Krantz
English 4620
Background notes
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Notes taken from New Penguin Shakespeare, John Kerrigan ed.and intro.

In 1609 when Shakespeare was already famous, his book of sonnets appeared. The first 126 are apparently addressed to a beautiful young man. While they have an "erotic undertow," they address diverse concerns. The group ends with what serves as an envoy. The next sonnets, 127-152, focus on a "seductive but treacherous" dark-haired lady." These deal with her charms, the speaker's adulterous love for her, and with his disgust at her lack of faithfulness. Tone, content, and context connect the poems including 40 "where the [speaker] ruefully forgives the youth for being seduced by his mistress" to those in which he asks the lady why she must enslave not only the speaker but "his 'sweet'st friend'." Still both sets of poems remain distinct and neither set is connected in an obvious way with the last of the poems in the sequence 153-4. (7)
Kerrigan proposes that critics who reorder the poems to establish a tighter link between them really miss the connections that make reading the whole "a concentrated yet essentially cumulative experience."
Some connections among the poems are obvious: poems on insomnia (27-8) or the 4 elements (44-5) or travelling on horseback (50-1) or emotional slavery (57-8). Sometimes a connecting word like But or Thus joins poems. Others are connected in less obvious ways by rhythm, rhyme, syntax, or "an echoing image" as found in 106-9. 106 deals with a central problem in the sonnets, praise. In dead ladies and lovely knights he finds an "anticipation" of the young man's beauty." The next poem, 107, deals with the "mood of the nation after the accession of James I in 1603" (8). Despite worries in the nation after the death of Elizabeth, James' coronation brings peace with it--a peace that touches the poet-speaker as well. His love "looks fresh" and his poetry flourishes. But the two themes are very distinct. How then are the poems linked? The 'prophetic soul' of one derives from the 'propehcies' of the other (107.1, 106.9); in both, great tracts of time revolve around the word 'now' (106.8 & 13, 107.9). Other subtle links join 106 and 107 with 108 & 109.
Evidence exists however that some of the poems were circulating separately before they were published. Nonetheless, Kerrigan maintains that they work as a whole. Moreover, he claims that, again despite other critics/editors, the text of the poems in neither purely fictional nor autobiographical in the modern sense of the word. "Shakespeare stands behind the first person of his sequence as Sidney had stood behind Astrophil sometimes near the poetic 'I', sometimes farther off, but never without some degree of rhetorical projection. The Sonnets are not autobiographical in a psychological mode" (11).
This returns us to a problem--is there a unifying principle? Again the answer is yes. If one includes Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint with the sonnet sequence, then the sequence is like several published before his, including the Amoretti followed by the Epithalamion. (17)
In Shakespeare's sonnets the duplicitous nature of ornate poetry, its ability to betray by praise, is condemned. For most renaissance writers, poetry has its origins in praise. The ancient poets make great and virtuous men immortal by their immortal poems (18). This meant using hyperbole to describe them and their actions, a practice that "licensed flattery to a dangerous degree" (19). In Shakespeare's time, sonnets that tended in this direction became "a byword for derivative mediocrity, far-fetched comparison, and flattering praise" (20-21). They invited satire as well as Shakespeare's scruples including those that saw such poetry as a "vulgar bid for personal immortality" (21).
Kerrigan claims that these scruples prevented Shakespeare from putting his name in his book (except for the "bawdy quibbles on 'Will'"). "When he is most directly 'Will,' he is nearest the spirit of riddling. Š He says, several times, that his verse will 'wear this world out to the ending doom' (55.12); but, modestly, he never claims that he, or his name, will be remembered. Š He finds the dark lady so desirable that 'flesh Š rising at thy name, doth point out thee /As his triumphant prize' (151.8-10); but just what this seductive 'name' might be, we are not told. Still more extraordinary is Shakespeare's treatment of the lovely youth. Time and again we are assured that the friend will live forever in the lines (19.13-14). Š Yet we never learn the young man's 'name'" (21).
Shakespeare wanted to "communicate something important about praise and truth, similitude and seduction, poetry and morality. Š He may have found it rewarding to write in sonnets precisely because the form conveyed to the reader panegyric and metaphoric assumptions of the kind he wished to work against." In sonnet 130 instead of an anti-Petrarchan exercise, we see the refusal of the poet to "submit the mistress to convention, even by inversion." Unlike Donne, who "commits himself to eulogy and excoriation with equal gusto (22), Shakespeare rejects both extremes and, in his plays and long poems shows the perils of invidious hyperbole" (23).
In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare shows the competitive roots of similitude by reminding us that the word "as" carries a judgement of value and extent as well as of resemblance. Comparisons are false in Sonnet 130 not just because 'eyes' cannot really compete with the sun for brightness but because comparison depends on difference (otherwise we would be seeing identity, not metaphor). Everywhere in the sonnets, Shakespeare writes with a consciousness of the difference found in similarity. Shakespeare reacts profoundly against the lie inherent in metaphor. He writes against it because it "belies the nature of things" (23). He finds comparison odious because they conceal, for example, "what the mistress's 'eyes' might actually be," they "neglect particularity and being."
Sonnet 21 has the same function in the early sonnets as 130 has in the later. Shakespeare "refuses to put the youth into rivalry with the stars" (24). He insists that telling the truth is better than exaggerating like the rival poets of his day and the harshest poems in the sonnet sequence are those against these poets. (25).
Although Shakespeare has few mannerisms, "his habit of celebrating particularity and being through Š reflexive structure is one of them" (26). Recall how often he uses phrases such "I am not that I am" or "I myself was to myself not mine." (26). Shakespeare expresses in the coupling of father and child the "creative copiousness which lies at the heart of being." This explains "why his sonnets begin with the 'breeding group', why poems on metaphor follow a series of sonnets devoted to marriage, procreation, and what I.I calls 'increase." In reproduction Shakespeare found the moral means to similitude" (27).
"Copy" did not have for the Elizabethans the negative connotation it has for us. Possibly because the printing press was new and copy did not mean there was an original but that which was used to produce offspring, a "life in plentitude, a copiousness, resembling that copia which renaissance rhetoricians thought texts should aspire to through a proliferation of eloquent 'figures." "Breeding promises an infinite extension of Š increase" (28).
For Shakespeare repetition became "perfect eloquence." In poem after poem he celebrates the novelty of what he has already said. At times this can produce a dull poem. Nonetheless Shakespeare was vividly metaphoric; "but he was also a writer so alert to the ethical implications of his art that he led an inquiry into metaphor within that art" (29).
At times he inverts metaphors to achieve his purpose. Adonis is like the young man and not vice versa. Even so, "the young man is never less than singular, himself alone, particular, and the poet's love is directed to him" (54). "If the sonnets to the youth grow out of comradely affection in the literature of friendship, those to the dark lady extend and degrade the rival attractions of heterosexual passion" (55). The sonnets to the lady parallel but also invert those written to the young man. They act like a sub-plot of a Shakespearian play (56). In sonnet 137, the lady is a ghastly parody of the young man's breadth. "In the conflation of her 'love' with Cupid, there is an echo of Shakespeare's exaltation of the youth into a 'god in love' (62). The last poem to the young man, Sonnet 126, "resonates with material from the early sonnets. But here the powers of Adonis reach their full height, and the young man grows by waning, increasing in decay. Like Spenser's 'boy' favored by Aphrodite, the youth is above time. Nonetheless, he cannot escape it. In Shakespeare's sonnets at the last "Time circumscribes the natural world and the very springs of life, while verse can only make memorials, inscribing what, without art, would always already be gone" (63).