The Sonnets and Other Poems Read Free Page B

of real figures and events. Unlike several contemporary sonneteers, Shakespeare does not name names. Because he is so guarded, the circumstances of composition have provoked centuries of speculation. The young man to whom the bulk of the poems are addressed may or may not be synonymous with the mysterious “Mr. W. H.” named in the collection’s dedication. The traditional candidates for the role of addressee are the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Southampton, though neither of them was a “Mr.” A provocative case has been made for the possibility that “Mr. W. H.” is actually a misprint for “Mr. W. S.” and that in the dedication Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, is merely acknowledging Shakespeare as the “only begetter” of the sonnets (“begetting” was a common metaphor for authoring).
    Dozens and dozens of male Elizabethan poets wrote sonnet sequences, but only Shakespeare and Richard Barnfield addressed their poems explicitly to a man. Barnfield wrote in the explicitly homoerotic tradition of ancient Greek pastoral poetry, whereas Shakespeare’s sequence emphasizes the spiritual aspects of the poet’s love for the fair youth. The only sonnets in the collection where “Will” is actually in bed with a lover are addressed to the dark lady. The young man’s “thing” (which has been “pricked out” by nature) is, says the poet in Sonnet 20, “to my purpose nothing”—though this is supremely ambiguous, since it could mean either that he is not interested in a physical relationship or that the prick serves him in the same way as a woman’s “nothing” (vagina). Taken in their entirety, the sonnets associate heterosexual desire with consummation and disgust, homoerotic attraction with spirituality and an intensity that derives in large measure from the impossibility of consummation. Tempting as it may be to infer Shakespeare’s sexuality from this duality, it might be better to read the opposition between dark lady and fair youth as a dramatic device: one is a “character” representing desire in its sexual manifestation, the other in its idealizing and spirituality.
    From the Earl of Surrey’s profession of love for a certain “Geraldine” through the identification of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Stella” as Lady Penelope Rich, sixteenth-century readers were tantalized with the question of whether love poetry was an exercise of the wits—in imitation of Virgil or Petrarch or Sidney—or whether there was a real-life story behind a sonnet sequence and, if there was, what was the identity of the players. Some poets positively relished leaving all possibilities open. Giles Fletcher tried to have it both ways in the title of his collection of 1593:
Licia, or Poems of love in honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his lady, to the imitation of the best Latin poets
. Imitations of the best classical examples, but also addressed to a specific lady.
    And was he really in love? A prefatory address to the reader explains that:
    for this kind of poetry wherein I wrote, I did it only to try my humour: and for the matter of love, it may be I am so devoted to some one, into whose hands these may light by chance, that she may say which thou now sayest (that surely he is in love), which if she do, then have I the full recompense of my labour, and the poems have dealt sufficiently for the discharge of their own duty
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    So Giles Fletcher may just be “trying his humour,” persuading you by his art that he is in love when actually he is not. Or he may really be in love, though if he is in love, it may only be a matter of chance if the poems fall into the hands of the person he loves. His pose is that he does not care whether they do or not. What he really wants to do is show you, the reader, how clever he is.
    And the identity of his beloved?
    If thou muse what my LICIA is, take her to be some Diana, at the least chaste, or some Minerva, no Venus, fairer far; it may be she is Learning’s image, or