Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets

J B Leishman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1961. This study analyses Shakespeare's treatment of the universal themes of Beauty, Love and Time. He compares Shakespeare with other great poets and sonnet writers - Pindar, Horace and Ovid, with Petrarch, Tasso and Ronsart, with Shakespeare's own English predecessors and contemporaries, notably Spenser, Daniel and Drayton and with John Donne. By discussing their resemblances and differences, a not altogether orthodox picture of Shakespeare's attitude to life is presented, which suggests that he was not as phlegmatic and equable a person as critics have often supposed.

III

‘HYPERBOLE’ AND ‘RELIGIOUSNESS’ IN SHAKESPEARE'S EXPRESSIONS OF HIS LOVE

For the matters which I propose to discuss in this Third Part ofmy study I have been unable to discover any obviously correct order of procedure, and I fear it will be impossible to avoid some appearance of both repetition and digression. Consider, for example, some of Shakespeare's sonnets written during absence from his friend. As I shall attempt to show, it is possible to distinguish in Classical and Renaissance poetry at least four varieties of, or variations upon, the general topic of ‘The Solitary Lover recalling the Beloved’. Two of these variations do not occur in Shakespeare'ssonnets, while the two that do occur do so in close association both with the peculiarly Shakespearean conception of the beloved as the archetype and pattern of all other beauty and also with a topic which, though characteristically Shakespearean and developed by Shakespeare with a fullness not to be found elsewhere, is not without certain parallels and analogues in Classical and Renaissance poetry: the topic, namely, of compensation, or, rather, a special variety of it which may be termed ‘the catalogue of uncompensating delights’, of delights, that is to say, which are no compensation for one that is withheld. And, again, the characteristic conception of the beloved as the archetype of all beauty is also a characteristic manifestation of that ‘religiousness’ (some might say ‘idolatrousness’) which distinguishes Shakespeare's sonnets from most other love-poetry; and so too is the catalogue of uncompensating delights, for it is, after all, but the obverse and corollary of Shakespeare's characteristic conception of love as a compensation for all the evils of life, for all his own deficiencies, and for all he has supposed lost. In a sense, therefore, it is not really possible for me to say what I think worth saying about even these sonnets written during absence except in relation to almost everything else that I propose to discuss, and without either anticipating something I have still to say or repeating something I have already said—let alone to reach any firm assurance that there is one particular stage in my discoursemore appropriate than another to a consideration ofthese particular sonnets. And further: the ‘catalogues’, as I have called them, in these sonnets afford a particularly good opportunity to contrast Shakespeare's predominantly metaphorical description with the predominantly unmetaphorical description of other poets, and in taking this opportunity I may well appear to digress from my main theme. But what is my main theme? Is it not that ofthe resemblances and differences between Shakespeare and other poets—or, rather, of the difference, the differentia, the thisness that becomes most strikingly apparent in and through the occasional resemblances? In my pursuit of this theme during the two preceding Parts I have perhaps been able to preserve some appearance of systematic and logical procedure, but from now onwards I fear that too much concern for systematic presentation would do violence to the complexity and delicacy of the subject. I must therefore ask the reader to be patient and to allow things, as it were, to emerge.

1

Shakespeare's ‘un-Platonic hyperbole’

I have put the phrase in inverted commas, and I feel that each of the two members of it ought really to be so placed. What I mean is this: there is much in Shakespeare's sonnets which may be described, sometimes perhaps with confidence and sometimes perhaps only question-beggingly, as ‘hyperbole’, and which is often closely associated with something that, at first sight, may seem to resemble what, in other Renaissance poets, we are accustomed to call ‘Platonism’. When, though, we look into the matter we find that what in Shakespeare too seems to be ‘Platonism’ is really inverted ‘Platonism’, ‘Platonism’ standing on its head.

