Shakespeare. The Sonnets with audio reading – Introduction

Part of the reason Shakespeare’s Sonnets speak to us so directly is that they are written with their own afterlife in mind. These are poems designed to commemorate the poet’s beloved for all eternity. In the famous lines of Sonnet 18 Shakespeare suggests that his poem confers immortality: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (ll. 11.13–14). Long after his lover’s death, Shakespeare’s poem will continue to keep his lover alive. The Sonnets look to their own future, imagining the readers who will come to them hundreds of years after Shakespeare’s death. We continue to read the poems partly because of this sense of contact with Shakespeare as he reaches out into the future, a sense of presence as well as a reminder of his absence (a theme that will return later in this piece).

But we need to be careful about reading the poems autobiographically, or seeing them as a key to the themes of love, jealousy, anger and lust that pervade Shakespeare’s plays. The poetic persona who speaks through the sequence is not Shakespeare himself. While many readers of the poems have traced a love triangle between the ‘poet’ and two figures often called the ‘Young Man’ and the ‘Dark Lady’, the Sonnets themselves resist straightforward narrative. The poems seem to play with the reader in this regard, tempting us with hints of the kind of love story that underpinned other popular poetic sequences of the time, or the plot of a Shakespearean comedy. At the same time, the poems constantly frustrate our attempts to trace the exact moment at which the poet loses – or gains – the affection of his lovers, or to map the precise relationship between the two enigmatic figures that so preoccupy his attentions. It is also significant that one of the lovers is male; Shakespeare’s Sonnets do not give us a predictably heterosexual romance but rather a complex and intricate exploration of gender and sexuality that encourages ambiguity rather than resolution. Shakespeare likewise subverts the conventional imagery of early modern erotic verse; ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, begins Sonnet 130.

This toying with the idea of narrative and the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry is one way in which the Sonnets are both highly traditional and also highly experimental. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are aware of their own place within poetic history and unafraid to rewrite this history in startlingly modern terms. This aspect of the Sonnets partly derives from the fact that Shakespeare is writing them somewhat after-the-fact. The sonnet form had been imported into English from Petrarch’s Italian poems by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, earlier in the 16th century. The Elizabethan vogue for sonneteering reached its height in the 1590s with volumes by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel, but was already on the wane by the time Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published. There is in his poems a strong component of nostalgia for the form as well as a desire to reinvent it.

While Shakespeare was not the first English poet to use the sonnet form, he did succeed in making it his own, changing its rhyme scheme and developing a distinctive structure that quickly became known as the ‘Shakespearean Sonnet’. Shakespeare’s predecessors had stuck closely to the Italian sonnet form used by Petrarch, which divides the poems into two sections, an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the final six). The Petrarchan sonnet often has a very strong turn, or ‘volta’, as the verse shifts from the first section to the second, making it the ideal form for expressing two different ideas or contrasting points of view. Shakespeare altered this structure, interweaving the first twelve lines of the poem and abolishing the two-part division of his poetic precursors. This allows his poems to express much more subtle, varied ideas, with each sonnet articulating a variety of different positions relative to its subject. Shakespearean sonnets also culminate in a resounding final couplet that can sound conclusive, offering a pithily memorable restatement of what has gone before: ‘If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved’ (Sonnet 116, ll. 13–14). Alternatively, the effect of the final couplet can appear inadequate, a deliberately ironic response to the rest of the poem: ‘Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be’ (Sonnet 138, ll. 13–14). In this way Shakespeare is able to utilise the final couplet to create quite differing effects.