In brief
In 1609 the publisher Thomas Thorpe issued a quarto called Shake-speares Sonnets: 154 numbered poems followed by a long poem in a woman’s voice, “A Lover’s Complaint”. Taken in the order printed, the first 126 sonnets speak to or about a beautiful young man, opening with seventeen that urge him to have children. A group around 78 to 86 frets over another poet competing for him. From 127 to 152 the subject is a woman with black eyes and hair, the speaker’s lover, who also takes up with the young man. Two sonnets about Cupid close the set. There is almost no story, no living person’s name beyond the speaker’s pun on “Will”, and no external evidence that any of it happened.
The argument
Love poets had promised immortality to their beloveds for centuries, and these poems promise it too, loudly. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (Sonnet 18). “You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes” (Sonnet 55). Yet the young man so promised has no name, no recorded feature beyond beauty, and no words of his own. More than two centuries of searching have not established who he was. The poem has outlived its subject, and it has kept nothing of him but the fact that somebody once felt this about him. What survives is the speaker’s mind working on the problem. My view is that the sonnets know this, and that the real subject of the book is the gap between what verse can promise and what it can hold. One early sonnet says it outright: the verse is “but as a tomb / Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts” (Sonnet 17). The great claims that come afterward should be read with that sentence in mind.
Thorpe’s quarto and Mr. W. H.
Thorpe entered the book in the Stationers’ Register on 20 May 1609. George Eld printed it, and copies were sold by William Aspley and John Wright. Thirteen copies survive. Some of the poems were much older. Francis Meres mentioned Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets among his private friends” in 1598, and a pirated anthology, The Passionate Pilgrim, printed versions of two of them around 1599. Linguistic studies suggest the dark-lady group may be among the earliest in composition. So the printed order need not be the order of writing, and it may not be Shakespeare’s.
Before the poems stands a page of capitals in the style of an inscription, signed T. T. It wishes “Mr. W. H.”, “THE ONLIE BEGETTER” of the sonnets, “ALL HAPPINESSE” and “THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OVR EVER-LIVING POET”. Nothing else about this person is known. “Begetter” could mean the inspirer or merely the man who obtained the manuscript. Candidates include William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who was later a dedicatee of the First Folio but could hardly be called “Mr.”; Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, with his initials reversed; a printer named William Hall; and a misprint for W. S. Each of these has its advocates and none has a document. Oscar Wilde wrote a story around an imaginary boy actor called Willie Hughes, and it remains the most honest treatment, because it knows it is fiction. The sensible position is that we do not know, and that nothing in the reading of the poems depends on it.
Did Shakespeare authorise it?
No statement by Shakespeare about the volume survives. Nineteenth-century critics assumed piracy, and Sidney Lee called Thorpe “predatory and irresponsible”. The case rests on the dedication coming from the publisher and on errors in the text. Then Katherine Duncan-Jones argued in 1983 that Shakespeare probably sold the text himself, on the grounds of Thorpe’s respectable record and of a design in the volume. Wells and Taylor found “nothing intrinsically irregular”, and Kerrigan and Burrow in their editions took her side. Brian Vickers and others remain unpersuaded. Both accounts are possible, and the evidence does not settle them.
The shape of the book
The procreation group (1 to 17) begins with argument: “From fairest creatures we desire increase” (Sonnet 1). Its only defence against Time is “breed” (Sonnet 12). Then the argument slides. In Sonnet 15 the speaker first offers verse as well, “I engraft you new”, and Sonnet 17 splits the difference: “You should live twice,—in it, and in my rhyme”. In Sonnet 18 the child has gone for good, and only the poem remains.
