Shakespeare's Sonnets

Critical Essays

James Schiffer, James Schiffer

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135023256
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Literary Criticism

Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays is the essential Sonnets anthology for our time. This important collection focuses exclusively on contemporary criticism of the Sonnets, reprinting three highly influential essays from the past decade and including sixteen original analyses by leading scholars in the field. The contributors' diverse approaches range from the new historicism to the new bibliography, from formalism to feminism, from reception theory to cultural materialism, and from biographical criticism to queer theory. In addition, James Schiffer's introduction offers a comprehensive survey of 400 years of criticism of these fascinating, enigmatic poems.

PART I

Introduction

Reading New Life into Shakespeare's Sonnets

A Survey of Criticism

James Schiffer

What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

—Sonnet 53.1–2¹

A common practice in many accounts of the reception history of Shakespeare's Sonnets is to complain, often in tones of comic despair, about the crushing volume of criticism, the mountain of essays, dissertations, chapters, books, poems, plays, and novels on these most problematic of poems—a mountain any surveyor must attempt to climb. Even at the start of the biographical debates in the early nineteenth century, James Boswell the younger protested: “There are few topicks connected with Shakespeare upon which the ingenuity and research of his criticks have been more fruitlessly exercised, than upon the questions which have arisen with regard to the poems before us, the individual to whom they were principally addressed, and the circumstances under which they were written” (20: 218). And by the end of the last century, Swinburne could write: “Upon the Sonnets such a preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary has long since been reared by the Cimmerian speculation and Boeotian ‘brain-sweat’ of sciolists and scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise man will desire to add to the structure or subtract from it one brick of proof or disproof, theorem or theory” (62). That “structure” is much greater now, of course, after another century of voluminous discussion, and modern commentators often lament the uneven quality of much of what has been written as well as the outright insanity of more than a few interpretations.

W. H. Auden, for example, begins his 1964 introduction to the Signet edition of the Sonnets by stating, “Probably, more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the Sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world” (xvii). In his survey of criticism for the Penguin edition in 1986, John Kerrigan notes that Herbert S. Donow's “admirable but inevitably incomplete” bibliography of the sonnet in England and America, published in 1982 and covering criticism through 1981, lists 1, 898 items on Shakespeare's Sonnets alone, but, Kerrigan adds, “much of the literature tends to lunacy and is dispensable” (65).² More recently, Helen Vendler has written of “the highly diverting, if appalling, history of the reception of the Sonnets” (“Reading” 29). She recalls the first time she realized “with trepidation, that the Sonnets are a lightning rod for nuttiness. There is even a man in the Variorum who thinks the Dark Lady was a wine bottle, and that the later sonnets record Shakespeare's struggles with alcoholism” (“Reading” 24). Vendler alludes here to J. F. Forbis's The Shakespearean Enigma and an Elizabethan Mania (1924), a work worthy to succeed German scholar D. Barnstorff's A Key to Shakespeare's Sonnets (1860), which argues that Master W. H., to whom Thomas Thorpe dedicated the 1609 Quarto volume, stands for “William Himself.” Father to a line of esoteric/allegorical interpretations, Barnstorff himself is worthy successor to George Chalmers, who argued in 1797 that all the Sonnets, even those directed to “a lovely boy,” are in fact addressed to Queen Elizabeth.

Reading the history of the Sonnets' reception can be the occasion of easy laughs, and sometimes disgust, at the blindness of our predecessors. Yet as Vendler also notes, “Earlier methods of reading the Sonnets, on display in the Variorum and elsewhere, of course teach us a philosophical humility before our own” (“Reading” 39). This same point is made more emphatically—and perhaps more genuinely—by Brian Vickers in volume 6 of Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. In asking that we not judge eighteenth-century critics too harshly for their dislike of Shakespeare's Sonnets and of the sonnet form, he writes:

In studying the reception of Shakespeare, or of any other major writer, over a long historical period the modern reader is involved in a constant series of adjustments and comparisons. We work with a triangle, consisting of Shakespeare in his age, the eighteenth century critics in theirs, and ourselves in our own: which, no less than the others, has a critical and aesthetic system that is inherited, consciously or not, and shaped by many influences. We can juxtapose our understanding of Shakespeare with the eighteenth century's understanding of him, and with our understanding of them. This triple process of comparative interpretation ought to make us see that our position is time-bound, and culture-bound, ought to prevent us from feeling any easy sense of superiority. Another age will arise that may look at our Shakespeare criticism with reactions ranging from indulgent apology to disbelief and contempt…. We will not be led into a complacent sense of progress. (41–42)

Becoming aware of the cultural, intellectual, and historical “influences” that have shaped responses to the Sonnets in the past should lead us to a greater understanding of how comparable factors shape our changing responses to the Sonnets today.

THE 1609 QUARTO

The first thing to learn about the Sonnets—the first of the ironies, one might call it—is that despite the vast quantity of Sonnets criticism, there is very little agreement about these poems, especially about the circumstances of their composition and first publication as a collection. This is a major theme of the second volume of Hyder Rollins's magisterial 1944 Variorum and of Stephen Booth's masterpiece of sardonic brevity, his appendix to his 1977 edition of the Sonnets titled “Facts and Theories.” G. Blakemore Evans's 1996 New Cambridge edition offers a similar listing of the key, and as yet unresolved, issues. Most editions of the Sonnets over the last century, in fact, offer detailed discussions of “the problems.”

