Time is the most frequently repeated concept and image in the Sonnets. This is the pervasive Renaissance theme of mutability, and the poet presents various ways to defy Time. The first seventeen Sonnets constitute the most distinctive unit of the whole sequence, which is arranged more or less logically by similarity of theme. We don't, of course, know who devised the ordering of the Sonnets or what relation the sequence has to date of composition. The first seventeen sonnets all urge the young friend to marry and to reproduce his beauty in children. This is the familiar doctrine of use that is part of Venus's argument to Adonis in Venus and Adonis and that echoes the often-repeated parable of the talents in Matt. 25:14-30. Man is the steward, not the owner, of his good qualities and possessions, and he is obligated to put his natural gifts to use for the benefit of others. If you are beautiful, you must make use of your beauty (as money accumulates "use" or interest) by having children on whom to bestow your god-given gifts.

The beginning of the first sonnet announces the immortality of beauty through propagation:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die.

You are not allowed to be in love with yourself and waste your substance in "niggarding," or hoarding, to be "contracted to thine own bright eyes" and feed "thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel." This is to make "a famine where abundance lies," that is, the potential abundance that comes from creating children to perpetuate one's beauty. Children are like "flowers distilled" (Sonnet 3), or perfume, that defies the tyranny of Time.

Another way to wage war against Time is to write verse, which confers a kind of immortality upon the Friend. This is a repeated theme in the Sonnets. Posterity and poetry both do battle against oblivion. Nature is a destroyer of beauty, but poetry is immutable and guarantees that "thy eternal summer shall not fade" (Sonnet 18). In Sonnet 65 there is a series of unanswerable questions about Time, one in each of the first two quatrains, and two in the third:

0, fearful meditation, where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Presumably, "Time's best jewel" is the beautiful Friend, whom the Poet is trying to conceal from the ravaging hand of Time, who threatens to seize him and put him in his chest. How can "beauty hold a plea" against the rage of Time? The only solution to this "fearful meditation" is the miracle of poetry: "That in black ink my love may still shine bright." The immanence and immortality of poetry are postulated as a defense against the ravages of Time.

Maurice Charney
[In this concise appraisal of various issues associated with Shakespeare's sonnets, Charney pays particular attention to Shakespeare's development of the sonnet form and the effectiveness of his concluding couplets. Charney also discusses the motifs of time and mutability, the presence of both lyric and dramatic elements in the sequence, and the poet-speaker's reflections on his creative powers.]

Thomas Thorpe published 154 Sonnets by Shakespeare followed by A Lover's Complaint (also said to be by Shakespeare) in 1609. Unlike the texts of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, the printed text has many obvious errors, and Shakespeare clearly did not proofread it or see it through the press. Although the Sonnets seem to have an authoritative manuscript behind them, they were certainly not published with Shakespeare's knowledge or permission. Sonnets usually circulated in handwritten "books" among one's private friends and acquaintances. It was not considered necessary or even desirable to publish them.

The great vogue of sonnet writing was in the 1590s, and we know from Sonnet 104 that three years had passed since the poet first saw his "fair friend," which makes it likely that the writing of the Sonnets occupied at least three years in the 1590s, probably early 1590s. Some of the Sonnets may have been written in the early 1600s, but the bulk of them are associated with Shakespeare's ingenious, heavily conceited, and self-consciously rhetorical style of the early and mid-1590s. In 1598 Francis Meres mentions in Palladis Tamia Shakespeare's "sugred sonnets among his priuate friends," an obvious compliment to his elegant style, although we may have some doubts about sugred as a term of praise. In 1599 two Sonnets, 138 and 144, were printed in a slightly different form in The Passionate Pilgrim.

The Sonnets were dedicated to "Mr. W. H." as "the only begetter," but it is hard to know whether this is the poet's or the publisher's dedication. It is unlike the formal dedications of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton, and it may be that Mr. W. H. is the only begetter in the sense that he made his manuscript copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets available to the publisher. There has been endless and mostly fruitless biographical speculation about the Sonnets, and even more elaborate autobiographical guessing about Shakespeare's own personal relation to the experience described in the Sonnets and to characters in the Sonnets such as the Friend, the Dark Lady, and the Rival Poet or Poets. There is no independent confirmation in other writing or records of the time of anything factual that is said in Shakespeare's Sonnets. We would expect, at the least, some outside confirmation of the Rival Poet's activities: his sonnets to the friend or to the lady, or some account of his love life. It is curious that in the elaborately punning Sonnets 135 and 136 it seems that Shakespeare, the Dark Lady's husband, and the Friend are all named Will. This is convenient because will is also a word for carnal appetite and lust.

We know nothing definite about the historical identity of the Dark Lady and the Friend. The Sonnets seem to be strongly homoerotic, but in terms of Petrarchan love conventions, the Platonic idea of friendship offers a much higher ideal than heterosexual love, as we can see plainly in the opening sequence between Leontes and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale or in the friendship of Palamon and Arcite (and Emilia and Flavina) in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Leontes' fiendish jealousy seems to be generated, like Original Sin, from sexuality itself, as Hermione his wife so keenly recognizes. Sexual love is represented repeatedly in the Sonnets as a source of grief and enslavement, nowhere more strongly than in Sonnet 129, "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame."

Sonnet 20 seems to lay out clearly the distinction between an ennobling love between two male friends and the potentially debasing sexual love between a man and a woman. The Friend has "A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted" and is "the master mistress of my passion." Nature first created him "for a woman," but then "fell a-doting, / And by addition me of thee defeated." Nature's "addition" seems to be clearly a penis, as we learn from the punning couplet close:

But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

There is a clear distinction between the noble "love" and the lesser "love's use," or intercourse. We learn later that the Dark Lady has seduced the Friend and engaged him in a sexual relationship (Sonnets 35, 40, 41, etc.). Sonnet 20 makes a sharp distinction between noble friendship and physical love. Sex is excluded from the relation with the Friend.

The Shakespearean or English sonnet is derived from the Earl of Surrey and has three quatrains (rhyming abab, cdcd, and efef) with a concluding couplet (gg) all in iambic pentameter. Most of the sonnets have fourteen lines, although there is one (Sonnet 99) of fifteen, with an introductory first line, and one of twelve (Sonnet 126), which has six couplets. There are vestiges of the Italian sonnet in Shakespeare, in which an octave is set against a sestet. The octave of two quatrains contrasts with the sestet, which consists of a quatrain and a couplet considered as a single unit. These are relatively uncommon in Shakespeare, although Sonnet 18 has the feeling of an Italian sonnet: it has three quatrains and a couplet, but the third quatrain has a different logical movement from the first two. The feeling of a distinct sestet is continued through the triumphant couplet:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This couplet provides an upbeat ending.

The most problematic feature of the Shakespearean sonnet is the couplet close, which is sometimes disappointing because it is so epigrammatic, so didactic, so much like a neat summary tacked on to a poem that doesn't need it. There are many feeble couplets, for example the one in Sonnet 37:

Look what is best, that best I wish in thee.
This wish I have, then ten times happy me!

This seems like mere filler for a sonnet that is clearly not one of the best, but is nevertheless complex, about a poet "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite," who shares in his friend's "abundance." This certainly doesn't indicate that the poet is literally "lame," and the couplet doesn't do justice to the poetic reasoning of the three previous quatrains.

The couplet works wonderfully well in Sonnet 73, and is generally successful when it has an element of dramatic surprise, like a punch line. In Sonnet 19 the couplet comes upon us as a sudden peripeteia to the irresistible powers of "Devouring Time":

Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

This couplet introduces an alternative with its "Yet" and "despite" that comes upon us as a hidden truth. Sonnet 65 is similar. Against "sad mortality" and his "spoil of beauty" there is no protection, except for the miracle of poetry trumpeted in the couplet:

O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

The couplet form lends itself in the Sonnets (and in Shakespeare's plays, too, especially scene-ending couplets) to bold and emphatic statement. Sonnet 56 is not particularly memorable, but its couplet ending vibrates with promise and new possibility. The poem is an appeal to "Sweet love" to "renew thy force," presumably in a period of absence or neglect. The "Return of love" is connected syntactically with the couplet:

Or call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer's welcome thrice more wished, more rare.

A series of five accented syllables beginning with thrice in the last line is driven home with the unusual fourth-beat caesura, or mid-line pause, after wished. More rare soars in a way that redeems the entire poem.

Time is the most frequently repeated concept and image in the Sonnets, This is the pervasive Renaissance theme of mutability, and the poet presents various ways to defy Time. The first seventeen Sonnets constitute the most distinctive unit of the whole sequence, which is arranged more or less logically by similarity of theme. We don't, of course, know who devised the ordering of the Sonnets or what relation the sequence has to date of composition. The first seventeen sonnets all urge the young friend to marry and to reproduce his beauty in children. This is the familiar doctrine of use that is part of Venus's argument to Adonis in Venus and Adonis and that echoes the often-repeated parable of the talents in Matt. 25:14-30. Man is the steward, not the owner, of his good qualities and possessions, and he is obligated to put his natural gifts to use for the benefit of others. If you are beautiful, you must make use of your beauty (as money accumulates "use" or interest) by having children on whom to bestow your god-given gifts.

The beginning of the first sonnet announces the immortality of beauty through propagation:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die.

You are not allowed to be in love with yourself and waste your substance in "niggarding," or hoarding, to be "contracted to thine own bright eyes" and feed "thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel." This is to make "a famine where abundance lies," that is, the potential abundance that comes from creating children to perpetuate one's beauty. Children are like "flowers distilled" (Sonnet 3), or perfume, that defies the tyranny of Time.

