Customer Reviews

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage - By: Themis-Athena, 28 Jan 2006
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit.

(Sonnet 26.)

How to do justice to the legacy of literary history's greatest mind - moreoverin such a limited review? Forget Goethe's "universal genius" & his rebel contemporary Schiller; forget the 19th century masters; forget contemporary literature: with the possible (!) exception of three Greek gentlemen named Aischylos, Sophocles & Euripides, a certain Frenchman called Poquelin (a/k/a Moliere), & that infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde, there's more witin a single line of Shakespeare's thanin an entire page of most other, even great, authors' works. And I'm not saying thisin ignorance of, orin order to slight any other writer: it's precisely my admiration of the world's literary giants, past & present, that makes me appreciate Shakespeare even more - & that although I'm aware that he repeatedly borrowed from pre-existing material & that even the (sole) authorship of the works published under his name isn't established beyond doubt. For ultimately, the only thing that matters to me is the brilliance of those works themselves; & quite honestly, the mysteries continuing to enshroud his person, to me, only enhance his larger-than-life stature.

The precise dating of Shakespeare's sonnets - like other poets', a response to the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophil & Stella" - is an even greater guessing game than that of his plays: although #138 & #144 (slightly modified) appearedin 1599's "Passionate Pilgrim," most were probably circulated privately, & written years before their first - unauthorized, though still authoritative - 1609 publication; possibly beginningin 1592-1593.

Format-wise, they adopt the Elizabethan fourteen-line-structure of three quatrains of iambic pentameters expressing a series of increasingly intense ideas, resolvedin a closing couplet; with an abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme form. (Sole exceptions: #99 - first quatrain amplified by one line - #126 - six couplets & only twelve lines total - #145 - writtenin tetrameter - & #146 - omission of the second line's beginning; the subject of a lasting debate.) Their order is thematic rather than chronological, although beyond the fact that the first 126 are addressed to a young man - maybe the Earl of Pembroke or Southampton, maybe Sir Robert Dudley, the natural son of Queen Elizabeth's "Sweet Robin," the Earl of Leicester - (the first seventeen, possibly commissioned by the addressee's family, pressing his marriage & production of an heir), & ##127-152 (or 127-133 & 147-152) to an exotic woman of questionable virtues only known as "The Dark Lady," evenin that respect much remains unclear; including the nature of Shakespeare's relationship with the two main addressees, regarding which the sonnets' often ambiguous metaphors invoke much speculation. #145 is probably addressed to Shakespeare's wife; the closing couplet plays on her maiden name ("['I hate' from] hate away she threw And saved my life, [saying 'not you']:" "Hathaway - Anne saved my life"), several others contain puns on the name Will & its double meaning(s) (exactly fourteenin the naughty #135: "Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will;" & sevenin the similarly mischievous #136), & the last two draw on the then-popular Cupid theme. Sometimes, placement seems linked to contents, e.g.,in #8 (music: an octave has eight notes), #12 & #60 (time: twelve hours to both day & night; sixty minutes to an hour); &in the famous #55, which praises poetry's everlasting power & as whose never-expressly-named subject Shakespeare himself emergesin a comparison with Horace's Ode 3.30 -in turn writtenin first person singular & thus, denoting its own author as the builder of its "monument more lasting than bronze" ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius") - as well as through the number "5"'s optical similarity to the letter "S," making the sonnet's number a shorthand reference for "5hake5peare" or "5hakespeare's 5onnets," echoed by numerous words containing an "S"in the text.

Of indescribable linguistic beauty, elegance & complexity, Shakespeare's sonnets owe their timeless appeal to their supreme compositional values, the universality of their themes, & their keen insights into the human heart & soul; as much as their transcendence of the era's poetic conventions which, following Petrarch, heavily idealized the addressee's qualities: a form new & exciting twohundred years earlier, but encrustedin clichein the late 1500s. Indeed, Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" Sonnet #130 owes its particular fame to its clever puns on that very style, which went overboard with references to its golden-haired, starry- (beamy-, sparkling, sunny-) eyed, cherry- (strawberry-, vermilion-, coral-) lipped, rosy- (crimson-, purple-, dawn-) cheeked, ivory- (lily-, carnation-, crystal-, silver-, snowy-, swan-white) skinned, pearl-teethed, honey- (nectar-, music-) tongued, goddess-like objects. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" the Bard countered, proceeded to describe her breasts as "dun," her hair as "black wires," & her breath as "reek[ing]," & denied her any divine or angelic attributes. "And yet," he concluded: "by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare."

Arguably, Shakespeare's very choice of addressees (a young man - also the subject of the famously romantic #18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day;" the first of several sonnets promising his immortalizationin poetry - as well as the "Dark Lady,"in turn introduced under the notion "black is beautiful"in #127) itself suggests a break with tradition; & compared to his contemporaries' poetry, even the equally-famous #116's on its face rather conventional praise of love's constancy ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments"), echoedin the poet's vow to vanquish timein #123, sounds fairly restrained. But ultimately, Shakespeare's sonnets - like his entire work - simply defy categorization. They are, as rival Ben Jonson acknowledged, written "for all time," just as the Bard himself immodestly claimed:

'Gainst death & all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Evenin the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.

(Sonnet 55.)