Scholars have been—and remain—deeply divided on a number of issues regarding the Quarto volume published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609; all subsequent texts of the Sonnets as a collection ultimately derive from this edition, also known as “Q.”³ And virtually every contemporary theory about these poems is based either directly or indirectly on one or more intensely contested assumptions about this publication. In The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Paul Ramsey describes the interconnectedness of the various issues: “The problems of the sonnets may not be entirely solvable; but they cannot be evaded. They loop and twist into each other, and to tug at one is to tighten others. Nor can one bypass the problems to come at aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic judgments about the sonnets necessarily presume and imply stated or unstated, lucky or dubious, judgments about the problems” (3).

The 1609 Quarto consists of 154 consecutively numbered sonnets, followed by A Lover's Complaint. All but three sonnets in the collection are in the Shakespearean form (also known as the English form introduced in England by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, early in the sixteenth century) of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter organized into three quatrains and a final couplet, all with the same rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. The exceptions are sonnet 99, which has fifteen lines; sonnet 126, which has twelve lines consisting of six rhymed couplets; and sonnet 145, which is in iambic tetrameter. The issues that arise from Q 1609 can be listed briefly:

1. AUTHENTICITY

The vast majority of commentators have accepted Shakespeare's authorship, even though no autograph manuscript has survived (a situation comparable to virtually all the plays and other poems). Some accept that the 1609 Quarto is primarily Shakespeare's, but have questioned specific sonnets in the collection, usually on aesthetic grounds, though as Booth observes, which sonnets get challenged has varied from disintegrationist to disintegrationist (most often questioned are the last two sonnets, 153 and 154, followed closely by 145) (Sonnets 545); J. M. Robertson, for example, rejected as many as one-third of the poems, largely on the grounds that they are inferior to others in the collection and are therefore unworthy of their author (271); Robertson also argued, as have many others, that A Lover's Complaint was not authored by Shakespeare (257). As Hyder Rollins details in volume 2 of the Variorum, some commentators have speculated that other personages such as Raleigh, Sidney, the first and second Earls of Essex, “Anne Whateley,” Elizabeth Vernon, and the Earl of Pembroke wrote all or some of the Sonnets (2: 45–46). Needless to say, those who reject Shakespeare as author of the plays also reject his authorship of the Sonnets, instead favoring their own candidates (usually Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere).

Those who accept Shakespeare's authorship base their opinion on the following evidence: (1) obviously, Shakespeare's name on the title page (with the implication of authorship in the title Shakespeares Sonnets', see Figure 2 in this volume), as well as the entry in the Stationers' Register on May 20, 1609, by publisher Thomas Thorpe of “a Booke called Shakespeares sonnettes”; (2) the fact that there is no evidence Shakespeare protested the attribution or tried to suppress the publication when the work appeared in print; (3) we know Shakespeare was writing sonnets because in 1598 Francis Meres wrote the following praise in Palladis Tamia: “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in Mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.”; (4) the presence of versions of sonnets 138 and 144 along with poems from Love's Labor's Lost in the first edition of The Passionate Pilgrim (see below); (5) parallels in diction, imagery, thought, and style with other works (both dramatic and nondramatic) assumed to be by Shakespeare; and (6) the presence of sonnets, also in the English form, in plays known to be by Shakespeare, for example, Love's Labor's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and All's Well That Ends Well.

2. DATE OF COMPOSITION

Commentators have long been at odds on this issue, some favoring a date as early as the mid-l58Os to the early-to-mid-1590s (when the sonnet-writing vogue was at its height), others favoring a later starting point, from the last years of the 1590s to the obvious terminus ad quem of 1609. At least some sonnets were written by 1599, since two were published that year in The Passionate Pilgrim, an unauthorized volume attributed to Shakespeare (even though most of the contents were by other authors), published by William Jaggard.⁴ Francis Meres's reference in Palladis Tamia to “Shakespeares sugred Sonnets among his private friends” may or may not refer to the poems in the 1609 Quarto (most scholars think it does refer to at least some of them). If Meres is referring to sonnets that would later be included in Thorpe's collection, then at least some of the Sonnets had to have been written by 1598. As Rollins observes, theories about date of composition have often been proposed to support specific candidates for the identity of the young male friend, rival poet (s), and dark lady on the assumption that the Sonnets are autobiographical (2: 57). Those favoring Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, as the young friend, for example, have traditionally argued for a date in the early to mid-1590s, while those favoring William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke, have tended to posit a date in the late 1590s to early 1600s, since Herbert was not born until 1580 and probably did not move to London until 1598. Some commentators have discovered topical references to historical events in individual sonnets, the most often cited being sonnet 107; unfortunately, scholars disagree about which events, if any, this sonnet might refer to; the line “The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured” has been interpreted by some to allude to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, by others to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Yet another possibility is that the line alludes to the Queen's surviving her grand climacteric when she reached the age of sixty-three in 1596 (Rollins 1: 264, 267f., 269).

Studies based on internal evidence have supported theories for both early and late dating; scholars have found strong verbal parallels both with Love's Labor's Lost and Venus and Adonis, on the one hand, and with King Lear and Timon of Athens on the other, and with All's Well That Ends Well in between. Over the last decade, something like a consensus has emerged that Shakespeare was writing, or at least revising, sonnets up to the time of publication in 1609. Thus, a computer-assisted study by A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott of rare word occurrences in the Sonnets and in plays whose dates are presumed to be known concludes that Shakespeare composed sonnets 1–60 in the first five years of the 1590s and then revised many of them after the turn of the century; sonnets 61–103, they find, were also composed early, but received “little or no revision”; sonnets 104–126 were probably composed around 1600; and sonnets 127–154 were written in the first half of the 1590s, but were probably not revised (92–93). In his examination of rare word occurrences and “lexical influence,” meanwhile, Donald Foster has concluded that “most of the sonnets were written later than 1598” and completed by 1608 (“Reconstructing” 27). While both of these recent studies conclude that Shakespeare was working on at least some of the Sonnets into the 160...