Another way to wage war against Time is to write verse, which confers a kind of immortality upon the Friend. This is a repeated theme in the Sonnets. Posterity and poetry both do battle against oblivion. Nature is a destroyer of beauty, but poetry is immutable and guarantees that "thy eternal summer shall not fade" (Sonnet 18). In Sonnet 65 there is a series of unanswerable questions about Time, one in each of the first two quatrains, and two in the third:

O, fearful meditation, where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Presumably, "Time's best jewel" is the beautiful Friend, whom the Poet is trying to conceal from the ravaging hand of Time, who threatens to seize him and put him in his chest. How can "beauty hold a plea" against the rage of Time? The only solution to this "fearful meditation" is the miracle of poetry: "That in black ink my love may still shine bright." The immanence and immortality of poetry are postulated as a defense against the ravages of Time.

Two sonnets dwell specifically on music, 8 and 128, but the musicality of the Sonnets as a group is striking. The slow, sad lyrical effects are the most impressive, and they lend themselves to being set to music (as many sonnets have been). Sonnet 30 is best remembered as supplying C. K. Scott Moncrieff with the English title for Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, It is artful in its heavy use of alliteration and its legal / commercial imagery. In the first quatrain, "remembrance of things past" is summoned to appear at the "sessions of sweet silent thought," in which the poet presumably sits in judgment on the events of his own life. The predominance of s-sounds in the opening line immediately establishes a mood of reverie and meditation¡—the sibilants are associated with sleep, as in the colloquial expression a few z's, meaning a short nap. "My dear Time's waste" continues the most repeated theme in the Sonnets of Time the Destroyer. The memorializing of the second quatrain presents a mournful threnody for "precious friends hid in death's dateless night," "love's long since canceled woe," and "th' expense of many a vanished sight."

The sonnet is an elegy to death, the expiration of love, and the gradual disappearance of all that is lovely and beautiful. There is a sense in the third quatrain that "grievances foregone" can never be forgotten and that "The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan" must be paid anew as if it had never been paid before. The music of the three quatrains is an almost perfect elegy for "remembrance of things past," but the couplet is jarring and facile:

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

It is as if a mere thought of the "dear friend" is enough to cancel the previous three quatrains. This is one of the most disturbing and inappropriate couplets in the Sonnets. We are soon to learn of many negative and unfavorable aspects of the "dear friend."

Sonnet 73 is similar to Sonnet 30 in its elegiac tone and in its meditation on man's mortality. It does not use such deliberate alliteration, but its prominent caesuras, or midline pauses, slow the rhythm down, especially in the three caesuras of line 2:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold …

The numerous accented syllables in the fourth line also slow down the movement of the poem practically to a funeral dirge: "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." "Bare ruined choirs" and "sweet birds sang" are all heavily accented without any intervening unaccented syllables. The autumn of the first quatrain is matched by twilight in the second, with black night and sleep, which is described as "Death's second self." In the third quatrain, the embers of the fires of youth match autumn and twilight as images of death. The fire consumes "that which it was nourished by." In this sonnet, the couplet is a perfect conclusion to the somber mood and adagio movement of the first three quatrains:

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Love is intimately connected with death, and the idea of mutability and mortality should serve to make love more intense.

The Sonnets are obviously related to the plays, but generically there are important differences between lyric and dramatic expression. The wooing sonnet in Romeo and Juliet (1.5.95ff.), for example, is a playful and witty part of the early courtship of Romeo and Juliet—they answer each other—but it would be inappropriate later in the play. If we consider specific sonnets in relation to plays, it is clear that Sonnet 66 looks ahead to Hamlet in its account of "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (3.1.58), especially in the third quatrain:

And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctorlike) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill.

Hamlet's "sea of troubles" includes

the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes …
(Hamlet 3.1.70-74)

Despite verbal similarities in the catalogues of ills, in Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" speech they are part of an intolerable strain that includes the possibility of suicide. In Sonnet 66 the cry for "restful death" is rejected in the couplet close because it would isolate the poet from his love. The sonnet itself is a self-contained logical unit that ends by rejecting the possibilities of the first three quatrains. It has no relation to a highly characterized speaker or to a specific point in the dramatic action.

Even if radical differences exist between the Sonnets and the plays, the best sonnets still use dramatic devices that are similar to those in the plays. The sonnets that are most appealing seem to be those that explore a strong sense of turmoil and perturbation and that consequently offer poignant, often negative, characterizations. Sonnet 94 is powerfully dramatic—not theatrical in the sense of any imagined scenes—in its characterization of the Friend as cold, disdainful, and unattached. Despite all the earlier sonnets on the doctrine of use and the insistence on man's stewardship rather than absolute possession of his beauty, in the octave the Friend ironically claims to be one of those who are "the lords and owners of their faces" rather than "stewards of their excellence." He is "Unmoved, cold" and husbands "nature's riches from expense." The opening line, "They that have pow'r to hurt and will do none," is so frightening because the powerful Friend is affectless, lacedemonian, and uninvolved. Therefore his beauty is like a flower that suffers "base infection," and that is why, finally, "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." The lily pretends to be a nobler flower than a weed, and hence its possibilities of corruption are more extreme. The Friend is characterized in this and many of the surrounding sonnets as incapable of real love.

A comparably dramatic sonnet is 129 about the Dark Lady, who appears in Sonnets 127-52. She is much more specifically sexual than any of Shakespeare's dramatic heroines, including Cleopatra and Cressida, and she seems to enslave the Poet (and his Friend, too) in an irresistible but shameful intensity of lust, such as Tarquin's self-defeating lust in The Rape of Lucrece, Sonnet 129 is not directly about the Dark Lady, but about her demonic effect on the Poet, who doesn't know how "To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell." Active lust involves "Th' expense of spirit," or the expenditure of seminal fluid, "in a waste of shame," which may pun on waste and waist. Until ejaculation, male lust follows the pattern of Tarquin, who seems to be arguing with, another self that he doesn't recognize: lust "Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust." The spondaic thrust of the last line carries some of the metrical and phonetic harshness of the meaning. Lust is deceptive and self-defeating: "Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight" and "A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe." The stark alternatives make this a very dramatic sonnet, as if lust is entirely outside a man's power to control. The Dark Lady is therefore both the heaven and the hell of the Poet.

The personal anguish of Sonnet 129 is displaced in the witty, mannered, sexual puns of Sonnet 151, "Love is too young to know what conscience is." It is as if the Poet has finally mastered the "sensual fault" (Sonnet 35) and "Lascivious grace" (Sonnet 40) of earlier poems, and he can proceed to the "sensual feast" (Sonnet 141) without any trepidations or pricks of conscience. The Poet willingly betrays his soul to his "gross body's treason," and "flesh" (specifically the penis) doesn't wait for any further excuses, "But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee, / As his triumphant prize." The double entendres on erection—reason, rising, pride, stand, and rise and fall—resemble Shakespeare's early comedies. Lust is no longer an excruciating torment, but rather an entertainment. The couplet cadence is playful:

No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her "love" for whose dear love I rise and fall.

This is a good example of a couplet that really concludes the three preceding quatrains and seems to answer the opening proposition of the sonnet. I am not offering the ingenious Sonnet 151 as an example of one of Shakespeare's best sonnets, but it does provide a contrast to the ferocious energy and reckless mood of Sonnet 129.

The wittiest sonnet is undoubtedly 130, which is endlessly quoted although it is not at all characteristic of Shakespeare's entire sequence. It stands out because it satirizes the very Petrarchan conventions upon which Shakespeare so firmly depends. Specifically, it ridicules the accepted cliches of a woman's beauty that were made so much fun of in Love's Labor's Lost and Shakespeare's early comedies. The Dark Lady, by definition, doesn't fulfill the Nordic criteria of beauty established in the 1590s: exceptionally white skin, brightly rosy cheeks, and brilliantly blonde hair, which standards were met more vividly by cosmetics than by nature. As Hamlet complains to Ophelia: "I have heard of your paintings, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another" (Hamlet 3.1.143-45). The Dark Lady, then, has eyes that "are nothing like the sun," presumably in clanty and brilliance. She lacks the classic war between the white and the red in her cheeks:

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks.

Her lips are not as red as coral nor her breasts white as snow. They are, in fact, "dun" colored, or dark and swarthy, like Cleopatra's, another Dark Lady, who shows a "tawny front" (Antony and Cleopatra 1.1.6) and is sunburned, "with Phoebus' amorous pinches black" (1.5.28). The Dark Lady is a practical and seemingly unromantic figure: her breath "reeks," her speaking voice is not very musical, and "when she walks" she is unlike a goddess because she "treads on the ground."
The couplet conclusion, however, is in an entirely different and unexpected tone:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

The soaring assertion and affirmation in the couplet is out of keeping with Sonnet 129, "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame," that immediately precedes it. This should give us pause about making exact autobiographical claims for Shakespeare's Sonnets. We don't know who arranged the poems in their present order—perhaps it was the printer, or perhaps he was only following the sequence of his manuscript—but there are some striking inconsistencies of tone and mood. The Dark Lady is hardly the same figure in Sonnets 129 and 130, nor do her sexual attractions seem to match in Sonnets 129 and 151.

We are struck by Shakespeare's skepticism about his own powers as a poet and a dramatist. He is excessively deferential to the Rival Poet or Poets, who are also writing sonnets to the Friend and the Dark Lady. His "poor rude lines" (Sonnet 32) are "exceeded by the height of happier men"—"happier" in the sense of more gifted. The "proud full sail" of the Rival Poet's "great verse" has "struck me dead" and swallowed up "my ripe thoughts in my brain," as if their womb became their tomb (Sonnet 86). This undercuts in some important way the power of the Poet to confer immortality on the love object through his poetry.

