The Sonnets of Shakespeare

Reader in English, Andhra University

But it is almost inexplicable that his biographers should have written their biographies of Shakespeare without taking account of his autobiography–except that they were men of little imagination and I suppose they found the full story too uncomfortable.
–A. L. Rowse

If Cleopatra be in some sense a portrait of the Dark Woman, I have often thought that Shakespeare’s account of Antony’s rapid fluctuations of mood between demanding passion and violent jealousy might be in some sense a piece of self-portraiture. Was his love for the Friend again in some sense, like Othello’s very different love for Desdemona….?
–Dover Wilson

I

We are all familiar with Shakespeare the playwright; we are not as familiar with Shakespeare the poet. We have to revise our elementary notions that one who writes poems is a poet and one who writes plays is a playwright. Shakespeare the playwright is a great poet. Some years ago Grenville Barker wrote: Let us stress the obvious but half-forgotten fact that Shakespeare is a dramatist. But in recent years the verse of Shakespeare has come to the centre of the stage. One who deals with the extractable elements like plot and character is sadly equipped, says Prof. Knights, to study Shakespeare; his linguistic vitality is regarded as the chiefest clue to the personal urgencies that shaped the plays. The play is in the poetry, not the poetry in the play. King Lear is not the story of a king and his three daughters but the poet’s attempt to answer Lear’s question: Is there anyone who can tell me who I am?

II

The sonnets are Shakespeare’s finest non-dramatic poetry. They are the goldenest in the golden age of Elizabethan Poetry. All the plays in some embryonic form are in the sonnets. What The Prelude is to an understanding of Wordsworth, the sonnets are for a study of Shakespeare. The doyen of Shakespeare scholars today, Dover Wilson, suggests cautiously that Antony and Othello are self-portraitures. In intellectual range and power and amplitude, writes another, there are no comparable poems in English. These shape and form, states Rowse, the very idea of the Sonnet in the language, laid up in a Platonic heaven, the model for as long as language recognisably lasts. ‘The region cloud’, ‘Without my cloak’ chosen from the Sonnets are the titles of well-known novels. In certain senses of the word ‘love’ Shakespeare is, according to Prof. C. S. Lewis, not only the best love poet but the only love poet in English–love in the sense of Agape, not Eros. Saintsbury’s glowing appreciation is final: The coastline of humanity has to be altered, the sea must change its quality, the moon draw it in another way before that tide mark is passed. It is said there are at least 50 great sonnets in this century and a half and. most of them are outrageously bawdy. Who can be blind to the sniggering naughtiness in

Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

The sonnets deal with lust, adultery, pederasty or homosexuality and slips in sensual mire. They are squalid with a cancerous taint according to the prudes; to them they are like a case history of perversion in Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Benson’s change of gender implies that they shocked the contemporaries as Lolitashocks us today. Seymour Smith states his conviction that Sonnets 30-36 can be interpreted only as ‘a heterosexual’s homosexual experience’. The truth of C. S. Lewis’ fine remark that in Shakespeare each experience of the lover becomes a window through which we look on immense prospects–on nature, the seasons, life and death, time and eternity whereas in Donne it is more like a burning-glass, is not realized by these critics: the lotus of charity is born of the mud of sordid lust; sex flowers into soul of self-allegation; ‘pankaja’ the Samskrit word for lotus, sums up this sea change in the sonnets.

III

It is convenient to deal with the sonnets under the following heads:

(i)                  the sonnet form
(ii)                the story of the sonnets
(iii)               the problems of the sonnets
(iv)              the personality of Shakespeare.

(i) The sonnet enjoyed a great vogue in the last quarter of the 16th century from 1590 to 1600. Most of the sonnets deal with an impossible She; Spenser’s are the only sonnets which are about his own wife and hence are less exciting. But then Spenser’s main contribution to the history of ideas is the replacing of the Romance of Adultery by the Romance of Marriage. Petrarch is the founder of sonneteering or sighing in poetry Wyatt and Surrey transplanted it in England and ‘the little sound’ (the etymology of the word) became

A tempest, a redundant energy
Vexing its own creation.

Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, says Don Armado, for I am sure I shall turn sonneteer. Devise, wit; write, pen for I am for whole volumes in folio.

There are two types of the sonnet in English: the Petrarchan and the Shakesperian or, more correctly, the Surreyan. The sonnet is a poem of 14 lines; it has 16 lines in Meredith’s Modern Love. In Shakespeare one sonnet has 15 lines; another only 12 (perhaps imitating Sidney to end a section); another is in tetra-meters. The Petrarchan consists of the octet and the sestet with a break at the end of the 8th line. Belloc says finely that the sonnet is essentially feminine and needs a waist. The Samskrit poets invariably describe the heroines as lion-waisted or so slender-waisted that they create a doubt if the waist ‘is or is not’ (bhavabhava). If the sonnet is barrel-waisted, it loses feminity. It is like a periodic sentence. If the octet begins with Though, the sestet begins with Yet; a When is followed by Then; a question by an answer; the tide by the ebb; despair by hope; a thought process or an act is completed. Hence Keats’s analysis:

the sonnet swelling loudly
Up to its climax and then dying proudly

The Shakesperian consists of three quatrains and a couplet: 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 instead of 8 + 6. The structural weakness of this lies in the perfunctory couplet which is like padding or appendage (ajaagalastana: nipples on the neck of a goat, as our writers call). The emotion or thought comes to an end at the 12th line and the couplet does not share the poetic power of the preceding lines. One critic has even asserted that there ishardly one Sonnet which is perfect; another remarks that Shakespeare blundered into the sonnet form. In the Shakesperian form the three quatrains are usually three parallel statements clinched by the concluding couplet; sometimes the thought is developed throughout; sometimes the sense breaks at the end of the second quatrain; sometimes the final couplet repudiates what has gone before. In No. 66 the couplet proclaims the poet’s love as compensation for all the ills of life in the first 12 lines.

The sonnet is extremely difficult to achieve. Only a tremendous poet or a cold mathematician, says one, can compose a sonnet. In politics we say: The smaller the country, the better governed it is; in literature the smaller the country the worse governed it is. Even a single bad line like a dash of vinegar spoils the poem; the sonnet has to be perfect chrysolite. In a sonnet, according to a critic, one line comes from the ceiling and the other thirteen have to be adjusted round it. To compose a love sonnet it is not enough to fall in love with a cruel fair; one has to fall out of it.

IV

(ii) The following is the story: The poet urges a young man to get married and beget children and pass on his marvellous beauty to posterity (as if it lies in him!). There is the well-known story of Shaw’s retort to a Hollywood Star who proposed to Shaw to be the father of her child who would then combine her beauty and his brains: he said that the child might inherit her brains and his beauty. As our saying goes, the Son of a pandit is a dud (suntha). Of course, a lion does not beget a lamb; in Samskrit a wife is called jaaya because the husband is reborn in her or remade as a child; that is immortality. What man is interested in urging another to get married and found a family except a father or a ‘many-daughtered’ father-in-law or a non-homosexualist? The young man’s reluctance goes against the Doctrine of Increase as it is termed.

If the young man is obstinate, he shall be immortalized in the poet’s verse more lasting than marble or gilded monuments. But a Rival Poet has mesmerized the young man with strained touches of rhetoric and the proudful sail of his verse. Shakespeare is worried not about the Rival’s scholarship or skill but about his verse becoming anaemic with the abduction or the young man. A Dark Lady poses a similar threat. ‘That thou hast her, it is not all my grief.…; That she hath thee is of my wailing chief.’ Dark means brunette, not dark like a negress; a kind of ‘mystique’ about a dark beauty seems to be developed. A sonnet says that
she is dark in deeds and hence the slander. She will do the deed even if Argus were her watch: every woman has her will. She was faithless to her husband, was mistress to Shakespeare and then went over to the young man. Shakespeare’s reason is against her but his heart runs after her as Antony runs after Cleopatra: ‘Past reason hunted, past reason hated’. Some of the fiercest sonnets snarl ferociously against the lusts of the flesh. The poet pours withering scorn on her: Coral is far more red than her lips’ red….Was ever lady wooed and won like this?, asks Shaw. Somehow all the flesh hatred in Shakespeare is roused by this Dark Lady. Some sonnets scream with furyand tormented revulsion against the sulphurous stench of sex; one of the most ferocious is that on lust:

