My head is full of Shakespeare Sonnets at the moment, from trying to teach this author to startlingly intelligent and perceptive young seminarians. The poet\u2019s allusions to the ruined monasteries that punctuate the Tudor countryside are \u2026 poignant at the least.<\/p>\n
The Sonnets were published late in Shakespeare\u2019s career (1609) \u2014 by a clever and unscrupulous man. His name was Thomas Thorpe. He ran what was for the times a unique publishing business, playing games with \u201ccopyright\u201d that were often unconscionable but, usually, this side of the law. He owned neither a printing press, nor a bookstall \u2014 two things that defined contemporary booksellers \u2014 subcontracting everything in his slippery way. Indeed, I would go beyond other observers, and describe him as a blackguard; and I think Will Shakespeare would agree with me. Though Shakespeare would add, \u201cA witty and diverting blackguard.\u201d<\/p>\n
He collected these sonnets, quite certainly by Shakespeare, but written at much different times and for quite various occasions, from whatever well-oiled sources. Thorpe had a fine poetic ear, and knew what he was doing. He arranged the collection he\u2019d amassed in the sequence we have inherited \u2014 154 sonnets that seem to read consecutively, with \u201cA Lover\u2019s Complaint\u201d tacked on as their envoi \u2014 then sold them as if this had been the author\u2019s intention.<\/p>\n
We have sonnets not later than 1591, interspersed with others 1607 or later. In one case (Sonnet 145), we have what I think is a love poem Shakespeare wrote about age eighteen, to a girl he was wooing: one Anne Hathaway. (She was twenty-seven.) It is crawling with puns, for instance on her name, and stylistically na\u00efve, but has been placed within the \u201cDark Lady\u201d sonnets (127 to 152) in a mildly plausible way. It hardly belongs there.<\/p>\n
Indeed, once one sees this it becomes apparent, surveying the whole course, that there is rather more than one \u201cDark Lady\u201d in the Sonnets, and that like most red-blooded men, our Will noticed quite a number of interesting women over his years. But Thorpe has folded them all into one for dramatic effect.<\/p>\n
The teen-aged Shakespeare has not yet fully mastered his craft. His earliest plays, too, contain flaws and miscalculations and stylistic naivet\u00e9. This does not mean they weren\u2019t written by Shakespeare. They also contain passages so striking that his authorship is unmistakable. Our own (scholarly) perception of this is clouded, because of our dependence on statistical tests: the use of vocabulary counts, for instance, to date passages. More useful and important, are considerations of lyrical craft and breadth (as Shakespeare grows older he breaks more and more rules, to more and more purposes), and the background themes. For like every other writer, regardless of genre, there are continuities from one work to another, more conscious than unconscious.<\/p>\n
Confusion redounds because, while scholars may agree that some sonnets are \u201cearly,\u201d and some \u201clate,\u201d they can\u2019t be trusted to guess which are which. Some creative intelligence, or \u201cgift,\u201d is necessary to discern such things. College professors with tin ears and computers are not up to the task. Their \u201cresults\u201d belong to the counting house, not to poetry, and should never be taken so seriously as they are (by other college professors).<\/p>\n
Thorpe had this \u201cgift,\u201d and used it mischievously. The first seventeen sonnets are unquestionably an intentional sequence, written as they declare, to a \u201cFair Youth\u201d \u2014 quite probably the Earl of Southampton \u2014 advising him to marry and thereby perpetuate his family and fame. The conceits, including celebration of male beauty, are perfectly Elizabethan, and have, incidentally, none of the \u201chomo-erotic tendencies\u201d we began to read into them the day before yesterday. If one considers, alone, the Elizabethan connotations of the word \u201cbrave,\u201d one may begin to realize that qualities we dismiss as \u201cfey\u201d and \u201ceffete\u201d \u2014 including the very appreciation of poetry and art \u2014 were formerly associated with true masculinity.<\/p>\n
Mischief, Elizabethan not post-modern, comes fully into play beginning at Sonnet 18. This is Thorpe\u2019s first bridge. He is extending that short sequence into something grander and thus more saleable. He wants the reader to think he has in his hands not a jumble of miscellaneous sonnets, but a great, unified work of art in the Petrarchan tradition. He relies on Shakespeare\u2019s own genius for address (even his soliloquys focus as if upon a single auditor), and for story-telling (even when there is no story), to carry the impression of a self-revealing narrative \u2014 that continues not for 17, but as if 126 of the sonnets were all addressed to this tremendously significant \u201cFair Youth.\u201d<\/p>\n