Shakespeare feels himself unable to cope with the newer and more refined style of such poets as John Donne and the Metaphysicals, who wrote what the Elizabethans called "strong fines." In Sonnet 76, Shakespeare complains that his verse is "barren of new pride," "far from variation or quick change," but "still all one, ever the same." He cannot seize the moment and use "new-found methods" and "compounds strange." The explanation is rather facile: "I always write of you," "So all my best is dressing old words new." We feel that the Poet is dissatisfied with the fact that "every word doth almost tell my name," but he doesn't know how to shift into a more innovative style.

The Poet expresses even stronger dissatisfaction with his public career as a playwright and actor, in which he feels trapped. In a striking image from daily life:

And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
(Sonnet 111)

Like Macbeth's, the dyer's hand is "incarnadine" (Macbeth 2.2.61), and "all great Neptune's ocean" (59) cannot change its color. Shakespeare is engaged in a profession to please the public, and "public means" breed "public manners." From this obvious cause comes the fact that "my name receives a brand." In the previous sonnet (110), Shakespeare apologizes to the Friend that he has made himself "a motley," or clown dressed in a motley, parti-colored costume, "to the view," and "Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear." In other words, he has betrayed his innermost thoughts to the public scrutiny of the theatrical public. I am not assuming that this is an autobiographical statement of utmost sincerity, but merely that it is an essential part of the fictional persona (and personas) created in the Sonnets. If Shakespeare is the most unrevealing and paradoxical English Renaissance author in his plays, there is no convincing reason to believe that he bares his heart in the Sonnets. The very directness of the revelations should put us on our guard.

It is unfortunate that Shakespeare's Sonnets have attracted a mass of biographical speculation different from that expended on the plays. Some of the same questions haunt all of Shakespeare's works, both dramatic and nondramatic: the ambiguous nature of art, revealing and concealing at the same time; the tendency to dramatize experience, as if "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It 2.7.138-39); and, most comprehensively, the fictionalizing of human experience on the assumption that we enact and represent a reality that we create in our minds from our own histrionic imagination. The Sonnets share these qualities with Shakespeare's other works, especially those of the earlier 1590s. They can't be dealt with autonomously as if they were written by a poet separate from the man who wrote the plays.

Source: Maurice Charney, "The Sonnets," in All of Shakespeare, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 388-99.

A prominent theme of Shakespeare's sonnets is the paradoxical nature of love, and many commentators have discussed this issue. David Lloyd Stevenson, for example, emphasized the literary conventions that shaped Shakespeare's depiction of human passion. In Stevenson's judgment, the poet made use of conventional romantic sentiment but rejected the traditional notion of idealized love. Instead, he argued, Shakespeare emphasized the irrationality of human love—the conflicting impulses of aversion and attraction that are characteristic of the experience of sexual desire. Anthony Hecht and Marion Bodwell Smith also addressed the question of the sonnets' depiction of love as contradictory or paradoxical. Hecht noted that these verses exploit the traditional philosophical notion that the antagonism between soul and body can be resolved when sacred and profane love are brought together in an ideal relationship. Smith similarly evaluated the theme of love in the sonnets in the context of Renaissance philosophy, concluding that Shakespeare disavowed the notion that love could encompass both spiritual and physical values. Instead, the critic maintained, the sonnets portray the two faces of love as polarities: in the verses to the youth, love is a joining of souls, but in the ones involving the Dark Lady, love is enslavement of the body. Stephen Spender considered the conflict in the sonnets between the appearance of love and the actual experience of it. He suggested that the Poet is committed to reconciling the disparity between the outward semblance of love in the Friend and the young man's corrupt inner nature.

Critics agree that as the sonnets gradually reveal the Friend's true nature, the Poet must find a way to deal with the betrayal of love. M. M. Mahood highlighted the Poet's frequently expressed fears that the young man is treacherous and deceitful, and that he is destined to be unfaithful. But Mahood also argued that the Poet's love endures: even when the Friend repudiates him, she remarked, the Poet assures him of his continuing affection. Hilton Landry focused on the Poet's response to betrayal in Sonnets 92-96, finding in this series a variety of reactions, including fear, irony, ambivalence, and concern for the young man's well-being. Kenneth Muir also saw irony and ambivalence in the Poet's reactions to his friend's faithlessness, but in addition he detected disgrace and shame.

Several critics have maintained that in addition to deceitfulness, the Friend is guilty of self-love. Philip Martin proposed that Shakespeare's treatment of the youth's narcissism is unusually complex. Self-love, the critic argued, is portrayed as a destructive alliance with "devouring time," for by concentrating on himself the Friend will inevitably lose his essence instead of perpetuating it through procreation and love of others. In a psychoanalytic reading of the sonnets, Jane Hedley contended that the Poet himself is caught up in narcissism. She asserted that by loving a youth or incomparable beauty, the Poet is able to recapture an idealized image of himself—one that has been eroded as he has grown older. Similarly, Stephen Spender discussed the affinity between the narcissistic young man and the Poet who seeks to immortalize his beauty. In Spender's judgment, both men regard the Friend's beauty as a "unique value" that must be preserved, and in their shared determination to achieve this, they become one.

Discussions of the nature of the relationship between the Poet and the Friend often raise the question of whether it is represented as love-in-friendship or whether it has a sexual component. Kenneth Muir, for example, interpreted Sonnet 20—a verse that is at the center of this controversy—as the Poet's frank admission that his feelings for the young man are erotic as well as spiritual. Marion Bodwell Smith, on the other hand, suggested that Shakespeare's sequence traces the development—and dissolution—of love-in-friendship, as the Poet moves from confidence to doubt and from despair to an acceptance of the contradictions inherent in human love. Anthony Hecht called attention to the fact that from the classical era through the Renaissance, male friendship was seen as an advanced form of human relations—that is, superior to heterosexual love. Hecht suggested that from this perspective, Shakespeare's sonnets constitute an inquiry into the truth of that notion. Reading the sonnets in the context of the period in which they were written, Paul Innes described social and cultural norms governing relationships between men in the English Renaissance. He noted that the system of literary patronage deepened the gap between aristocratic benefactors and socially inferior writers. Calling attention to the connection between "the language of love and the discourse of patronage" in the sonnets, Innes suggested that one of the Poet's greatest fears is that if the young man rejects his love, he will lose the social and monetary benefits he presently enjoys.

David Lloyd Stevenson
[Stevenson analyzes the unique perspective on love expressed in the Dark Lady sonnets, arguing that they reveal a profound appreciation of the paradoxical nature of human passion. Stevenson maintains that although other sonnet writers had dealt with the discrepancy between idealized love and the actual experience of it, Shakespeare's sardonic treatment of lust and romantic sentiment in the Dark Lady verses is distinctive and original.]

Shakespeare … presents the sixteenth-century quarrel over the nature of love from a point of view peculiarly his own. This presentation of love in his sonnets is important because it is very like that found in his comedies of courtship. Within the narrow limits of their fourteen lines, he expresses with intensity and candor the highly individualized version of lovers' difficulties which is comic and implicit in his love-game comedies.

Shakespeare expresses the familiar sentiments of the courtly or Petrarchan lover in very few of his sonnets. In Sonnet CXXVIII he elaborates a metaphor in which he wishes he were the nimbly leaping jacks of the spinet his lady is playing, that he might also "kiss the tender inward" of her hand. In Sonnet CXXXII he writes a playful, romantic compliment. He toys with the time-honored conceit of the eye and the heart, concluding that since his mistress' eyes are black, they are mourners for the love sickness caused in him by her heart. In Sonnet CXLV, the lightest of the three, he plays with his mistress' exclamation, "I hate," for the length of the sonnet, closing it with the quick about face,

"I hate" from hate away she threw,
And sav'd my life, saying—"not you."

Conversely, in only two sonnets does Shakespeare concern himself with what had been a major problem to Sidney and Drayton—the unreality of the conceits which served to describe the traditional romantic ideal of beauty. In the one (Sonnet CXXVII), Shakespeare suggests that his mistress lacks the fair complexion and golden hair required of the ideal lady of romance.

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir.

In the other sonnet (Sonnet CXXX), in a line by line analysis, he calls attention to the disparity between his mistress' attractions and those which poetic convention decreed that she should possess. This sonnet is the familiar one beginning, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

With these few exceptions, Shakespeare does not give romantic sentiment direct lyric expression in his sonnets. Nor does he present the usual conflict between romance and a new, humanistic skepticism. Moreover, Shakespeare is too objective to react against Petrarchism in the sharply satiric way of Marston and Donne, and he does not try to avoid the difficulties of lovers by following the Renaissance Platonists in spiritualizing love. Least of all does he escape from love by retreating to the sixteenth-century equivalent of monastic morality—Puritanism. The truth is that the majority of his lyrics begin where other Elizabethan poetry leaves off. They both recognize and explain the paradoxical nature or love. They acknowledge in a sardonic fashion the presence of inevitable contradictions in experienced passion. His sonnets record his effort to exploit the conventions of romantic sentiment, but not the idealizing spirit of which they are a product.

Shakespeare expresses his comprehension of the interplay of an idealizing tendency and cold fact in a number of different ways. In one sonnet (CXXXI) he employs terms of half-complimentary, half-scornful acceptance of his lady's physical imperfections. The poem is a perfectly clear statement of the complementary halves of love. To his "dear doting heart," he says, his lady is "the fairest and most precious jewel." Others have challenged her beauty, he admits, and

To say they err I dare not be so bold,
Although I swear it to myself alone.

Therefore, he tells her,

A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,
One on another's neck, do witness bear
Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place.

A similar perception, that this idealized portrait of his lady is contradicted by the reality of her deeds, is expressed in the sonnet (CL) which opens,

O! from what power hast thou this powerful might,
With, insufficiency my heart to sway?

