From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 457-60.
[This section was prepared and proofread by Deborah Hill.]
SONNETS
1592 -1602-1609
SHAKE-SPEARES | Sonnets. | Neuer before Imprinted. | AT LONDON | By G Eld for T. T. and are | to be solde by William Aspley. | 1609. -- TITLE PAGE OF FIRST SEPARATE EDITION, 1609.
-- DEDICATION OF FIRST EDITION, 1609.
Fugitive pieces which the poetic and sprightly grace of some lines would not have rescued from oblivion but for the curiosity which attaches to the slightest traces of a celebrated man. -- GUIZOT, FRANCOIS PIERRE GUILLAUME, 1821-52, Shakspeare and His Times, p. 65.
If any should be curious to discover
Whether to you I am a friend or lover,
Let them read Shakspeare's sonnets, taking thence
A whetstone for their dull intelligence
That tears and will not cut, or let them guess
How Diotima, the wise prophetess,
Instructed the instructor, and why he
Rebuked the infant spirit of melody
On Agathon's sweet lips, which as he spoke
Was as the lovely star when morn has broke
The roof of darkness, in the golden dawn,
Half-hidden and yet beautiful.
-- SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE, 1822? Studies for Epipsychidion, and Cancelled Passages,
Poetical Works, ed. Forman, vol. II. p. 392.
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart.
-- WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM, 1827, Sonnet.
They contain such a quantity of profound thought as must astonish every reflecting reader; they are adorned by splendid and delicate imagery; they are sublime, pathetic, tender, or sweetly playful, while they delight the ear by their fluency and their varied harmonies of rhythm. -- DYCE, ALEXANDER, 1833, Specimens of English Sonnets, p. 213.
As a whole, however, these sonnets are no more to our poet's fame, than a snowball on the top of Olympus. -- CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1838, ed. Shakspeare's Plays, Moxon ed., Life.
They rise, indeed, in estimation, as we attentively read and reflect upon them for I do not think that at first they give us much pleasure. No one ever entered more fully than Shakepeare into the character of this species of poetry, which admits of no expletive imagery, no merely ornamental line. . . . It is impossible not to wish that Shakepeare had never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are also faults of a merely critical nature. The obscurity is often such as only conjecture can penetrate, the strain of tenderness and adoration would be too monotonous, were it less unpleasing, and so many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not such a host of other passages attest the contrary. -- HALLAM, HENRY, 1837 39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol.III, pt. iii, ch. v, par. 48, 50.
There is nothing more remarkable or fascinating in English poetry.... We read them again and again, and find each time some new proof of his almost superhuman insight into human nature; of his unrivalled mastery over all the tones of love. We cannot bring ourselves to wish that "Shakspeare had never written them," or that the world should have wanted perhaps the most powerful and certainly the most singular, utterances of passion which Poetry has yet supplied. -- PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1865, ed. Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare, p. 243.
We may look upon the Sonnets as a piece of music, or as Shakspere's pathetic sonata, each melody introduced, dropped again, brought in again with variations, but one full strain of undying love and friendship through the whole.... In the Sonnets we have the gentle Will, the melancholy mild-eyed man, of the Droeshout portrait. Shakspere's tender sensitive, refined nature is seen clearly here, but through a glass darkly in the plays. . . . Still I think it is plain that Shakspere had become involved in an intrigue with a married woman, who threw him over for his friend Will. She was dark, had beautiful eyes, and was a fine musician, but false. ... Sad as it may be to us to be forced to conclude that shame has to be cast on the noble name we reverence, yet let us remember that it is but for a temporary stain on his career, and that through the knowledge of the human heart he gained by his own trials we get the intensest and most valuable records of his genius. It is only those who have been through the mill themselves, that know how hard God's stones and the devil's grind. -- FURNIVALL, FREDERICK JAMES, 1877, ed. The Leopold Shakspere.
With Wordsworth, Sir Henry Taylor, and Mr. Swinburne, with Francois-Victor Hugo, with Kreyssig, Ulrici, Gervinus and Hermann Isaac, with Boaden, Armitage Brown, and Hallam, with Furnivall, Spalding, Rossetti, and Palgrave, I believe that Shakspere's Sonnets express his own feelings in his own person. To whom they were addressed is unknown. We shall never discover the name of that woman who for a season could sound, as no one else, the instrument in Shakspere's heart from the lowest note to the top of the compass. To the eyes of no diver among the wrecks of time will that curious talisman gleam. -- DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1881, ed. The Sonnets of William Shakspere.
