Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare’s sonnets were published for the first time as a collection in 1609, although two (numbers 138 and 144) had previously been printed in a volume of Elizabethan verse called The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). The 1609 collection of sonnets was dedicated to “Mr. W.H.,” the “only begetter of these . . . sonnets.” The dedication was signed by “T.T.,” (Thomas Thorpe, the publisher). Thorpe may have secured a copy of the poems that had been circulating among Shakespeare’s friends, or he may somehow have obtained Shakespeare’s own manuscripts. In addition to 154 sonnets, the volume contained “A Lover’s Complaint.” In this poem, too-little read today, a woman tells a herdsman the story of her seduction and later abandonment by her lover. The presence of a “Complaint” in a book of sonnets was a well-recognized practice, and Shakespeare’s sonnets and “The Lover’s Complaint” were undoubtedly intended to be read together.
The first 126 sonnets are apparently addressed to a handsome young nobleman, presumably the author’s patron. The poems express the writer’s selfless but not entirely uncritical devotion to the young man. The next 28 sonnets are written to a “dark lady,” whom the poet seemingly cannot resist. Another figure in the sequence is the “rival poet.” Scholars have spent much time trying to identify the specific figures the sonnets address, but it is unlikely that the sonnets are so personal. More likely, the sonnet offered Shakespeare a structure for experiments in lyric verse that enabled him to play with familiar conventions of feeling and poetry. Although no systematic narrative develops in the sonnets, there is a thematic link between the “young man” group and the “dark lady” group. The youth and the mistress betray the poet, and at one point the author berates the young man for stealing the dark lady from him. Miscellaneous sonnets treat various other themes, most notably the rending effects of time and the eternalizing possibilities of art.
The form of the poems is an English variation of the traditional fourteen-line sonnet. The lines, which each have ten syllables, are arranged into three quatrains, or groups of four lines, and a final couplet (two successive lines that rhyme). The rhyme scheme of the sonnets is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. A theme is developed and elaborated in the quatrains, and a concluding thought is presented in the couplet. Sonnet 116 is typical of the form and excellence of the poems.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
The poet himself prophesied in Sonnet 55: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rime.” The appreciation of the sonnets’ power and beauty by successive generations confirms this prophecy. Shakespeare’s sonnets continue to be read and enjoyed, and they remain among the greatest poetic achievements in the English language.