There is so much graceful redemption in the "very refuse" of her deeds, he cries,

That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds.

And he concludes, turning the contradictions of love upon himself in derision:

If thy unworthiness rais'd love in me,
More worthy I to be belov'd of thee.

In several of his sonnets he further examines the difference between ideal love and the less than ideal reality of his mistress. He uses, in ironic fashion, the old descriptive psychology of passion and its origins in the flame of the eye. Thus he cries,

O me! what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight.

And he concludes, again in self-mockery, that the eyes of a lover are blinded with his tears of despair. It is they which blur tawdry aspects of his passion till the discrepancy between them and his ideal is all but invisible.

O cunning Love! with tears thou keep'st me blind,
Lest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find.

Shakespeare uses this same figure of the self-deceptive eye, but more bitterly, more in self-castigation, when he asks of Love,

Why of eyes' falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
Whereto the judgment of my heart is tied?

Shakespeare often deliberately turns his back upon Petrarchan conventions. He elaborates in caustic fashion his mistress' departure from the prescribed appearance and behavior of the lady of romance. He cries that he has perjured himself far more than she. She has merely her

… bed-vow broke, and new faith torn,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing.

But as her lover he has

… sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see;
For I have sworn thee fair; more perjur'd I,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie!

However, Shakespeare presents most graphically the contradictory impulses that go to form the experience of love, not through ironic use of familiar metaphors of poetry, but by a description of the attraction and repulsion of sexual desire. Thus, in Sonnet CXLVII he exhibits the same wretched consciousness of the power of physical love to destroy an ideal as he did in The Rape of Lucrece. The mere sexual impulse

… is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease.

He uses the figure of Reason, the physician whose prescription has been ignored, abandoning the lover to incurable dilemma.

Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.

A similar, though more generalized, presentation of the inadequacy of lust either to satiate itself or to come up to its imagined delight is the subject of Sonnet CXXIX. Desire is

A bliss in proof,—and, prov'd, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream.

… Shakespeare here reduces the paradox to its essentials. But he does not, … deny the romantic expectations of love or, … deny its carnality. He acknowledges, on the contrary, the irrationality of human passion.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Most of Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark lady describe in various ways and in varying degrees of derision his understanding of the conflicting forces which form the experience of love. In a few sonnets, however, he goes beyond recognition of these forces to suggest (as did John Donne) that the discordant elements of love must be accepted as essential parts of a unified experience. Shakespeare, in Sonnet CXLII, proposes one way of easing man's disappointment when he discovers that sexual experience is not to be identified with complete spiritual felicity. His lady has questioned his love for her because of his past infidelity. He replies that her own life has not been of the sort to give her the right to criticize his.

O! but with mine compare thou thine own state,
And thou shalt find it merits not reproving;
Or, if it do, not from those lips of thine.

He suggests that they can strike some kind of balance between the dismal fruition of their love and their extravagant hopes only through pity for each other. If she "root pity" in her heart for him, she, in turn, may receive pity from those

Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee.

Otherwise,

If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,
By self-example mayst thou be denied.

With less mockery, Shakespeare expresses a similar conciliatory idea in Sonnet CLI. He builds up an elaborate phallic metaphor to describe the triumph of sexuality in love despite the knowledge (conscience) that his lady, as well as he, has been a "gentle cheater." The mere recognition of their unillusioned views of each other, their mutual skepticism, does not inevitably destroy his pride in possessing her.

No want of conscience Hold it that I call
Her "love" for whose dear love I rise and fall.

Shakespeare repeats this propitiatory gesture in a clearer fashion in another sonnet. He first acknowledges the insincerities of both parties to love.

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.

Then he concludes that tranquility is best served by a resigned accommodation of oneself both to illusion and to fact.

O! love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

It would be difficult to find in any other Elizabethan poet a more frank acknowledgment not only that there are paradoxes involved in love, but also that they define love. In Donne alone is there anything comparable, but in his poetry an intellectual skepticism pervades his attitude of disillusionment, and a philosophic detachment his dispassionate balancing of contradictory impulses. Shakespeare arrives at a conclusion like that suggested by Donne, but usually by an approach that is quite different, by an emotional reaction to experience. In one of Shakespeare's sonnets, however, an intellectual skepticism does triumph. In this one sonnet is found his nearest lyric approach to the comic spirit dramatized by his love-game comedies. He presents his lady with the ironic suggestion that she pretend to be faithful to him, that she merely play the role of romantic mistress.

If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet, love, to tell me so;—
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians
know.

And the last line of this sonnet, which repeats this concept, does so by echoing familiar courtly love phraseology.

Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.

Shakespeare's sonnets are not written outside the Petrarchan tradition, nor do they ignore romantic sentiment. Indeed, as has been seen, he makes constant use of the inherited language of love, with its symbols the eye and the heart. It is merely that in his sonnets he does not use the usual metaphors and conceits as a Petrarchan or as an anti-Petrarchan. He succeeds in evoking the innermost essence of his emotions, and thus can make no easy use of conventional materials. He reshapes them, not in rebellion against a romantic attitude, but as part of a sardonic commentary on the contradiction between idealized and experienced passion. The customary Elizabethan poetic conceits fail to convey all that Shakespeare wishes to say about love. He expresses a much more profound understanding of what had hitherto been presented in most sixteenth-century writings as the conflict of a systematized romanticism with reality. The contradictory attitudes and emotions which his sonnets display are presented with so much more apparent conviction that they appear to be not so much a generalized comment on a common problem as a highly personal comment on an individual one.

This fact is illustrated further in a few sonnets which are concerned solely with the attraction and the repulsion of sexual desire. Here the thought seems distant from that usually found in Elizabethan love poetry. But these sonnets are related to the sixteenth century by the fact that they display a mood of bitter recoil from romantic sentiment. Recourse to obscenity is, in fact, a way of making rebellion against one's own ideals seem tolerable. It is an attempt to drown out the insistent voice of hopeless disenchantment. Such erotic blasphemy gives significance, for example, to such a metaphor as the one from Sonnet CXXXV,

"Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

By insisting that the physical consummation of love is a gross and undignified act its psychic, intangible import is derided. This descent to the phallic is an attempt to reduce love to its elements and thereby to free oneself from the penalties of a softly idyllic mood which has carried one too far from reality. It is paralleled by all the jealous or frustrated lovers in Shakespeare's plays. It is Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, Leontes's of Hermione, and the basis of one of the most harrowing scenes in all literature, Othello's treatment of Desdemona as his whore.

Shakespeare's sonnets mirror lovers' difficulties in a highly individualized fashion. What John Donne was doing intellectually, Shakespeare was doing in a more intuitive way. He was turning the exaggerated conflict between an idealized sentiment and a skepticism engendered by humanistic thought back into an expression of a conflict more fundamental to the human being. … Shakespeare often appears to be describing the contention between a personally imagined perfection of amorous experience and experience itself. In his sonnets the courtly and Petrarchan symbols of love are partially transmuted. The wheel has nearly come full circle. What began in Provence as a systemized exaltation of love, in Shakespeare's lyrics to a dark lady begins to break down into the confusion inherent in the quarrel between an individual's own imagination and his own experience of reality.

Source: David Lloyd Stevenson, "Conflict in Shakespeare's Sonnets," in The Love-Game Comedy, AMS Press, 1966, pp. 174-84.

M. M. Mahood
[In her examination of the friendship between the speaker and the young man he addresses, Mahood focuses on the Poet's growing fear that his friend will betray him. She maintains that most of the sonnets from 33 to 124 represent the Poet's various attempts to deal with what he increasingly sees as inevitable: his friend will prove treacherous. Mahood also compares Shakespeare's development of the themes of deception and betrayal of friendship in the sonnets with his treatment of these motifs in several plays—especially his depiction of the relationships between Antonio and Bassamo in The Merchant of Venice, and Hal and Falstaff in 1 and 2 Henry IV.]

I
The present trend of criticism is bringing Shakespeare's poems and his plays together. A dramatic element is recognized in short poems of many kinds—Shakespeare's sonnets, Keats's odes, the lyrics of Yeats. Like plays they attempt to give through some fiction (the truest poetry is the most feigning) form, and so meaning, to experiences whose real-life occasions are now lost to us and are, in any case, none of our business. A sonnet cannot help in the interpretation of a play, nor can the play throw any light on the sonnet's meaning, if the two works are thought of as belonging to different grades of imitation; if the sonnet, for example, is a snippet of biography or a poetic exercise. But if the two kinds of poetry are regarded, despite their differences in magnitude, as products of the same imaginative process, then our reading of the one can illumine our understanding of the other. In particular, these cross-references can lead us to a fuller understanding of the main theme of the sonnets: the complex and profoundly disturbed relationship of the poet with the friend to whom most of the sequence is addressed.

Sonnet XXXIII provides an example of the elucidation that such cross-references can afford:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.

It is not at all easy, in reading this, to grasp what the friend has done—if the clouds represent some blot on his reputation with the world at large, or the relationship of poet and friend has been clouded by the friend's unkindness. Is the clouding involuntary or deliberate? The grammatical structure of the second quatrain leaves us in doubt whether the sun hides his visage, stealing away in shame, or whether, untouched himself, he simply permits the clouds to hide it. 'Celestial' implies that the friend, like the sun, belongs to the immutable order of heavenly bodies who are not themselves affected in any way by the rack of clouds passing below them in the sublunary world's insubstantial pageant. Yet if the friend merely allows his glory to be eclipsed and is himself in no way blemished it is hard to see what Shakespeare intended by 'disgrace', since the word whenever used by him (with the possible exception of 'And then grace us in the disgrace of death' in Love's Labour's Lost, where it can mean 'disfigurement') has a derogatory meaning. 'Stain' also is a teasingly imprecise word. It can mean to darken, or even to eclipse or to be eclipsed (as in Antony and Cleopatra, III, iv, 27), though a much commoner meaning is to blemish or to become blemished.

