What Was Shakespeare Really Like? by Stanley Wells

Author:Stanley Wells [Wells, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781009340373
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2023-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

11 Dedication to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609. The cryptic dedication, shaped like a tombstone, is oddly printed in capital letters with a dot after each word over the initials only of the publisher rather than the author, and mysteriously refers by initials only to an ‘only begetter’– Mr W. H. – of the poems.

The phrase ‘never before imprinted’ (not true, obviously, of the two sonnets that had appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim) implies that the poems were known to have existed for some time – as it were, Here they are at last! And this is in line with what we know or can reasonably conjecture about the dates at which they were written.

Stylistic studies suggest that the bulk of the poems published in the Shakespeare volume had been written while the vogue for sonnet sequences was at its height, early in his career, from about 1593 onwards, when Shakespeare was making most use of the form in his plays. The latest printed (Sonnets 127 to 154) are believed to be among the earliest composed, followed chronologically by Sonnets 1 to 103. The latest composed – Sonnets 104 to 126 – date from between 1600 and 1604 – all well before they were first published. Shakespeare may have gone on tinkering with individual poems in the years after he wrote them, especially while he was transcribing them into the version in which they eventually appeared in print.

This means that the 1609 order of printing is not the order in which the poems were written. But it is not entirely haphazard. The poems do not form an orderly ‘sequence’, although this term is often misleadingly applied to them by analogy with the sonnet sequences of the 1590s. It reflects and creates serious misunderstanding. A more accurate term is ‘collection’. Nevertheless some of the poems run on in sense from one to the next, and others fall into pairs or mini-sequences related by subject matter: for instance, as I have said, the first seventeen all exhort a young man, or ‘boy’, to marry. Poems in which the writer mentions other, unidentified rival poets, include Sonnets 78 to 80, 82 to 86, and are grouped together.

False assumptions, which started towards the end of the eighteenth century, and which result from comparisons with sonnet sequences of the 1590s, are responsible for the frequently repeated statement that all the poems in the first group concern a male person, and that all those from No. 126 onwards are about a ‘dark lady’ – the term itself does not occur – a ‘woman coloured ill’, as she is called in No. 144. In fact only twenty of the poems, all in the first group, can confidently be said, on the evidence of forms of address and masculine pronouns, to be addressed to, or to concern, a male, while seven, all in the second group, are clearly about a ‘dark’ female (‘dark’ in facial features and perhaps in other respects). In the sonnets clearly addressed to a male he

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