For our own part, we find it as difficult to believe that some of the Sonnets are autobiographical as that others are not, and all that has been written to prove that 1-126 are all addressed to the same person fails to convince us. It is clear enough that certain sets (like 1-17, for instance) form a regular series, but that all the poems are arranged in the order in which Shakespeare meant to have them is not so clear. There is no evidence that the edition of 1609 was supervised or even authorized by him. The enigmatical dedication is not his, but the publisher's, and the arrangement of the poems is probably that of the person who procured them for publication, whoever he may have been. The order seems to us more like that of a collector -- one who knew something of their history, and was interested in getting them together for publication than that of the author. Possibly this collector had his own little theory as to the interconnection of some of them, like certain of the modern editors, no one of whom seems of the whole to have been any more successful in classifying them. We fear that both their order and the means by which the publisher got possession of them must continue to be one of the insoluable problems of literature. -- ROLFE, WILLIAM J., 1883-90, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets, Introduction, p. 11.
These magnificent poems -- magnificent notwithstanding many minor flaws -- must always hold their high place, not only as the personal record of the greatest of our poets, but for the sake of their own consummate beauty and intellectual force. -- SHARP, WILLIAM, 1886, ed. Sonnets of This Century, p. xlvii.
We have all tried to wring the heart out of that mystery. We have all felt the accent of acute passion alternating with the accent of what looks like artificial compliment -- the inequality of style, the inequality of emotion, the inequality of artistic handling -- in those unparalleled outpourings of a mighty poet's soul. We do not doubt their genuineness. We trace the outlines of a story in them, which it is not difficult to descipher, although the import may be painful. So far we are agreed. But when it comes to deciding whether Shakespeare intended a merely dramatic series of psychological lyrics, or whether he committed his own experience from day to day to paper in the sonnets, or whether he wrote them for a friend -- who Mr. W. H was, and who the dark lady was then at once we differ. As it seems to me this is the point at which sound criticism diverges from criticism over-weighted with erudition or with subjective prepossession. -- SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON. 1890, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, vol. I, p. 117.
In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling, the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest proofs of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare's Sonnets betray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. -- LEE, SIDNEY, 1898, A Life of William Shakespeare, p. 87.
What is important is that Shakespeare has here caught up the sum of love and uttered it as no poet has before or since, and that in so doing he carried poetry -- that is to say, the passionate expression in verse of the sensual and intellectual facts of life -- to a pitch which it had never previously reached in English, and which it has never outstepped since. The coast-line of humanity must be wholly altered, the sea must change its nature, the moon must draw it in different ways, before that tide-mark is passed. -- SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 319.
Here, and here alone, we see Shakespeare himself, as distinct from his poetical creations, loving, admiring, longing, yearning, adoring, disappointed, humiliated, tortured. Here alone does he enter the confessional. Here more than anywhere else can we, who at a distance of three centuries do homage to the poet's art, feel ourselves in intimate communion, not only with the poet, but with the man. -- BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. I, p. 3-6.
Every person of culture who reads the Sonnets nowadays is pleased to find in most of them fertility of thought, beauty of imagery, and mellifluous versification, but having read them he is at a loss to know precisely what they are all about. Are they, he asks himself, a continuous poem, or so many isolated poems? Are they autobiographical or dramatic; or are they poems at all in the proper sense, and not enigmas, concealing under a poetic garb some deep and occult philosophy? Each of these questions has been answered affirmatively and negatively with equal zeal and ingenuity. In the complete editions of Shakespeare's "Works" the editors have tried their hands at solving the several difficulties, hut not with much success, and bulky volumes have been prepared to prove various theories as to their design and significance, which carry no conviction with them beyond the immediate circle of authorship. These differences of opinion are largely due to a certain obscurity in the Sonnets themselves.... They allude to situations that have now passed entirely out of memory; they indulge in conceits and plays upon words which rather perplex than help the understanding of them; and often they admit locutions, which, if not wholly obsolete, are yet very different from our accepted forms. Indeed, in reading them, it sometimes happens that we come upon passages which at first seem clear and intelligible, but which on closer scrutiny, like the face of a dumb man, get indefinite and vague. -- GODWIN, PARKE, 1900, A New Study of the Sonnets of Shakespeare, pp. 4, 6.
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