If we turn to the plays for parallels in thought, diction or imagery which may throw light on Shakespeare's intention in sonnet XXXIII, we are immediately struck by two passages which bear a close resemblance to the second quatrain of the sonnet. When Richard II appears on the walls of Flint Castle, Hotspur exclaims

See, see, King Richard doth himself appear,
As doth the blushing discontented sun
From out the fiery portal of the east,
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
To dim his glory and to stain the track
Of his bright passage to the occident.

To which the Duke of York adds

Yet looks he like a king: behold, his eye,
As bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth
Controlling majesty: alack, alack, for woe,
That any harm should stain so fair a show!
(III, iii, 62-71)

The verbal resemblances between this and sonnet XXXIII are close, but no closer than others to be found in a passage of Henry IV, Part I. Hal, parting from his Eastcheap companions, lets the audience into the secret of his relationship with them:

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
(I, ii, 220-6)

In the first passage the sun image is used of a weak man who, for all his show of controlling majesty, is controlled by his subjects; in the second, of a strong man who conceals his true nature for reasons of policy. This contrast heightens rather than solves the contradictions of sonnet XXXIII. But fortunately the plays also offer a number of parallels with the sonnet's magnificent opening quatrain which may take us a little further in understanding the poem.

The first of these is in Henry VIII, when Wolsey, disgraced by the King ('That sun, I pray, may never set!), laments that

No sun shall ever usher forth mine honours,
Or gild again the noble troops that waited
Upon my smiles.
(III, ii, 410-12)

The context is one of betrayal; however hard Wolsey seeks, like the poet in sonnet after sonnet (for example, XXXV, which is closely connected with XXXIII and in which 'Thy adverse party is thy advocate") to justify the King, every audience is perturbed by Henry's treachery. The use of 'gild' is significant. Shakespeare nearly always employs the word in a derogatory sense to suggest the brilliance that masks corruption: 'England shall double gild his treble guilt'; 'men are but gilded loam'; 'the gilded puddle'; 'gilded tombs do worms infold'. Goneril [in King Lear] is 'this gilded serpent'. Even a seemingly neutral use of the word turns out to be ambiguous. When Antony sends a jewel to Cleopatra after his parting with her, the queen greets the messenger with the words

coming from him, that great medicine hath
With his tinct gilded thee.
(I, v, 36-7)

Gold is cordial. Antony is life-giving, 'sovereign' like the sun. Yet at this moment he is bound for Rome and marriage with Octavia. A mainspring of the play's action is Cleopatra's uncertainty as to whether Antony is dust a little gilt or gilt o'er-dusted. This is exactly the uncertainty in which the poet of the sonnets stands in relation to his friend.

'Alchemy, like 'gild', was not a word which necessarily implied deception to the sixteenth-century reader. But it too is used by Shakespeare in contexts of betrayal. As J. W. Lever has shown [in The Elizabethan Love Sonnet] there is a meaningful resemblance between the opening of sonnet XXXIII and the lines in King John in which the King, having treacherously abandoned the cause of Constance and her son Arthur by agreeing to the French match, declares of the marriage day

To solemnize this day the glorious sun
Stays in his course and plays the alchemist,
Turning with splendour of his precious eye
The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold.
(III, i, 77-80)

Even more interesting is the way the word is used in ]uluis Caesar:

O, he sits high in all the people's hearts:
And that which would appear offence in us,
His countenance, like richest alchemy,
Will change to virtue and to worthiness.
(I, iii, 157-60)

Although Cassius gives warm assent to this 'right well conceited' description of Brutus, the play itself leaves us in lasting doubt over the effect of such alchemy. Does it in fact turn the assassination into a golden deed, or does it only gild over the conspirators' guilt? Public virtue, Shakespeare hints here and elsewhere in the plays, never cancels out private wrong, and the noblest Roman of them all is branded with the lasting reproach of Et tu, Brute.

To Coleridge the opening of sonnet XXXIII represented one mark of the poetic imagination at its best: its ability to transfer a human and intellectual life to images of nature [Biographia Literaria]. Just as Venus' sense of loss at Adonis' departure is precisely matched by the experience of watching a shooting star vanish in the night sky, so Shakespeare finds in the treacherous overclouding of a bright summer's day the exact image for his disappointment in his friend's deliberate coldness. This disappointment is not the almost impersonal regret felt by Hotspur and York at Richard's weaknesses; it is the personal pain that Henry V could give his old companion, Falstaff. So much is suggested by the beginning of sonnet XXXIV—Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day', where the hurt is scarcely healed by the tears the friend sheds. 'And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds' may well be spoken with deep irony to the man who thinks his patronage can pay for his unkindness. For in italicizing the word 'Flatter' in his quotation, Coleridge unerringly indicated the tone of sonnet XXXIII and the succeeding sonnet. Flattery forebodes treachery. What Shakespeare dreads in his friend is not the folly of youth—that he is almost eager to condone—but the cold strength of maturity.

II
If Thorpe's arrangement of the sonnets has any significance, sonnet XXXIII represents the first cloud across the friendship, and the poet never subsequently speaks with the simple trust that we find, say, in sonnet XXIX. When Shakespeare later made use of the image of the rising lark which supplies the unforgettable sestet of that sonnet, he gives it a bitter setting; [in Cymbeline] it becomes the incidental music to Cloten's attempt to corrupt Posthumus' wife. And when, within the sonnet sequence itself, Shakespeare returns in sonnet XQ to the theme of love's riches as compensation for the world's neglect—'And having thee, of all men's pride I boast'—the final, misgiving couplet quite alters the sonnet's effect:

Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away and me most wretched make.

Another sonnet concerned with the friendship's value is the forty-eighth, which contrasts the care the poet has taken to stow away his material wealth on leaving for a journey with the way his most precious possession of all, the friend himself, is left 'the prey to every vulgar thief:

Thee have I not lock'd up in any chest,
Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,
Within the gentle closure of my breast,
From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part.

The lingering monosyllabic line 'Save where thou art not … ' is heavy with mistrust. Such a mistrust is experienced by the Helena of A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose affection has been so freely and foolishly given and who still cannot quite believe, when all the mistakes of a midsummer night are over, that Demetrius is hers:

And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own, and not mine own.
(IV, i, 195-6)

The motif of a treasure in a casket which occurs several times in the sonnets is of course an integral part of The Merchant of Venus. Here the critics draw our attention to one particularly close parallel. Bassanio, making his choice of the leaden casket, moralizes over the way the world is still deceived with ornament:

So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.
(III, ii, 92-6)

Sonnets LXVII and LXVIII also protest at the deceptions of the time, which are held to accord ill with the friend's 'truth'. His beauty is his own as beauty was in the days

Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay.

The poet's intention seems to be that both Bassanio and the friend should stand for truth in a naughty world. sonnet LXVII in fact strengthens this connection by saying that nowadays Nature is bankrupt—'Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins'; and Bassanio's wealth, he tells Portia, all flows in his veins. But though he is frank enough to tell her this when he first comes wooing he does not then tell her what he later confesses, that he is 'worse than nothing' and that he is in fact indebted to Antonio for coming like a day in April 'To show how costly summer was at hand'. It is unfashionable at present to regard Bassanio as a fortune-hunter, yet in this same scene Gratiano puts the facts of the matter honestly enough when he says 'We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece". If generations of critics have been perplexed by the discrepancies between Shakespeare's apparent intentions in portraying Bassanio and the character who emerges from the play, the reason may be that Shakespeare's presentation of the character is related to a real-life discrepancy between what he wishes his friend to be and what he fears he is. So in the sonnets, with their many verbal parallels to The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare strains in sonnet LXVII and sonnet LXVIII to dissociate his friend from the corruption of the times and in sonnet LXIX blames those times for adding to his friend's fair flower 'the rank smell of weeds'; yet the collection as a whole shows him to be haunted by the fear that his friend is all the time a lily that festers.

Such a re-reading of The Merchant of Venice in the light of the sonnets helps us towards an answer to the question with which the play opens: why is the Merchant himself so sad? Already in the first scene Antonio hints at the true source of his sadness:

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.
(I, i, 42-5)

Discriminatory stress here falls on bottom, place, merchandise; Antonio has not entrusted all his wealth to one ship, but he has entrusted all his affection to one man and is obsessed by thoughts of the hazards he runs in this venture. In the story, as Shakespeare shapes it out of the casket tale and the tale of the cruel bond, Bassanio is faithful to Antonio, whose fears are therefore groundless. But they are none the less real to the audience. Antonio begins as he ends, the odd man out, awakening in the audience a sympathy which is extraneous to the play's general effect and so quite different from any emotions which Shylock may arouse. In Antonio's readiness to stake all for his friend, his parting from him, his letter, his willing resignation, we find the dramatic expression of that 'fear of trust' at which Shakespeare hints also in Bassanio's speech on ornament, and which runs through so many sonnets to find, perhaps, its most eloquent expression in sonnet XC.

Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might.

