet who utilized the form to its fullest potential.
What makes Shakespeare’s sonnets so much more ambiguous and interesting than those of other English poets (or those of Petrarch for that matter) is that he is able to squeeze so much information, quality of thought and ambiguity into fourteen lines. Shakespeare was, by training and practice, a dramatist unlike all of the other sonneteers mentioned above. This meant that he knew how to set up a dramatic situation, and he does so in his best sonnets. Most sonnets are composed of a dialog involving the speaker and his beloved. The dialog is only one way because the beloved cannot respond to the speaker, but it is a dialog in the most basic sense that there are two characters interacting in the poem.
Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets involve three (or sometimes four) characters, thereby establishing a dramatic situation instead of a dialog. No other sonneteer was able to, nor has been able to, paint a dramatic portrait as convincingly or as frequently into the small space of a sonnet. The dramatic situations often come in the form of a love triangle between the speaker, the dark lady and a rival poet. Take, for example, the first two lines of sonnet 134, “So now I have confessed that he is thine,/And I myself am mortgaged to thy will..” In the very first line Shakespeare introduces three characters in the pronouns “I” (the speaker), “he” (the speaker’s friend) and “thine” (the dark lady). Just like in a play, a love triangle is created, but unlike a play there is no action. What we get a psychological portrait of the speaker. Lost in his thoughts, the speaker gets nowhere and is left loveless and friendless. This is not a simple complaint to a lover one would find in the sonnets of Petrarch or Sidney, but a more complex relationship between three people articulated by the speaker.
Also, because the speaker’s is the only voice in the sonnets, his rendering of the dramatic situation is purely subjective. The reader does not know how accurate his accounts are, the reader only knows how the speaker feels about a situation. When Shakespeare incorporates multiple characters into a sonnet, he draws attention to the fact that the entire situation being expressed in the sonnet is subjective. The more voiceless characters one has, the more their voicelessness is obvious. Shakespeare not only broke ground on characterization in sonnets, but language as well. The second line is a good example of another reason why Shakespeare’s sonnets are more interesting than most other sonnets.
As with his plays, Shakespeare uses a wide variety of terminology borrowed from many other disciplines to express the plight of his speaker. He borrows terms from law, economics, philosophy, theology, medicine, theater, banking and a variety of other professions, and in using this language undermines the definitions of these words as well as the fields with which they are associated. In the case of sonnet 134, he uses the word “mortgage” to communicate to the reader that he is indebted to the dark lady and he is unable to get free of the debt. Obviously, his is not a financial debt but rather a spiritual and emotional one, but Shakespeare’s usage of economic terminology makes the speaker’s plight much more vivid and tangible. It also conflates economics with love, and suggests that one can weigh or count emotion as one does money and debts. This conflation effectively undermines the purpose of money and commerce while it simultaneously makes the speakers anxiety more earthly and concrete.
This is notion of spiritual or emotional indebtedness is richly convoluted image used to communicate the convoluted and inexpressible nature of love itself. No matter how one tries to phrase it, one cannot define love, and no one can aptly articulate the anxiety associated with love either. Shakespeare’s plays similar games with the language from other fields, but they always have the effect of making the reader reconsider how and to what end one can use language. The rich language of the sonnets alongside the emotional, chronological and thematic developments that take place from quatrain to quatrain aptly render all of the ambiguities associated with love.
In his plays, Shakespeare is renowned for most accurately expressing and displaying the multi-faceted nature of the human condition. He does so too in his sonnets. There are few other poets who are as conscious of language and the development of human motive as Shakespeare, and even fewer who can communicate such developments. The sonnets require rereading, and they can be taken as individual poems or, as they should be, in relation to one another.
The sonnets do not tell a story, but they reveal the character of the speaker and the relationship he has with the characters around him. They show his triumphs, his failures, his insecurities, his brilliance and his passions. Shakespeare the poet shows a side of Shakespeare’s genius not found in other writings because they are so personal and introspective in nature. They are not like the soliloquies spoken in front of an audience in the context of dramatic action, but personal musings about the love. The reader is invited to share in an experience rather than witness an event, and should approach the sonnets with this in mind to fully appreciate the nuances in character of the speaker of the sonnets.