The expense of spirit a waste of sheme
Is lust in action and till action,
Lust is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust…..

The words snarl like a vicious beast and disturb even the structure of the sonnet. The most powerful and disgustingly vivid expression of the sexual act occurs in Othello: Making the beast with two s. An excellent parallel to this infatuation in modern literature is that of Philip for Mildred ill Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Hubler writes that there is nothing like the woman of Shakespeare’s sonnets in all the sonnet literature of the Renaissance.

Similarly there is no parallel to the language of friendship the poet uses towards the young man in 16th century literature, in the opinion of C. S. Lewis. The man right fair is not at all censured. The poet writes: To thy sensual fault I bring in sense, thy adverse party has become thy advocate and in what sounds like spinelessness he says: My friend and I are one, even when the friend has stolen his Mistress. The poet is prepared to surrender everything for the young man–his mistress and even his good name: Do not thou with public kindness honour me. The gesture of sublimely incredible friendship jars on modern ears. But this is in tune with the other characters in Shakespeare’s plays or in classical literatures. The friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, Proteus and Valentine, Antonio and Sebastian, Hamlet and Horatio, David and Jonathan, Gray and Bonstetten, Tennyson and Hallaam, Byron and Edleston illustrates abundantly the Sonnet story. Damon and Pythias vie with each other for death so lovingly that a tyrant craves for their friendship. The gambler in Kathasaritsagarashouts that the king’s head is doomed, if his friend’s life is in danger. Pater relates in his book on the Renaissance the story of Amis and Amile. Amis kills his own children to cure Amile of leprosy and, though buried separately, their dead bodies are found together. When a friend says: I like your wife, you do not surrender her to him. That is what precisely happens in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Valentine says: All that was mine in Silvia I give thee; so much so Quillercouch questions the propriety of Gentlemen in the title. Sebastian speaks out in The Twelfth Night:

I have many enemies in Orsino’s court
But come what may, I do adore thee so
That danger shall seem sport and I will go

The story of the sonnets, applying the aesthetic test as Bradley calls it, is too odd to be fictitious, too painful to be mere rhetoric, too dim to be dramatic.

V

The sonnets are astonishingly original. In all sonnet cycles it is a mistress that queens it over her lover. The code of medieval love laid down that the lover should even address his lady as My Lord (midons) as if a husband is asked to praise his wife: O wife, you are my husband. He has to obey her in every respect except when she commands him not to love her. Shakespeare laughs at this. The most remarkable thing about his sonnets is the thematic revolution or topsyturvification: here a young man is the master-mistress of the poet’s passion and the lady is laughed to scorn: she is the bay where all men ride. Still the poet is caught in the gluepot of her sexiness; he lives like a deceived husband, even when she lies with him. It is just like a lover telling his love: You have a snub nose but I love thee nonetheless. The lady in her anger may make the lover snub-nosed.

It is surprising that at a time when sonneteering was the fashion, the sonnets of a popular dramatist like Shakespeare should have gone through just two editions in a century and that all the editions of his works up to Dr. Johnson did not include the sonnets. Steevens wrote in 1793 that not even an act of Parliament would ‘shoehorn’ readers into the study of the sonnets. The Romantic poets began to worship everything Shakesperian and all the dark heroines from Rosaline to Cleopatra are said to be the daughters of the Dark Lady. The inference is that the sonnets were regarded at one time as ‘chronique scandaleuse’ and hence suppressed. Now we agree with Meres that Shakespeare is ‘the most passionate, among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love’.

