Sonnets Background

     Sonnets are rhymed poems consisting of fourteen lines, the first eight making up the octet and the last six lines being the sestet. The Shakespearean Sonnet (which differs slightly from the Italian (or Petrarchian) Sonnet and the Spenserian Sonnet) end with a rhymed couplet and follows the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. Thus, the octet/sestet structure can be alternatively divided into three quatrains (sets of four lines) with alternating rhymes concluding in a rhymed couplet. With the lone exception of Sonnet 145, the meter of Shakespeare's Sonnets is iambic pentameter, each line being comprised of five double-syllable iambic feet. Of all poetic meters, iambic pentameter comes closest to conversational English; the verse speech that prevails in Shakespeare's plays is uniformly composed in iambic pentameter.

     Shakespeare did not originate the sonnet form. The basic structure of the sonnet arose in medieval Italy, its most prominent exponent being the Early Renaissance poet Petrarch. The appearance of English sonnets, however, occurred when Shakespeare was an adolescent (around 1580). Both Edmund Spenser and Philip Sydney, among others, worked in this form a decade or so before Shakespeare took it up in the early 1590s, possibly seeking to exploit the ongoing popularity of the sonnet among literary patrons of the day. As noted in passing above, Sonnets 153 and 154 differ from the other 152 poems included in the first edition of the Sonnets in that they are clearly based on an epigram from ancient Greek poetry that was in all probability known to Shakespeare (and others) through Ovid's Metamorphoses. Apart from these two pieces, none of the sonnets has an identifiable literary (or historical) source.

      Given this and the intimacy of the themes broached by Shakespeare in the sonnets, it is natural that scholars would entertain a search for autobiographical sources, and that this search would focus on three identity issues: (1) who is the young man to whom Sonnets 1-126 are addressed? (2) who is the Dark Lady of Sonnets 127-154? (3) who are the rival poets who intrude in the love triangles of Sonnets 78 through 86? As to the first question, the starting point for the search of the young man's actual identity (and virtually all of the hard evidence at hand) is an inscription to a "Mr.W.H." in the first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, these initially referring to a male who is called the "onlie beggeter" (only source) of the volume's contents. Literary historians have come up with a host of actual men whose names resonate with the "W.H." initial tag. They include two individuals---William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke) and (with the WH initial order reversed) Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southhampton)---both of whom were young nobles in the 1590s and literary patrons associated with Shakespeare and his circle. But there are problems with both of these (and all the other) candidates for the model of Shakespeare's young man.

     As to the second question, the identity of the Dark Lady to whom Sonnets 127 through 154 are addressed is based on even thinner evidence. On purely speculative grounds, Mary Fitton, Emila Lanier, and Lucy Morgan (all ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court) have been suggested as women whom Shakespeare might have had in mind when he wrote the second broad grouping in his Sonnets. Third and last, as to the possible identity of the rival poet who appears in Sonnets 78 through 86, the names of or George Chapman and/or Christopher Marlowe are often mentioned. The conclusions that we reach from trying to identify the persons addressed in the Sonnets are twofold: no convincing identification of the young man, the Dark Lady, or the rival poet has ever been made; there is no reason to believe that any individual in Shakespeare's personal life directly corresponds with the beloved youth, the loose woman, or the artistic competitor of his Sonnets.

     There is one final background issue that must be raised, which is the nature of the love between the explicitly male speaker of the Sonnets and the young man to whom the first 126 poems are formally addressed. The tender terms, and indeed the jealously, that the speaker extends toward the beloved youth of the Sonnets has led some to interpret these poems as expressions of a homosexual love affair and, still further, that Shakespeare himself engaged in sexual relations with other men. It is to Sonnet 20 that proponents of this thesis most often refer. There we read the opening lines: "A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted/Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion" as the speaker continues on to say that his lover has been endowed by Nature with the charms of woman, but that the speaker's love for the young man has been "defeated" by Nature through an "addition" (possibly the male penis). Aside from the seeming strangeness of a male openly authoring love poetry to another man (and the Elizabethans would have seen this activity in a different, possibly broader, light), and these intriguing references, the Sonnets do not necessarily describe homosexual or even physical intimacy between the speaker and the young man addressed. Indeed, within Sonnet 20 the speaker says that he was "defeated" by Nature, implying that his love for the youth could not be consummated. Again, the questions in this patch of the background to the Sonnets are unresolved, and open-ended.

The Sonnets

     The pieces included in the 1609 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets all conform to the standard format of 14 lines concluding with a rhymed couplet, and all (with one suspect exception) are written in the natural meter of iambic pentameter, lending them a stress pattern that approximates English language speech. The 154 poems are commonly divided into two groups: the larger set (Sonnets 1 through 126) is addressed by the poet to a beloved young man; the remaining pieces (Sonnets 127 through 154) comprise a smaller grouping addressed to another persona, a Dark Lady. While the vituperative sonnets written to the Dark Lady do not display a well-defined narrative progression, the 126 poems addressed to the young man comprise a deliberate sequence, a sonnet cycle akin to that used a decade earlier by the contemporary English poet Philip Sidney (1554-1586) in Astrophel and Stella. The theme of love and infidelity is dominant in both sets of poems; in the larger grouping, this theme is interwoven with motifs of beauty, immortality, and the ravages of time and with lyrical speculations about poetry's power to maintain bonds of love and to immortalize the beloved.