Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare wrote a titanic work, his comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies and sonnets belonging to the essentials of the world’s heritage. But perhaps the complete measure of his poetical genius, containing some of the greatest lyric poems in English literature lies in the Sonnets, bleak cries of emotional torment and spiritual exhaustion. They tell a story of the struggle of love and forgiveness against anguish and despair and it is this tragic portrait of human love that makes the sonnets immortal.
It is obvious that Shakespeare’s vision of love, as reflected in his sonnets, is fundamentally different from that of the other great Italian and French sonnet writers from a conceptual point of view. His lyrics are not only deeply philosophical and personal, but they completely break up with the old rules, not just at the metrical(1) level, but most of all at the imagistic one, giving thus birth to the famous "Shakespearian Sonnet".
Among one of its main characteristics lies the concept of Antipetrarchism, a straight new idea, totally antagonical to that of Petrarchism, promoted by the continental poets. The term obviously derives from the name of the great Italian writer Frances Petrarch, one of the immortal masters of the specie and designates the stylisation of the erotic feeling, praising the love’s alternance of joys and sorrows through a refined lyric, using solemn metaphors, savant antithesis, hyperboles and the subtle play of words. The Petrarchian sonnets always sing the beauty and perfection of one lady called "madonna", visualised as the incarnation of pure love and inspiring an exclusively spiritual passion (Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura, Ronsard’s Cassandra). It was also used in English literature earlier, by the Renaissance poet Sir Philip Sidney in "Astrophel and Stella" and later, in the Classicism, by Dryden and Pope and by Wordsworth, Shelley and particularly John Keats during the Romantic era.
Antipetrarchism, on the other hand, is the reverse. Shakespeare cultivates a lyric –especially in the last sonnets- where spiritual, sidereal love is substituted with a physical, carnal, sometimes even vulgar passion. Moreover, the means to describe his mistress are in perfect opposition with the Petrarchian devices mentioned above and the language belongs to the category later called of the "grotesque", somehow resembling the one used by Tudor Arghezi in Mould Flowers.
This profoundly Shakespearian concept is best reflected in Sonnet 130, in fact the poetical art or the manifest of Antipetrarchism. And indeed, in these lines all the sacred symbols of the Italian sonnet are entirely and once and for all destroyed: the long idealised portrait of the beloved finally converts to reality. The widely used metaphors like "sunny eyes", "coral-red lips", "snow-white breast", "rose-like cheeks", "perfumed breath", "musical voice" or "goddess-like walk" are cruelly transmuted into the apology of the poet’s mistress’ common traits: her "eyes are nothing like the sun", "her breasts are dun", "no such roses see I in her cheeks", "when she walks, treads on the ground". But although realism sometimes touches the grotesque as in "black wires grow on her head" or "the breath that from my mistress reeks", Shakespeare’s beloved finally becomes a touchable, flesh and blood being, unlike the celestial, sidereal "madonnas". Her portrait is not painted in pastel, glamorous colors, but in dull, blurred tints, invoking reality.
The author obviously aims to mock and the speaker’s voice is clearly ironical when enumerating the traits of the Petrarchian mistress. But he doesn’t harshly destroy one concept without proposing a new one in its place! And the vigor of this innovating vision of love is expressed in the concluding couplet, as this feeling is "as rare/ As any she belied with false compare". Therefore, what Shakespeare brings is realism instead of idealisation, sincerity instead of exaggeration, fresh, loyal-to-reality traits instead of savant epithets, in a word, truth instead of "false compare".
This is the Antipetrarchian concept of Shakespearian love, the new, regenerating and profoundly original vision first introduced in literature by the most famous English writer.
All in all, the entire work of William Shakespeare can be viewed as the "Bible of Love". His literary genius shines even in his least spoken about sonnet, because he is indeed one of the few universal writers who manage to create a masterpiece even from the most humble subject and even in the most restrictive conditions. From this point of view, he is a unique creator, as centuries and centuries after his death, his works have continued to have a miraculous life of their own.
[1] The English sonnet has a number of 10 syllables on a line (iambic pentameter) and is formed by 3 quatrains rhyming ABAB and 1 heroic couplet, rhyming CC, while the Italian sonnet has a number of 14 syllables on each line and is formed of 2 quatrains rhyming ABBA ABBA and 2 tercets rhyming CDC DCD or CDE CDE.
Bibliography:
1. Leon Levitchi –History of the English Literature
2. Dan Grigorescu –preface of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (bilingual edition)
3. An Audio Visual History of English Literature
4. Martin Stephen and Philip Franks –Studying Shakespeare