VI

(iii) There are three important problems connected with the sonnets: the historical, the literary, the autobiographical. The historical means the identification of the lovely Boy, the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet. The critic does not care a farthing if the man right fair is Southampton or Herbert, if the rival poet is Marlowe or Chapman; by pursuing the will-o’-wisp of rival young men, rival ladies, rival poets the reader becomes a rival of poetic appreciation. The literary implies the date and order of the sonnets. The date is the key to the arch. If we resolve this, everything else resolves itself. To discuss other problems without fixing the date is to baptise your child when you are not even married. The sonnets have been ‘rearranged, disarranged, deranged’ according to the passing whim of every critic. By and large 1-126 form a unit and deal with the lovely boy; it is relevent to note that TIME occurs 78 times in this group. Nos. 127-152 are the disordered appendix sucking us into the maelstrom of passion for the dark lady. Nos. 153 and 154 point out, perhaps, the resigned awareness that the dateless lively heat of the king of plackets and codpieces can never be quenched. About the Autobiographical there is acute difference of opinion. Wordsworth declared that Shakespeare unlocked his heart through the sonnets; if so the less Shakespeare he, asserted Browning. Schlegel wrote in 1796 that the poet bared his soul; a recent editor of the sonnets says that Shakespeare’s poems say, ‘Look at you!’ Sir Sidney regarded; them as literary exercises; the experience is more imagined than; suffered; there is thematic similarity among Venus and Adonis, Hero and Leander, Willobie His Apisa and even Euphues. But none walks abroad save on his own shadow. Most of the sonnet cycles were used for the expression of personal feelings and Shakespeare asks his friend to read his sonnets for their sincerity. Sincerity can be regarded as the theme of the sonnets. As opposed to the autobiographical is the theory of the sonnets as a public prayer; the test is if the congregation can join. Love poetry is transferable. We may not be saints or scoundrels but we are all lovers. A reader ought to see in a sonnet not what the poet felt but what he himself felt, what all men felt.

Regarding these problems, agnosticism is safe. In the sonnets we cannot be sure of the date or the order, the identity or autobiography; we are sure of only one thing–poetic robustness.

VII

(iv) The personality of the poet that emerges from the sonnets is an incredibly noble one. The young man does not love the poet as much as the poet loves the young man. In love, said a cynic, there is one who loves and another who is loved. The poet’s utter self-abnegation is like Christian charity; his is not an ‘asking’ love but a ‘giving’ love. He would commence a lawful plea against himself. Speak of my lameness and I shall halt, he says he would rather censure himself than the young man or even the dark Lady:

But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty?

This is like theinvincible forgiveness of heroines in Samskrit plays, nobly unaware of wrong done. For instance, Sakuntala has not the heart to blame Dushyanta but blames herself: mama sucharita pratibandhakam puraakrutam tesu divaseshu parinaama abhimukham aasit. All men make faults and even I in this…Upon thy side against myself I will fight. Dover Wilson stated persuasively that Shakespeare conceals nothing, condemns nothing. It is rather misleading to say that he condemns nothing. There are flaws in human nature at which his voice vibrates with passion and his lines become lurid with irony. Hence the remark that with reference to Shakespeare the expression ‘holding up the mirror to nature’ is silly and meaningless; only Nature’s natural holds up the mirror to nature. Marx seems to have said: Poets have so far interpreted the world; we shall change it. Poets do what Marx denied them; they change the world–spiritually.

