The Afterlife of Shakespeare's Sonnets

"Isn’t that surprising? It’s always eye-opening to work your way back into the history of any object that you love — whether it’s a poem, a building, or a piece of music — and discover how its reception has evolved over time. The sonnets weren’t reprinted until 1640, two dozen years after Shakespeare’s death, in a peculiar volume by John Benson. Benson does exactly what an editor would not do now: outright omit some poems; add others not written by Shakespeare (while still attributing them to him); modify the gender of the addressee (changing the ‘he’ of those early sonnets into a ‘she’) — even add explanatory titles to individual poems. For instance, Sonnet 122 goes something like: ‘You gave me a notebook. Sorry, I gave it away to someone else. But the reason I gave it away was, ummmm, because . . . because if I had a notebook to take notes about you, I would forget you! So, actually, I’m remembering you better by giving away the notebook that you gave me.’ It’s an awkward kind of re-gifting apology, and it’s part of those poems addressed to a young man. Yet Benson retitles it, and calls it “Upon the Receipt of a Table Book from His Mistress .” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, he re-genders sonnets and, among other things, doesn’t include 18 — which we just take for granted as having always been popular. That’s one of the things the Kingsley-Smith book is smart about unpacking: why certain sonnets have been favored at certain junctures, less favored at others. As part of her reception history, Kingsley-Smith surveys early readers’ comments. Just yesterday my students were examining images of 17th century copies where someone will, in the margin, scrawl ‘nonsense’ — or even better: ‘What a heap of wretched INFIDEL stuff.’ It’s not as if these poems have always been seen as flawless masterpieces; some of our earliest records of responses to them register antagonism or perplexity. In addition to considering how later writers like Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen, or Virginia Woolf reacted to these poems, she gleans insight by examining how particular sonnets got anthologized, and why. There’s been a lot of great scholarship over the last half century on the history of male-male intimacy in the English Renaissance, a topic often nervously skirted in previous centuries (one reason why editors might revise the pronouns, or anthologize certain poems out of context). The Edmondson and Wells book comes out strongly in favor of a bisexual Shakespeare. That’s not new — it’s been said before — but they’re saying it forcefully. There’s certainly an exquisite playfulness in the sonnets about eroticism. Sonnet 20, for instance, praises the young man for being as beautiful as a woman, save for ‘one thing.’ That ‘one thing,’ we learn in the punchline, is his genitalia — in effect, ‘because nature added “one thing” to you that she didn’t give to women, I can’t have sex with you; you can have sex with women, and I’ll just love you.’ This extra ‘one thing’ is also a (boyish) joke on the meter: 20 is the only sonnet where every line has 11 syllables instead of 10 — one “extra” thing it’s not supposed to have, making it simultaneously excessive and anomalous. At the least, I think it’s fair to say that the sonnets articulate forms of intimacy that are not exclusively physical."