The same fear of trust may be the case of a similar disproportion in another of Shakespeare's middle comedies, Twelfth Night. The Antonio of that play feels for Sebastian a devotion which belongs to an altogether different order of experience from the Duke's infatuation with Olivia or Olivia's mourning for her dead brother. Viola's silent passion comes within reach of it, and for this reason she is deeply moved by Antonio's reproaches to her for not yielding his purse (a situation handled with cheerful heartlessness in The Comedy of Errors). Bewildered as she is by this meaningless demand, she can recognize his anguish of disillusion, an anguish oddly misplaced in Illyria:

Let me speak a little. This youth that you see here
I snatch'd one half out of the jaws of death,
Relieved him. with such sanctity of love,
And to his image, which methought did promise
Most venerable worth, did I devotion …
But O how vile an idol proves this god!
Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame.
In nature there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be call'd deform'd but the unkind:
Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the devil.
(III, iv, 393-404)

Two persistent themes of the doubting sonnets—the youth's beauty, promising 'most venerable worth' and the poet's worshipping devotion—are to be found here, and Antonio's speech of further reproach in the last act adds another: the contrast between the speaker's spendthrift affection and the friend's careful calculations of the risks involved:

His life I gave him and did thereto add
My love, without retention or restraint,
All his in dedication; for his sake
Did I expose myself, pure for his love,
Into the danger of this adverse town;
Drew to defend him when he was beset:
Where being apprehended, his false cunning,
Not meaning to partake with me in danger,
Taught him to face me out of his acquaintance,
And grew a twenty years removed thing.
(V, i, 83-92)

This relationship of Antonio to Sebastian stands up like a great inselberg of eroded experience in the green landscape of comedy. And in a history play of the same period, Henry V, surprising prominence is given to the theme of trust betrayed, in Henry's eloquent reproaches to the traitor Scroop. The loosely episodic construction of the play is not injured by the stress Shakespeare lays on an incident which is briefly treated by the chroniclers. But this emphasis once again suggests that Shakespeare was haunted by the fear that his self-possessed friend would one day repudiate him:

O, how hast thou with jealousy infected
The sweetness of affiance! Show men dutiful? …
Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger,
Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood,
Garnish'd and deck'd in modest complement,
Not working with the eye without the ear,
And but in purged judgement trusting neither?
Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem:
And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion. I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.
(II, ii, 126-42)

Among the sonnets, sonnets XC-XCIV, a sequence of mounting mistrust which most of the rearrangers leave undisturbed, and which culminates in the much-discussed 'They that have power', come very close in theme and tone to Henry's speech. Sonnet XCIII speaks, with all the bitterness of Twelfth Night's Antonio, of the youth's deceptive beauty, and like Henry V the poet here associates outer fairness and inner corruption with original sin; so calamitous and yet so inescapable does the friend's betrayal appear to him:

But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

III
The sonnets we have hitherto discussed are among the least conventional in the sequence. In many of the more conventional ones, however, it is noticeable that Shakespeare is making use of the convention to relieve or to escape from his intolerable doubts of his friend's loyalty. Thus one of the oldest themes which the sonnet absorbed from medieval love poetry, the poet's abject self-abasement before the god-like nature of the friend or mistress, eases the poet's dread of betrayal by supplying a justification for it. Such a rationalization of fear is found, alongside the melancholy which the fear induces, in Shakespeare's depiction of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. His words at the trial—

I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death: the weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground; and so let me:
(IV, i, 114-16)

are as movingly unconvincing as is sonnet LXXXVIII:

With mine own weakness being best
acquainted,
Upon thy part I can set down a story
Of faults conceal'd, wherein I am attainted,
That thou in losing me shalt win much glory.

Glory of this kind is won by Hal at the end of the second part of Henry IV when he repudiates Falstaff; and there are several sonnets in which the relationship between the young, handsome and conspicuous friend seems closely to parallel that of the Prince of Wales and his reprobate old companion. Of these sonnet XLIX comes nearest to the culminating scene of Henry IV, Part II:

Against that time, if ever that time come,
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,
Call'd to that audit by advised respects;
Against that time when thou shalt strangely
pass
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity,
Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine own desert,
And this my hand against myself uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part:
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of
laws,
Since why to love I can allege no cause.

At the end of the play, love is converted from the thing it was when Hal, succeeding to the throne, declares 'I have turned away my former self' and takes as his new counsellor the strength of laws in the person of the Lord Chief Justice. If we take, from the back of the gallery or the back of history, a long view of the Hal-Falstaff relationship, the rejection is justified. But the sonnet gives us a sombre close-up of the matter from the viewpoint of the rejected companion, in which cold prudence shows itself in the 'advis'd respects' (a phrase already used of majesty in King John) and in the profit-and-loss calculations with which the friend casts his utmost sum. The reasons of settled gravity serve, to borrow a telling phrase from sonnet LXXXIX, 'to set a form upon desired change'. Gravity belongs to the court and in particular to the Lord Chief Justice who tells Falstaff 'There is not a white hair on your face but should have his effect of gravity.' 'What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight?' Falstaff asks when a nobleman of the court comes to summon Hal to a reckoning with his father; and gravity is dismissed by levity while the scene of reckoning is played out as an Eastcheap farce. But in the charade, Falstaff is soon turned out of the role of Hal's father; and the royal resolution—'I do, I will' with which Hal encounters Falstaff's plea not to banish honest Jack is put into effect when the new-crowned Henry V passes 'strangely'. The Lord Chief Justice follows, to waken Falstaff rudely from his long dream in which he, and not the Lord Chief Justice, will replace Hal's father—

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
(Sonnet LXXXVII)

In the play as well as the poems, Shakespeare seeks to exorcize the haunting fear of betrayal by showing such betrayal to be justified in the light of prudence, a cardinal virtue, and of policy, the wisdom of governors. But the reproach of disloyalty remains, breaking out in the sonnets through ambiguous words and phrases, and perplexing for centuries the audiences of Henry IV.

Readers who are distressed by the self-abasing tone of such sonnets may turn with relief to those that make use of a contrary convention and promise the friend immortal life in the poet's verse. Yet many of these 'eternizing' sonnets are not so much the expression of confidence as of fear, the same persistent rear of the friend's treachery. In anticipation of that betrayal, the poet tries to perpetuate his friend in his verse as he now is and while he is still the poet's friend. He seeks 'To make him seem long hence as he shows now' (sonnet CI). But what he seems and shows may be quite other than what he actually is, and some of these sonnets are as profoundly ironic as the Duke's words to Angelo in the last act of Measure for Measure, when the deputy still appears 'unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow':

O, your desert speaks loud; and I should
wrong it,
To lock it in the wards of covert bosom,
When it deserves, with characters of brass,
A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time
And razure of oblivion.
(V, i, 9-13)

Because the characters of brass may ultimately speak of the friend as someone very different from the man the poet knows, the poet insists on his power to perpetuate him in his verse, not as a paragon of all the virtues—in fact we are told very little about the young man, as all Shakespeare's biographers have cause to complain—but simply as the poet's friend—

But you shall shine more bright in these
contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish
time.
(Sonnet LV)

Sluttish time not only neglects the gilded monuments but actually besmears them; the poet is fighting to preserve his friend against 'all-oblivious enmity' and beyond that, it may be conjectured from the same sonnet's ambiguous final couplet, from the ultimate truth of his nature which the poet dreads to see discovered:

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

So too in the greatest 'eternizing' sonnet, the Ovidian sonnet LX, Time appears as the enemy not only of the youth's beauty but of his virtue too. Time feeds on the rarities of Nature's truth, and the eclipses which fight here against the glory of maturity can be, as they are in sonnet XXXIII, the darkened reputation which comes even in a man's lifetime from 'envious and calumniating time'.

The ravages of Time are the subject of sonnet LXIV—'When I have seen by Time's fell hand … '. But here there is no promise of an immortality in verse to offset the melancholy close:

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That
Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot
choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Commentators on this sonnet are much struck by the resemblance between its second quatrain and the speech of King Henry in Henry IV, Part II beginning 'O God! that one might read the book of fate'. Both passages picture the sea's encroachment upon the land and the land's upon the sea. It is worth following Henry's speech in the play a little further, to see what application he makes of the image:

O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress
through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and
die.
Tis not ten years gone
Since Richard and Northumberland, great
friends,
Did feast together, and in two years after
Were they at wars it is but eight years since
This Percy was the man nearest my soul,
Who like a brother toil'd in my affairs
And kid his life and love under my foot.
(III, i, 53-63)

Time will also come and take Shakespeare's love away—by death perhaps, although in the natural course of things the poet would die the earlier; the Henry IV passage shows rather that Time may take him away as it took Northumberland from Richard and has taken Hotspur from Henry. Here again then destructive time is equated, as Derek Traversi has said [in Approach to Shakespeare], with the 'necessary flaw at the heart of passion'.

So the millioned accidents of time creep in, the poet says in sonnet CXV, between men's vows and 'Divert strong minds to the course of altering things'. In this last sonnet, however, the vicissitudes of time are made to serve a new turn of thought by explaining how it has been possible for the poet's love to increase. This sonnet therefore belongs with those that make use of a third conventional idea of love poetry and of the sonnet in particular, the constancy of the poet's love. Whatever the friend may do, the poet's affection will last for ever and a day. There is thus a natural transition from this sonnet to the boast of sonnet CXVI that love is not love 'Which alters when it alteration finds'. Sonnets CVII and CXXIV also belong to this group, and when, after all that has been written about these two difficult poems, one rereads them in their place in the sequence it is hard to see how the 'love' they celebrate could ever have been taken to mean the friend himself and not Shakespeare's affection for the friend. The 'confin'd doom' of CVII can surely only mean the limits which cynical onlookers have set to Shakespeare's friendship, limits suggested perhaps by a knowledge of the friend's true nature. But in defiance of these prophecies, the poet claims his love is not 'the child of state'—

It fears not policy, that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-number'd
hours.

The friend's love may well be diverted from its true allegiance by policy; he has already revealed himself as a calculating young man, and the time may come when he will cast his utmost sum and, knowing his estimate, will reject the poet. But in contrast the poet's love stands 'hugely politic'; it embraces the whole state of existence and to him it is inconceivable that he could ever 'leave for nothing all this sum of good'—

For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.

