Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems by Cousins A. D.;

Author:Cousins, A. D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2000-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1–19: The Young Man, the Poet and Father Time

(I) INTRODUCTION. PETRARCH, SIDNEY AND THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET

Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609; beyond that, however, we know little of their transmission from manuscript to print.1 They may have been written between 1592 and 1599, that is, from about the time when Venus and Adonis was being written until that when The Passionate Pilgrim was published. On the other hand, there is no shortage of alternative suggestions. It has been proposed, for example, that most of the Sonnets were written by 1589, that they were probably all written between 1591 and 1595 or 1593 and 1597, or that they were begun in the 1590s but completed thereafter.2 Because of a remark by Francis Meres it seems likely that a number of the Sonnets were circulating ‘among [Shakespeare’s] private friends’ before and (or) during 1598; yet exactly which sonnets, and did their being circulated (if it happened) affect either their composition or that of any which Shakespeare wrote subsequently?3 Moreover, to what extent is the order of the poems Shakespeare’s? Who was Mr W. H., to whom the publisher of the Sonnets dedicated them, and who was the youth (or, perhaps, who were the youths) to whom and about whom sonnets 1–126 were written? Were those two people one and the same – if, of course, the youth actually existed? Who was the Dark Lady of sonnets 127–52, assuming that she too really lived? The answer to each question is simply that no one knows; at present, to seek an answer is to enter a Sargasso Sea of ink and speculation.4

Leaving aside those as yet unresolved questions, one can at least begin to discuss Shakespeare’s poems by considering some ways in which they belong to the fashion for sonnets, especially for so-called sequences of them, in England during the 1590s.5 To do that means, given the centuries-long domination by Petrarch of the European literary language of love, first considering some ways in which the sonnets and other lyrics of Petrarch’s Rime provided a model for the Elizabethan sonneteers – especially for Sir Philip Sidney, whose post-humously published Astrophil and Stella (1591) created the fashion for sonnet sequences in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and of course for Shakespeare, whose Sonnets suggest his awareness of both Petrarch’s and Sidney’s love poems. As Mario Praz demonstrated in his essay on the Petrarchism of the English Renaissance, when English poets encountered Petrarch’s Rime (which was approximately from the late 1520s onward) they did so both centuries after its composition and revision and after many changes in continental literary as well as critical responses to it.6 They thus encountered at much the same time Petrarch’s love verse and that by various of his continental successors and commentators.7 Petrarch himself, nonetheless, apparently remained pre-eminent in their eyes as the great reformulator of the language of love: as the old yet immediate, the intimidatingly authoritative yet sometimes tiresome, original with whose verse they had to come to terms, whether by following, repudiating or rivalling it.

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