They appear to be going somewhere, when they are not, and the break into the \u201cDark Lady\u201d section, and the concluding pair of \u201ccupid\u201d emblem sonnets, give more of the show away. For they create, with the \u201cLover\u2019s Complaint\u201d hitched onto those, a structure no competent poet would consider: a tail, tacked on a tail, tacked on a tail, like The Human Centipede.<\/p>\n
As a point of departure, I recommend a good book by the American jurisprude, John T. Noonan, Jr. It is entitled, Shakespeare\u2019s Spiritual Sonnets (2011), and is the product of a lifetime of attentive and meditative reading. Noonan considers each sonnet on its own terms, to see what it is saying and to whom.<\/p>\n
He finds, for instance, explicitly religious language in many places. And there is self-revelation of a religious kind. Here, often, is a Catholic poet confessing his own sins, in thought word and deed, and making his poor and yet free oblation, not to a general audience but intimately, to the sympathetic Catholic reader. Shakespeare is, Noonan says, writing to his own soul (sonnets 129 and 146); to the Church (74, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119, and elsewhere); to the Virgin Mother (109, 110); to God in Christ (122, 125); to the Jesuits on mission (69, 70, 94). And most spectacularly, in Sonnet 73, the Church herself is speaking. For the arguments gentle reader must go fetch the book.<\/p>\n
Whether or not each attribution is correct, we begin to appreciate the mess Thorpe has made of Shakespeare. But, too: why Shakespeare, though he must have been outraged by the use to which his private poems were put, could do nothing. He could not call attention to Thorpe\u2019s imposture without also calling attention to his own secret life, beyond the edge of the publicly acceptable.<\/p>\n
For he could be Catholic as William Byrd, and many other composers, poets, and artists, inside the Court, and thus under its protection, while out of public view. But in plain view on the streets of London after the \u201cGunpowder Plot,\u201d and other anti-Catholic hysterias, one did not make a spectacle of Roman allegiance. That would be asking for it.<\/p>\n
Shakespeare would take risk enough, when he was likely to get away with it. He allowed, for example, the publication of one of the strangest poems ever written. This was his \u201cPhoenix and the Turtle,\u201d contributed to an anthology entitled Love\u2019s Martyr, show-casing leading poets of the day. On its surface it was one of several light allegorical treatments of a harmless theme; but under this surface it was not harmless.<\/p>\n
This \u201cfirst metaphysical poem in the English language\u201d is an unearthly funeral lament. It seizes upon a reversal of convention agreed by all the authors: the phoenix is presented as female, the turtledove as male. The brief, mysterious narrative, and then the threnos (\u201cwailing\u201d) at its tail, are profoundly moving, yet incomprehensible as they stand. That is, until we have this clue: that it is a requiem for (Saint) Anne Line, hanged from the Tyburn gallows for having sheltered Catholic priests, along with two priests also hanged and then drawn and quartered. (Anne\u2019s husband, Roger Line, who predeceased her, comes into it as well.) Suddenly the \u201clove\u201d that is being \u201cmartyred\u201d is likewise reversed: a Love not conventional but mystical, the martyrdom not a conceit, but real.<\/p>\n
Read now Sonnet 74, for another reflection of the same event (from February 1601), and note wordplay that includes a nervy pun on Anne\u2019s surname.<\/p>\n
Now, this is the sort of material Thomas Thorpe insinuated into The Sonnets, and passed off as high society perfume. He had a history of collecting and publishing works behind poets\u2019 backs, sometimes callously exposing them to trouble, while himself wiggling smartly out of the line of fire.<\/p>\n
This he does in the inscrutable dedication he attached to the collection. He made it seem that he was loyally serving interests above his station, when he was not. He wrote similarly elegant, self-serving prefaces to other works, too, stepping himself aside, as tabloid editors do today: pretending to serve some public interest when they are in it for the dime. This most famous dedication in English was his cutest pose. And the final joke is that it contains what he may pass off as a bad typo (\u201cW.H.\u201d for \u201cW.S.\u201d) \u2014 a little twist that has sent generations of college professors down bottomless rabbit holes searching for an \u201conlie begetter\u201d who is, in reality, onlie Shakespeare himself. Given what we know of Thorpe, the typo had to be intentional, intended for some additional private mischief we will never be able to trace.<\/p>\n
By David Warren, lecturer in religion and literature, St Philip’s Seminary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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