The young man’s poems then run through absence, jealousy and shame. Sonnet 40 and its neighbours hint at a betrayal. The rival-poet sonnets wonder at “the proud full sail of his great verse” (Sonnet 86). Sonnet 126, “O thou, my lovely boy”, has only twelve lines, in couplets, and the quarto prints two empty pairs of brackets beneath it, where the last lines would go. The woman’s poems are harsher. “Two loves I have of comfort and despair” (Sonnet 144) sets out the triangle, and Sonnet 147 ends “Who art as black as hell, as dark as night”. Then come the two Cupid sonnets, variations on Greek epigrams, the last line of the whole sequence being “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love” (Sonnet 154).
The labels Fair Youth and Dark Lady appear nowhere in the poems. Readers made them, and with them a novel the book does not contain. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells prefer to call it a collection, not a sequence.
The addressee, and what Sonnet 20 says
The poems say plainly that the speaker loves a man. How to take that is the oldest quarrel about the book. John Benson’s Poems of 1640 rearranged the sonnets, gave them titles and altered some pronouns, though scholars now think the changes were fewer than was once claimed. Edmond Malone restored the quarto text in 1780, and in the same edition George Steevens wrote of “disgust and indignation” at Sonnet 20. Later readers have tried to make it mere friendship.
Sonnet 20 should be read for what it does say. The young man has “A woman’s face” and is “the master mistress of my passion”. Every rhyme in it is feminine, a formal joke Stephen Booth’s commentary points out. Nature made him for a woman, “fell a-doting”, and added “one thing to my purpose nothing”. Then comes the couplet: “But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure”.
On its face that gives the sexual use to women and keeps the love for the speaker. Those who wish the sonnets chaste stop here. But the sonnet delights in the very thing it disclaims, the pun on “prick’d” is unmissable, “use” is a word for both sex and interest, and “nothing” was itself a sexual pun. It is one poem, early on, and it binds no later one. Nor do the later poems say what was done. What can honestly be said is this: the love is often erotic in its language, the poems record no act with him as they do with the woman (Sonnet 151 is explicit), and the modern categories do not map on to them. The poems tell us about desire. They are not a record of anyone’s conduct, and a biography of Shakespeare’s sexuality cannot be got out of them.
Four sonnets read closely
Sonnet 116
Sonnet 116 opens with the marriage service, “Admit impediments”, and defines love almost wholly by what it is not: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds”. It is usually quoted as a serene promise. Helen Vendler reads it as a refutation, an answer to someone who has argued that love may change, and the tense insistence fits that. The star “Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken” concedes that love can be measured and not valued. “Love’s not Time’s fool” is a boast that needs to be made. The couplet is a legal bet: “If this be error and upon me prov’d, / I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d”. The stakes are absurd, which is the point, since a speaker who was sure would not need them.
Sonnet 129
Sonnet 129 has no “I”, no “you” and, in this text, no full stop for twelve lines. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action” is bookkeeping for sex, and the adjectives then pile up: “perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame”. The grammar goes round through every tense, “Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme”. The editors have tidied it. The quarto reads “Made In pursut” and “A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo”, and modern texts print “Mad” and “proved, a very woe”, which are fair guesses at a damaged sense. The couplet turns its own words over, “All this the world well knows; yet none knows well”, and then gives way to the one word in the poem that is not disgust: “heaven”.
Sonnet 130
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (Sonnet 130) takes the stock comparisons one by one and declines them. Coral, snow, wires, roses, perfume, music and goddess all fail. It is funny, and Booth rightly calls its mockery gentle, aimed at the mechanical use of Petrarch. Editors disagree over whether “reeks” was already as rude as it now sounds. The couplet, “And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, / As any she belied with false compare”, is the true compliment. But note what she gets from it. The speaker says “I love to hear her speak”, and we never hear her. Rival poets are the poem’s real audience.
Sonnet 138
I know no better poem than Sonnet 138 about a settled bad relationship. “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies”. Each knows, and each pretends. All of it comes to rest on one pun: “Therefore I lie with her, and she with me”. We can watch it being written, because The Passionate Pilgrim has a version, perhaps an early one. There the close is “Therefore, I’ll lie with love, and love with me, / Since that our faults in love thus smother’d be”, and the quarto’s “simple truth suppressed” is “Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest”. The 1609 text is colder and better. “And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be” adds no consolation, just the accounts.