Before proceeding, it will be well to say a word or two about the difference between the kind of ‘Platonism’ we find in Renaissance lovepoetry and the true doctrine of Plato. For Plato the sole justification of visible and terrestrial beauty is that it can sometimes lead the soul to ‘remember’ those eternal ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’ of truth, beauty and goodness which it knew in its pre-natal state. When, though, the soul has once started ‘remembering’, when it has become, in Plato's sense, ‘philosophic’, ‘wisdom-loving’, it proceeds, as Plato so continually and passionately insists, ‘altogether without aid of the senses’. All Plato's language about the ascent, or the re-ascent, of the soul and about ‘the way of dialectic’ is penetrated by a passionate hostility to sense, and he never really explains why the world of what he contemptuously calls ‘appearances’, phenomena, should exist and why the soul should have been separated from the objects of its first contemplation and imprisoned in the body. There is, in fact, an absolute gulf between the pure ‘forms’, the pure ‘ideas’, the pure

and the defiling and imprisoning body. This gulf was bridged by the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, of the Word, the

become flesh, and by the Christian proclamation that the sole revelation of God was in and through the person of Christ. All poetic ‘Platonism’ is more or less Christianised Platonism, Platonism not only modified but transformed by the conscious or unconscious influence of the belief that the highest of all revelations of the divine had been in and through a person. The presence in this ‘Platonic’ love-poetry of more or less recognisable Platonic doctrines, notions and terms is less fundamental than that of the Christianity which has modified them. Dante was not, could not have been, a student of Plato, and Michelangelo was; nevertheless, although the direct influence of Plato is very apparent in Michelangelo's sonnets, the affinity between his way of regarding Vittoria Colonna and Dante's way of regarding Beatrice is far more profound and important than any differences between the framework of ideas which those two poets employed. The fact that some Christian poets do and some do not speak of ‘ideas’ and ‘patterns’ and of an ascent from terrestrial to celestial beauty is not in itself a matter of great significance, for the use which the Christian poets make of these Platonic notions is so different from Plato's that they can only be called ‘Platonic’ within the inverted commas which I am continuing to employ. Indeed, even in Petrarch there are traces of such Platonic notions, which may have reached him through Cicero. What all these philosophically or ‘Platonically’ Christian love-poets, from Dante onwards, or even from some of the predecessors of Dante onwards, believe, or profess to believe, is that in loving the divine beauty and goodness manifested in and through a person they are loving and being led towards that personal God of which it is a manifestation; that they are being guided by a person to a person; that a personal God, through a person, is drawing them to himself. For all these poets the body is not, as it ultimately is for Plato, ‘the tomb of the soul’, but ‘the Temple of the Holy Ghost’, and the beloved is an actual manifestation and incarnation of the divine; whereas for Plato the beauty of the beloved, like all visible beauty, is no more than a shadowy likeness or appearance, no more than, at most (to coin a really modern metaphor), a kind of propelling rocket, which falls away after it has lifted the soul of the ‘philosophic’ lover into the orbit of the eternal ‘forms’, or ‘ideas’.

In all this essentially Christian love-poetry, whether mainly ‘Petrarchan’ or mainly ‘Platonic’, the beloved object, though never superseded or transcended by the lover, is itself transcended by that archetype of which it is a type, by that transcendence which is immanent within it, and from which it is represented as deriving its authority over the lover. This poetry, like Plato's philosophy, is transcendental in that the distinction between human and divine, terrestrial and celestial, remains, although this distinction is no longer, as in Plato, an absolute separation, but exists only within the great Christian paradox of Incarnation. Now what distinguishes Shakespeare's sonnets, or those among them with which I am mainly concerned, from the love-poetry I have been trying to describe, is this: that although they are in a sense ‘transcendental’, just as they are also, in a sense, ‘spiritual’ and ‘idealistic’, or even ‘metaphysical’, they are so only within the limits of the terrestrial. In all Shakespeare's expressions of the meaningfulness to him of his friend and of his love for his friend the distinction between human and divine, terrestrial and celestial, nowhere appears. The friend is represented as transcending all other objects of desire or ambition or contemplation, but never (never, at any rate, with anything like even an approach to explicitness) because of the immanence within him of that which transcends him even as he himself transcends. Indeed, he is sometimes explicitly described, not as a type of beauty and excellence, but as the archetype of all other beauty and excellence.

Before proceeding to illustrate this, I will return to my use of the word ‘hyperbole’ in my descriptive phrase ‘un-Platonic hyperbole’, a phrase of which I said that I felt each of its two members should be placed within inverted...