Judge not lest ye be judged; we are not here to judge and condemn but understand and interpret. Shaw remarked that he had not become that great nuisance to the world–a man of principles. Shakespeare too is not a man of principles who would stretch frail man on a procrustean bed. Our philosophies have to be adjusted to human beings and not human beings to philosophies. Sabbath is made for man, not man for sabbath.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

We have to suspend our judgement. It is most mischievous foul sin in chiding sin. In the unending diversity of God’s creation what can we condemn? Perhaps there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. This refusal to judge is interpreted as a morality or divinity; his humanity is so wide and warm that, like a barber’s chair, it fits all buttocks. In the Vibhutiyogachapter of the Gitathe Lord describes Himself as dyutam chalayataam asmi; I wonder if in any other religion God has the courage to describe himself as the skill of the gambler. Shakespeare has immense tolerance to the moral molluscs sinning their way to sanctity. He would have approved of Omar Khayyam’s:

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake,
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blackened, Man’s Forgiveness give–and take!

He is not a moral Grandison flaunting the sickly flower of purity in the buttonhole. He does not belong to the terrible army of cripples, self-abased, miserable, retrospective. There is ingrained humility and lovableness in those not righteous over much. Too much of pedantry is a vice and deserves the retort of the criminal. A certain judge pointing to a criminal said: There stands the criminal at the end of my cane. The thief retorted: At which end of the cane, my Lord? Handy dandy, who is the thief? Who is the judge? The beadle lusts after the whore’s flesh and how is he less culpable than the whore? None offends, as Lear says. Persons may pretend to be moral Olympians. But they are worse than moral invertebrates when they fall: Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

There was never yet Philosopher
That endured tooth ache patiently
However they writ the style of gods.

The poet’s gospel is that of the three Monkeys: See not evil, bear not evil, speak not evil. In this world it is invariably a question of the pot calling the kettle black. Hence he shouts at the pitch of his voice:

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am….

Shakespeare is one who gives himself away unreservedly. The motto on the casket, which Bassanio chooses, sums up his character: He who chooseth me must hazard all. He is not a cold calculating selfish type but a prodigal of his affections; the Elizabethans never did anything by halves; it is the baroque impulse. There is beggary in love that reckons. Prudence is a deadly virtue that curdles, like eager droppings into milk, the thin and wholesome blood. In Shakespeare’s world there is no single blessedness: there is only multiple blessedness. The Economy of the Closed Heart sins against the Doctrine of Increase. His world is not dichotomized into the sacred and profane: flesh may flower into soul and soul may putrefy into pedantry which invites his deep hatred. The greatest mark of Shakespeare is his ability to give us contrasting things without the slightest diminution of either. As Raleigh says, he is that rarest of all human beings, a complete man. The story of William the Conqueror coming before Richard III does not condemn Shakespeare; it seats him on the throne of humanity. His laughter is as broad as that of ten thousand beeves at pasture; his brow does not darken over the vast reciprocity of tears. He is honest and of an open and free nature–the very qualities he ascribes to his tragic heroes. Treat every one above his deserts and after your own nobility.

VIII

The Sonnets are a Testament of Love–erotic, feudal, filial, parental, amicable, sexual. They are the most triumphant war cry against all-destroying time:

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her own blood.

They are the most tormented and biting revulsion against scalding lechery and the stench of sex. They are the Scripture of Charity;

How would ye be
If He, who is the top of judgement, should
But judge as you are?

They celebrate Blake’s Clod as no poet celebrated it. There is no parallel, writes Lever, in the whole corpus of Renaissance poetry to Shakespeare’s sustained exploration of the theme of friendship through more than 120 sonnets. What friendship is this that writes:

for I love you so
That in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.

This self-abnegation is not a pose. Love is the Subduer of Rhetoric, the Enemy of Lust, the Destroyer of Time. The separable spite of the sonnets is consumed in the mutual flame of The Phoenix and the Turtle; in the 116th sonnet we have the poet’s great affirmation:

Love is not Time’s fool.

The neatest summary of the story and thought in the sonnets is Bacon’s well-known sentence: “Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.” This triplicity amazingly enough fits into the three thematic strands in the sonnets: Procreation, Friendship, Lust: the young Man, the Poet, the Dark Mistress.