Time, verse and whose immortality
Time in these poems is a physical assailant: “Devouring Time” (Sonnet 19), who “delves the parallels in beauty’s brow” (Sonnet 60), against whom “brass, nor stone” hold out (Sonnet 65). The reply is always ink: “That in black ink my love may still shine bright” (Sonnet 65), “His beauty shall in these black lines be seen” (Sonnet 63). But the two best statements disagree about who wins. Sonnet 81 gives all of it to the beloved: “Your name from hence immortal life shall have, / Though I, once gone, to all the world must die”. The name is exactly what did not survive. Sonnet 107 gives a different account: “I’ll live in this poor rime”, and “thou in this shalt find thy monument”. The second is the one that came true, for the speaker. Thorpe’s phrase on the dedication page calls the living Shakespeare “EVER-LIVING” and makes a selling point of the promise. What the reader gets, if the promise is honoured at all, is a voice. Each reading renews it, as Sonnet 81 foresaw: “Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men”.
“A Lover’s Complaint”
The quarto ends with forty-seven stanzas of rhyme royal, which Gutenberg’s #1041 leaves out. The poem is in Gutenberg’s complete works. A speaker overhears a “fickle maid full pale” tearing up letters and throwing love tokens into a river, and she tells a reverend old man how a charming youth seduced her and left. It was common to follow sonnets with a woman’s complaint: Samuel Daniel’s Delia had his Rosamond in 1592. John Kerrigan’s Penguin edition of 1986 restored it as part of the design, and it does give the sequence a voice it withheld, a woman answering a book of men’s talk. Its ending is unsentimental, since she would fall again: “Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed”. Its authorship has been doubted since Hazlitt, and Brian Vickers assigned it in 2007 to John Davies of Hereford, though most scholars accept Shakespeare’s.
The people
The young man
The young man is beautiful, young and apparently of higher standing than the speaker, which is nearly the sum of it. He may be several men, or partly none.
The rival poet
The rival poet is learned and praised: Chapman, Marlowe, Spenser, Daniel and others have been proposed. The speaker’s defence is that “thou art all my art” (Sonnet 78), and his finest shot is “that affable familiar ghost” (Sonnet 86).
The woman
The woman has “raven black” eyes (Sonnet 127) and dark hair, and is called “dun”. Candidates have been named, and A. L. Rowse’s claim for Emilia Lanier in 1973 rested on a misreading. She is treated worse than anyone in the book, and the speaker says it is his own lies he is ashamed of: “For I have sworn thee fair” (Sonnet 147).
The speaker
The speaker calls himself “Will” in Sonnet 135, says he is old, and is at his best when he convicts himself. Whether he is Shakespeare is the question the book’s title invites and does not answer. Wordsworth thought the sonnets the key with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart, and Browning’s poem “House” retorted that if so, the less Shakespeare he.
How to read it
- Use an edition with commentary. Stephen Booth’s (1977) prints the quarto facing the modern text. Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997) is the closest reading. Kerrigan (1986), Duncan-Jones’s Arden (1997) and Burrow’s Oxford (2002) are the standard editions.
- Look at the quarto. The Internet Shakespeare Editions text shows the dedication and the empty brackets of 126. The Folger text is free online.
- Know the free text’s fault. Gutenberg #1041 has all 154 sonnets, but it omits the dedication and the “Complaint”, and the last line of 152 is garbled. It should read “To swear against the truth so foul a lie”, as in Gutenberg #100.
Read next
- Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella (1591). The sequence whose printing set off the English sonnet craze, and one of his chief models.
- Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”. The theory as a short story, and a warning.
- Samuel Daniel, Delia with The Complaint of Rosamond (1592). The two-part volume the 1609 quarto resembles.