Sonnet CIX, from which these lines are quoted, presents the poet like one that travels' bringing 'water for my stain'. Verbally it closely parallels the passage in Henry IV, Part II from which T. W. Baldwin [in The Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poem and Sonnets] begins his study of the relationship between the poems and the plays:

Falstaff. But to stand stained with travel, and sweating with desire to see him; thinking of nothing else, putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him.

Pistol. Tis 'semper idem', for 'obsque hoc nihil est:' 'tis all in every part.
(v, v, 25-31)

In this of course Falstaff's devotion is anything but disinterested, and I have already suggested that it is one of Shakespeare's ways of evading the fear of trust to present Falstaff as a character who deserves the dismissal he gets. But Falstaff does not alter where he alteration finds. He believes that he will be sent for soon at night and when that last hope is gone, Falstaff himself has nothing left to live for: 'The king hath killed his heart.'

IV
In suggesting that the deep fear of love's confined doom and the various ways of coming to terms with that fear—by accepting the justice of the doom, by stressing poetry's power to escape devouring time and by protesting the poet's own unchanging loyalty—are the motive forces of most of the sonnets between XXXIII and CXXIV, and an important element in several of Shakespeare's middle plays, I have run the risk, especially where the plays are concerned, of appearing to be a biographical speculator. But while I am convinced the fear of trust is a factor to be reckoned with in our reading of the poems and plays, I would not suggest following this clue out of the text and into Shakespeare's life. We know too little about the labyrinthine processes by which experience is transformed into the work of art. The warning of a Victorian editor of the sonnets, Robert Bell, is apposite: 'the particle of actual life out of which verse is wrought may be, and almost always is, wholly incommensurate to the emotion depicted, and remote from the forms into which it is ultimately shaped'. Some trifle light as air may have rendered Shakespeare the man jealous of a friend's affection and so created the tormented 'I' of the sonnets as well as the two Antonios and certain aspects of Falstaff.

If the recognition of the 'fear of trust' as a strong element in the sonnets and middle plays throws no clear light on Shakespeare's biography, it might be expected to help in the critical evaluation of these works. But here we meet a long standing difference of opinion between those critics—they are mostly practising poets like Yeats, Auden and Empson—who hold that poetry should be the clear expression of mixed feelings and those others, and they include some of the best commentators on the sonnets, who feel that ambiguities of tone and verbal meanings constitute a defect because they indicate the poet has insufficiently realized his experience in a poetic form. For these critics the lack of moral explicitness in, say, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV will always be a blemish on these plays, and they are likely to prefer Integer vitae [the upright life] to 'They that have power', or the perfect control of 'When in disgrace with fortune … ' to the sounding imprecision of 'Not mine own fears … '. If I here stop short of an evaluative conclusion to these few observations on the Sonnets and middle plays, it is not because I feel such evaluations can be dismissed as a matter of taste, but because they need a definition of critical principles that lies outside the scope of the present essay. And even when we are furnished with such principles we are likely to find that in critical evaluation, as in biographical inquiry and other activities of scholarship, we may come to the pericardium, but not the heart of truth.

Source: M. M. Mahood, "Love's Confined Doom," in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 15, 1962, pp. 50-61.

Philip Martin
[Martin concentrates on Sonnets 1-17, where, he contends, the principal themes of all the sonnets involving the young man are subtly introduced. In this group, the critic notes, speaker simultaneously praises and censures the youth's self-absorption. Though he agrees that the young man's self-love is justified, he also points out that by refusing to marry and have children the youth is, in effect, cooperating with time in the destruction of his beauty. Martin also calls attention to the intimate connection between themes and language in the sonnets, illustrating this with a careful analysis of the relationship between the diction, syntax, and figurative language of Sonnet 1 and the ideas expressed there.]

Anyone who reads the Sonnets must notice how often and how variously they speak of self-love. It is there from the start. The order of the Quarto may be disputed, but surely not the position of Sonnet 1. For the sequence could have no opening so completely Shakespearean as this. Here, as in those dialogues between minor characters which open many of the great plays, the chief themes are quietly asserted: the youth's beauty, the destructiveness of time, the choice to be made between defying time and co-operating with it.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauties Rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heire might beare his memory:
But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes,
Feed'st thy lights flame with selfe substantiall
fewell,
Making a famine where aboundance lies,
Thy selfe thy foe, to thy sweet selfe too cruell:
Thou that art now the worlds fresh ornament,
And only herauld to the gaudy spring,
Within thine owne bud buriest thy content,
And tender chorle makst wast in niggarding:
Pitty the world, or else this glutton be,
To eate the worlds due, by the grave and
thee.

What particularly corresponds here to the first scenes of the plays is the pitch of the poetry, the understatement of its manner. This is a deliberately minor sonnet as compared, say, with 'Not marble, nor the guilded monuments' or 'Let me not to the marriage of true mindes'. It is not elevated, it is not one of the great moments of the sequence, yet it is indispensable. And while it is, like Sonnet 144 ('Two loves I have of comfort and dispaire'), an obviously thematic sonnet, it does not merely state its themes, it embodies them in a respectably complex poetic texture. Restrained as it is, it has the true Shakespearean richness of suggestion. And to read it aloud will show how beautifully timed its long crescendo is; how much the aural shape of the poem, its 'music' in the popular sense, is a part of that other 'music of poetry' which Eliot speaks of: the patterning of diverse, even discordant elements into a unified meaning.

Self-love may be servitude, self-love may be freedom: this is what a great many of the Sonnets say, some throwing the emphasis on one possibility, some on the other. In Sonnet 1 it falls on the first: self-love, as the poet sees it in the youth, is nothing less than a complicity with 'devouring Time'. But the point is made both tellingly and winningly; praise and condemnation balance each other. This is a poetry which keeps something in reserve and never raises its voice unless it has to. The 'thou' of the poem is not mentioned a moment too soon, and the harshest word applied to him, 'glutton', is held back until the second last line, where the rhythm gives it a surprising force. But it would be well to look more closely at this sonnet to see what it establishes, not only in the way of themes, but also of modes of language; for in both respects (which are in any case intimately related) it is a genuine introduction to the poems that follow.

The first line intimates a concern with 'creatures', beings subject to a mightier power (though that is not yet insisted on); and by assonance and alliteration 'creatures' and 'increase' are linked in the poetry as they should be (the poem implies) in life. "Thereby in line 2 points back, more than syntactically, to 'increase' and to the 'creatures' from which it proceeds. As an image, "beauties Rose" needs no more force than it has, being used as a commonplace for beauty perpetually flourishing, withering and being reborn. The line goes on to introduce the ideas of dying and of never dying and thus to make the first reference to immortality. In line 3 the suggestions of 'as … should' are ambiguous. The line points to what must happen in the nature of things, with which it seems prepared to acquiesce: that 'the riper should by time decease' is fitting. But (the next line adds) only if there is an heir. And this changes the meaning of 'as' from 'because' to 'while' in both its senses: firstly as referring to time (while one life is declining, another rises in its stead) and secondly as marking a contrast (on the one hand, death; on the other, new life patterned on the old). And together the two lines juxtapose 'riper' and 'tender'. "Riper' has the usual Shakespearean associations of maturity and acceptance ('Ripeness is all'), and there may be an implication, coming partly from the even movement of the line, that the acceptance is that of the parent as well of people generally (the 'we' of the poem): for him it is a 'well-contented day', or it will be if an heir survives it. And a 'tender' heir: the word implying youth (the first blades of grass, the first shoots on a bough), and also human affection, the grateful love of children towards those who have given them life, and whose memory they are glad to 'beare'. The delicate forwarding movement of the language is difficult to suggest in critical prose: it is so much more deftly many-sided than any description can be. As Mrs. Nowottny remarks [in "Formal Elements in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Sonnets I-VI"], in discussing the fugal form of Sonnet 4, 'critical analysis, which cannot reproduce the simultaneousness of the original, must labour heavily behind, discussing first the development of each part and then their interaction.' … But even such an attempt may suggest how one line leads inevitably into the next, and in no mechanical or predictable way, how even the second half of a line may realize a further stage of the process established in the first. The furthering may be achieved, as we have seen, by an ambiguous phrase or by a pun on a single word: 'beare', for instance. Essentially the line in which this occurs is concerned with issue: an heir who will carry on the parent's line. But the poetry does not separate biology from the rest of life. 'Beare his memory' conveys the two ideas that in his love the heir consciously cherishes the memory of his father, that in himself he is the memory of his father, whose image can be seen in him by those (like the poet perhaps?) who knew the father; and that naturally the son will wish to carry on his memory, his and his father's, by begetting children of his own.

The first quatrain, then, creates a sense of natural and inevitable order, a necessary enchainment of one generation with the next and the next: father, child, and the unconceived who must be brought to birth. This quatrain states the thesis both of this sonnet and of at least the sixteen poems which follow it. I would point again to the quietness of this opening: a softly-spoken but in no way tentative statement of an idea which (the tone leads us to feel) no one is likely to deny. There is tact here (or is it tactics?); and there is, too, an expansive movement within the quatrain. The first line provides a starting-point as quiet and gentle as possible, but each line seems to mount on the rising curve of the one before it, and the gradually mounting wave of the four lines together sweeps us slowly but powerfully into the second quatrain. If the first states a thesis the second shows its immediate application. We know we have reached the point of reference with the first words: 'But thou'. And yet in the next words the gentleness of the poem's manner, or manners, is still apparent. No ringing denunciation, at least not yet. Instead:

But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes,
Feed's thy lights flame with selfe substantiall fewell,
Making a famine where aboundance lies.

