All the Sonnets of Shakespeare

"They’re doing two things here. As the title indicates, it’s “all” the sonnets of Shakespeare — not just the 154 from the 1609 quarto. This includes excerpts from the plays that are literal sonnets, as well as characters discussing the practice of “sonneting.” Romeo and Juliet ’s sonnets might be the most familiar, whether the Chorus’s prologues (“Two households, both alike in dignity”), or the dialogue where the masked lovers meet and compose a mutual 14-line poem (“If I profane with my unworthiest hand”). Edmondson and Wells gather these, along with other passages from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Edward III, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, Pericles, Cymbeline, and Henry VIII. Separately, they’ve speculated about the possible order of composition of those poems. Dating the drama tends to be easier: for many plays, we have a pretty good sense of when they were first performed, and when they were first printed. In some cases, we can even deduce when a play was likely composed. “if you’re a poet writing in Tudor England, the sonnet is one of many forms that you seek to master to demonstrate your capability as a writer” The sonnets are tougher to date with precision. If, as they suggest — and as others have suggested before — they were composed over a 25+ year span, and then in 1609 were expanded and rearranged, how can you justify saying ‘I think this one was written before that one’? So they do a lot of circumstantial speculation, synthesizing generations of scholars who’ve tried to puzzle this out. One example: sonnet 145’s unusual for its eight-syllable lines, what we call a tetrameter, instead of the conventional pentameter. It sounds like the final line might embed a pun on Anne Hathaway’s surname: “’I hate’ from hate away she threw.” Might this have been a sonnet he wrote in the 1580s, to woo his future wife? Reordering the sonnets has a long, controversial history. While Duncan-Jones dismisses it as fruitless, many, many readers have thought, ‘I think I know a better order for these poems! I think I have a better sense of how they should proceed — one that fits my idea of what the trajectory of the poems really is.” Reconstructing the possible order of composition is a clever, if ultimately limited, exercise. What I appreciate more about this book is its anthology of poems from the plays, reminding us that versifying is not separate from drama — and, vice versa , that there are dramatic elements at play in the poems. Across his career, Shakespeare was meditating upon this particular form: sometimes mocking it, sometimes praising it; deploying it in comedy, history, and tragedy; toying with its permutations on both stage and page. They address a wide range of subjects and topics and occasions, from being tongue-tied (23) to being sleepless (27). Moreover, he doesn’t make his sonnets sound like the Petrarchan models that were in vogue two decades earlier, where a male speaker was (over)idealizing a female beloved. Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets involve an older male addressing a younger male, for whom he has enormous affection, as well as ambivalence and frustration. Then we come to the last 28 sonnets, which entail an explicitly sexual relationship with a woman. It’s full of lust that’s “perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust” (to cite 129). Neither addressee is conventionally Petrarchan! Absolutely; many of them are animated by intimations of mortality. There are wonderful poems — like 71, 73, 81 — where the speaker projects his own death in the future, and wonders what the surviving addressee will do. Will you be mourning for me? Will you have forgotten me? Does my older age now spur your youth into action? Sometimes that imaginative projection leads to audacious statements, like 55, where the poet proclaims that the poem will outlive everything — even ‘gilded monuments / Of princes.’ (An old boast!) On other occasions, the poet worries: how will this feeble little piece of paper survive, when nothing in the physical world does (65)? It’d take a miracle . . . Well, readers have long yearned for that sense! Wordsworth claimed that “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” — to which Robert Browning retorted: “Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!” And Algernon Charles Swinburne ventured to reply: “no whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning.” “They address a wide range of subjects and topics and occasions, from being tongue-tied (23) to being sleepless (27)” To me, the experience of reading the sonnets involves an almost Rorschach blot-like quality. There’s definitely something there . . . and you can see what you might want to see . . . but it’s impossible to pin down a consensus about everyone seeing the same thing. Features and traits emerge through the voice of the poems, but I don’t know if “personality” would be the word that I’d invoke to describe that; maybe, better, a “persona.” If anything, this persona is a remote one, cautious about not putting himself forward (that Keatsian “negative capability”)."