Shakespeare's sonnets

• 1. Introduction

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  Shakespeare's sonnets survived a pirate, a plague, and more than four centuries of argument over who they were really written to. In June 1609, the great Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn walked into a London bookshop and paid one shilling for a freshly printed quarto. Its title page read, in upper case lettering: Shake-speare's Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted. What Alleyn held was a collection of 154 poems that would become one of the most scrutinised bodies of writing in the English language. Who was Mr. W.H., the mysterious dedicatee? Who was the Fair Youth? Who was the Dark Lady? And why, given that Shakespeare himself seemed to mock the sonnet tradition in his own plays, did he pour so much of himself into it? Those questions have never been fully answered. That unresolved quality is part of what keeps the sonnets alive.

• 2. A Tradition Turned Upside Down

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  Thomas Wyatt brought the sonnet to England in the sixteenth century, and Henry Howard gave it the rhyming metre and division into quatrains that English readers recognise today. The tradition Wyatt and Howard inherited ran back to Petrarch in fourteenth-century Italy: a male poet worshipping a goddess-like, unattainable woman. Dante did it. Philip Sidney did it, in his influential sequence Astrophel and Stella, published posthumously in 1591. Shakespeare read all of them, and then did something else entirely. Instead of the adored, distant female beloved, he placed a young man at the centre of the first 126 sonnets. The remaining 28 introduce the Dark Lady, who is described as having black hair and skin the sonnets call "dun". She is not aristocratic, young, beautiful, or chaste. Her breath, the speaker says, "reeks". The relationship is sexual and uncomfortable. Far from idealism, these poems wade into lust, infidelity, and acrimony. The sonnets in the plays that Shakespeare wrote in the same period portray sonnet-making as a comic flaw: proof that love makes men foolish, or a seduction technique deployed cynically. The 1609 quarto seems to settle a score with that older tradition.

• 3. The 1609 Quarto

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  Thomas Thorpe entered the book in the Stationers' Register on the 20th of May 1609. The entry, written in the register's typical shorthand, reads: "a booke called Shakespeares sonnettes", at the fee of sixpence. Whether Thorpe had Shakespeare's blessing to publish is unknown. Thorpe usually signed prefatory dedications only when an author was abroad or dead, and he did sign this one, which has led scholars to suggest the book may have appeared without Shakespeare's permission. A competing explanation points to the chaos of May 1609: a serious plague outbreak shut down the theatres and drove many Londoners out of the city; Shakespeare's theatre company was on tour from Ipswich to Oxford; and Shakespeare himself was being called back to Stratford to manage family affairs and a lawsuit in Warwickshire involving a substantial sum of money. George Eld printed the quarto; the booksellers William Aspley and John Wright divided the print run between them. Thirteen copies have survived in reasonably good condition. The publication, when it appeared, was met with near silence in the documentary record, a striking contrast to the enthusiastic reception that had greeted Venus and Adonis years before.

• 4. Mr. W.H. and the Dedication

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  "The only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W.H." is how Thorpe's dedication begins, and those initials have fuelled debate ever since. William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, is considered by many scholars the most likely candidate. He was also the dedicatee of the First Folio. A complication is that Thorpe would have been unlikely to address an earl as "Mr"; one explanation offered is that the form of address came from Shakespeare himself, who wanted to refer to Herbert as he had been at an earlier age. Ben Jonson's dedication to Herbert in his Epigrammes of 1616, which pointedly insists on Pembroke's correct title, has been read as a gentle rebuke aimed at whoever had addressed the earl too familiarly. Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, offers the attraction of reversed initials. He was the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and was noted for his good looks. Other candidates proposed over the years include William Hall, a printer who had worked with Thorpe; Sir William Harvey, Southampton's stepfather; William Haughton, a contemporary dramatist; and William Hart, Shakespeare's own nephew. The eighteenth-century scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt proposed William Hughes, drawing on puns within the sonnets themselves, particularly Sonnet 20. Oscar Wilde later dramatised that theory in his short story "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.", imagining the dedicatee as a young actor who played female roles. Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Bate, and Donald W. Foster have even suggested the initials are simply a printing error for Shakespeare's own initials, "W.S." or "W. Sh".

• 5. Three Figures in the Poems

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  Scholars reading the sonnets as a sequence encounter three recurring figures. The Fair Youth, addressed in Sonnets 1-126, is handsome, self-centred, universally admired, and, as the sequence develops, capable of betrayal. The earliest sonnets in that group, the first seventeen, urge him to marry and father children so that his beauty will survive in the next generation. Later poems record a homoerotic friendship, then a triangular complication when the Fair Youth begins an affair with the Dark Lady. The sequence ends with the poet's own act of betrayal, in Sonnet 152, and his independence from the young man. The third figure, the Rival Poet, appears in Sonnets 78-86 within the Fair Youth sequence. His identity is equally contested. Francis Davison, John Davies of Hereford, Samuel Daniel, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson have all been proposed, based on clues scattered through the poems. It is possible the Rival Poet is a composite figure rather than one identifiable person. Current linguistic analysis suggests the Dark Lady sonnets were composed first, roughly between 1591 and 1595, while the later sonnets to the Fair Youth were written between 1597 and 1603, which inverts the order in which they are printed in the quarto.

• 6. Pirates, Editors, and a Long Recovery

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  Francis Meres, writing in his Palladis Tamia in 1598, noted that Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets" were already circulating among private friends, suggesting the poems had an audience before the 1609 quarto made them public. A year later, William Jaggard published The Passionate Pilgrime, an anthology falsely attributed entirely to Shakespeare. It contained four sonnets that can genuinely be traced to Shakespeare: two of them, Sonnets 138 and 144, are early versions of poems later printed in 1609; the other two were lifted from Love's Labour's Lost. Thomas Heywood, writing in his Apology for Actors in 1612, reported that Shakespeare was "much offended" with Jaggard. Jaggard quietly withdrew the Shakespeare attribution from unsold copies of his expanded 1612 edition. In 1640 the publisher John Benson produced an anthology that drew on the 1609 quarto but rewrote and rearranged the poems, frequently substituting "she" for "he" to make the sonnets appear to address a woman. This edition shaped critical reception for more than a century. It was only in 1780 that Edmond Malone, in his two-volume supplement to the Johnson-Stevens edition of the plays, firmly reinstated the 1609 quarto as the sole authoritative text. By 1986 the New Penguin Shakespeare edition had restored "A Lover's Complaint" as an integral part of the collection, bringing the quarto's original two-part structure back into focus.

• 7. A Lover's Complaint

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  "A Lover's Complaint" follows the 154 sonnets in the 1609 quarto and is composed of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal, a form entirely different from the sonnets themselves. Its opening image is specific and arresting: a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, throwing torn letters, rings, and tokens of love into the water. An old man nearby asks the reason for her sorrow, and she recounts how a seductive young man pursued, seduced, and abandoned her. She concludes by admitting she would fall for his false charms a second time. This two-part structure, in which a male-voiced first part is followed by a female-voiced complaint, had an established precedent in Elizabethan poetry. The earliest English example is Samuel Daniel's Delia... with the Complaint of Rosamund, published in 1592. Shakespeare had already used the form himself in The Rape of Lucrece. The young man of the complaint is handsome, wealthy, promiscuous, unreliable, and admired by all, a figure who rhymes thematically with the Fair Youth of the sonnets. When the New Penguin edition restored the complaint to its proper place in 1986, it made clear that the 1609 quarto had always been a single designed object, not just a bag of miscellaneous verse.