Half of the effect of these lines is of praise for the youth. Beyond doubt the compliment is intended: his eyes are bright. If it is becoming clear that he falls short of his end, the lines intimate also the wealth of his endowments. It is almost pardonable, certainly understandable, that he should live as he does, with such eyes, such abundance, to 'court an amorous looking-glass'; the poetry, pursuing this vein of compliment, might almost seem to be saying that the youth is, as he thinks, 'selfe substantial!'. Yet in this process the self is being consumed. And the vein that runs counter to that of praise emerges strongly in the third line with the heavy stress on 'famine'; so that the negative is already set against the positive at the climax of the quatrain and the centre of the poem. Quite effortlessly the poetry holds in one hand the two terms of the contradiction: in 'Making a famine where aboundance lies', the rhythmic antithesis between 'famine' and 'aboundance' weighs praise against blame, blame against praise, and in a manner to suggest that an abundance which 'lies' unused must turn to a famine equally great; a destruction equal to the power destroyed. The quatrain ends with a paradox which, through a lessened subtlety, creates I think a slight anticlimax even while it drives the point home; yet the two strands are retained, of criticism and compliment, or rather, perhaps, of appeal: 'Thy selfe thy foe, to thy sweet selfe too cruell.

There is little question that Shakespeare's sonnets are essentially lyrical—that is, short verses expressing thoughts or feelings. There is critical debate, however, about the extent to which they contain narrative or dramatic elements. Most twentieth-century commentators find little more than a skeletal "story" in these verses. Kenneth Muir, for instance, summarized what he termed "the basic facts" of the sonnets in a single sentence. He reminded readers that these verses do not represent a novel in poetic form, yet he also acknowledged that Shakespeare convinces us that the sonnets are sincere expressions of the speaker's emotions, from one day to the next and from year to year. Heather Dubrow (1981) stressed the fact that only rarely do the sonnets relate a chronological sequence of events. She called attention to the lack of specific references to time and place, and to the scarcity of sonnets that describe something that actually happens to the Poet, the Friend, or the Dark Lady.

Dubrow also addressed the question of dramatic elements in the sonnets. She suggested that these poems are profoundly dramatic in that they bring before us, immediately and intensely, the conflicted mind of the speaker. The dramatic confrontation is not between external forces, she argued, but between the speaker's competing or contradictory thoughts and emotions, and this struggle is conveyed through monologues or meditations that resemble, to some degree, soliloquies in plays. G. K. Hunter similarly maintained that Shakespeare's sonnets bring readers into direct contact with the speaker's suffering and, through their poignancy and immediacy, evoke the same feelings of pity and terror elicited by tragic drama. Michael Cameron Andrews agreed with Dubrow that the sonnets are essentially lyrical, but he maintained that they are dramatic in the sense that they constitute a dynamic portrayal of a mind at war with itself. He argued that these poems vivify the tempestuous flow of conflicting emotions in the speaker's mind as he tries desperately to resolve—through justification, pretense, self-deception, and other subterfuges—the discrepancy between his idealized vision of the Friend and the knowledge that the young man has deceived him.

Heather Dubrow
[Though she acknowledges the presence of narrative and dramatic elements in Shakespeare's sonnets, Dubrow asserts that most of these poems are interior monologues in the lyrical mode. Shakespeare's principal concern is to convey the speaker's anguish and confusion, she suggests, and to heighten our experience of his thoughts and emotions. Dubrow argues that the unusually generalized setting of these sonnets and the lack of a story help increase readers' identification with the speaker by universalizing his experience. Moreover, she notes that while the problems created by the behavior of the Friend and the Dark Lady are vivid and immediate, they themselves remain shadowy figures. These characteristics make Shakespeare's sonnets unique in comparison with those of his contemporaries, she remarks, as does his unusual use of the couplet: instead of summarizing the ideas and arguments of the preceding quatrains in the last two lines, he frequently introduces new thoughts here, thus underscoring the speaker's self doubts and anxieties.]

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies.
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been
T. S. Eliot, "East Coker"

We assume that the non-dramatic poetry of a great playwright will in fact be dramatic in many senses of that complex term. And we assume that when a writer who, among his manifold gifts, is a skilled storyteller chooses to write sonnets, at least some of them will be narrative. Those presuppositions help to explain why, despite all the other controversies about Shakespeare's Sonnets, certain concepts are so repeatedly and so uncritically brought to bear on interpretations of these poems. We are regularly informed, for example, that they are "dramas" or "stories," a view reflected in the frequency with which critics of the Sonnets include the word "dramatic" in the titles of their studies and then proceed to comment on the "plots" and the "characters" that they find in the sequence. But in literary criticism, as in so many other human activities, we are prone to see what we expect to see, and nothing else. While Shakespeare's Sonnets evidently do include certain dramatic and narrative elements, in focusing on that aspect of them we have overlooked a more revealing and more surprising fact: that many of the characteristics central to other dramatic and narrative poetry, including other Renaissance sonnet sequences, are signally absent from Shakespeare's Sonnets.

I
A comparison of Shakespeare's Sonnet 87 with two other works that also concern a leavetaking will highlight his approach to the genre. The famous lines of Drayton's Idea 61 demonstrate how a poem in what is essentially a lyric mode can become dramatic:

Since ther's no helpe, Come let us kisse and
part.
Nay, I have done: you get no more of Me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly, I my Selfe can free,
Shake hands for ever, Cancell all our Vowes,
And when We meet at any time againe,
Be it not seene in either of our Browes,
That We one jot of former Love reteyne;
Now at the last gaspe, of Loves latest Breath,
When his Pulse fayling, Passion speechlesse lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of Death,
And Innocence is closing up his Eyes,
Now if thou would'st, when all have given
him over,
From Death to Life, thou might'st him yet
recover.

Rather than describing the episode in which the lovers part, Drayton enacts it. We are asked to believe (and, thanks to his skill, the illusion is persuasive) that we are actually witnessing the speaker bidding farewell to his lady. We are as conscious of her implicit but powerful presence as that speaker is himself. And we are conscious, too, that what the poem claims to enact is a specified and unique moment in time. To be sure, Drayton briefly uses allegory to distance us from that moment—but his main reason for establishing such a distance is to create a foil against which his final appeal to the woman will seem all the more immediate.

Though Petrarch's Canzonière CXC is primarily concerned "with rendering certain states of mind—the poet's joy at the beauty of Laura and his intense sorrow at her loss—he evokes those states by telling a story:

Una candida cerva sopra l'erba
Verde m'apparve, con duo corna d'oro,
Fra due riviere, a l'ombra d'un alloro,
Levando 'l sole, a la stagione acerba.
Era sua vista si dolce superba,
Ch'i'lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro;
Come l'avaro che 'n cercar tesoro
Con diletto l'affanno disacerba.
'Nessun me tocchi.' al bel collo d'intorno
Scritto avea di diamanti e di topazi;
'Libera farmi al mio Cesare parve.'
Et era'l sol gia volto al mezzo giorno;
Gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi;
Quand'io caddi ne l'acqua, et ella sparve.

Petrarch's poem may be visionary and mystical, but like other narratives it is firmly anchored in time. It has a clear beginning, middle, and end: at the opening of the poem the speaker sees the deer, then he admires her, and then he loses her.

Shakespeare wears his rue with a difference:

Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate.
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patience back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gav'st, thy own worth then not
knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
(Sonnet 87)

The opening word, "Farewell," suggests that this sonnet is going to enact a parting in much the same way that Drayton's does; and the third quatrain does in a sense tell a story. Yet Shakespeare's poem is not necessarily a rendition of a particular event that takes place at a particular moment: one cannot tell whether the parting is in the process of happening or has already occurred. For Shakespeare's primary concern is not to imitate an incident in which a lover says farewell but rather to evoke the lover's reflections on the process of parting. And Shakespeare's sonnet differs from Drayton's in another and no less significant way: while most of the assertions in Drayton's sonnet are addressed to the beloved, most of those in Shakespeare's are not. In the couplet, for example, Shakespeare's speaker seems to be brooding on his experiences rather than either enacting them or announcing their significance to the person he has loved.

The characteristics of that couplet and of the sonnet in which it figures recur throughout Shakespeare's sonnet sequence. The narrative, dramatic, and lyrical are not, of course, necessarily exclusive of each other, either in general or in Shakespeare's sonnets in particular. In his sequence as a whole, and not infrequently within a single sonnet, we do encounter instances of all three modes. Sonnets 153 and 154, for example, are certainly narrative according to virtually any definition of that term; the entire sequence is indubitably dramatic in the sense that it vividly bodies forth the speaker himself, developing and drawing attention to the nuances of his character. Nevertheless, it is not the presence of certain narrative and dramatic elements but rather the absence of others that is most striking when we read Shakespeare's sequence and most telling when we juxtapose it with the sonnets composed by many other Renaissance poets.

II
One of the clearest and most important indications that the majority of the Sonnets are in certain senses neither narrative nor dramatic is that they do not include a temporal sequence of events, as does, for example, Petrarch's "Una Candida cerva sopra l'erba." As we read Shakespeare's Sonnets, we witness tortuous shifts in the speaker's emotions and judgments, but very seldom do we encounter a chronological progression of occurrences. Instead, his monologues take place in the kind of eternal present that is usually a mark of lyric poetry. Characteristically, they generalize about an event that recurs frequently rather than focusing on one instance of it: "When I consider everything that grows" (Sonnet 15, line 1); "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past" (Sonnet 30, lines 1-2). In another sense, too, the sonnet sequence that so vividly evokes the horrors of time is not itself rooted in time: Shakespeare's poems seldom refer to datable real incidents or even to incidents that occur at a specific, though symbolic, moment. Petrarch alludes to the date of his meeting with the real woman who was transformed into Laura and the date of her death, and his sequence may also have complex symbolic relationships to the calendar. Spenser's sonnets are apparently keyed to the seasons. One of Daniel's refers to a trip to Italy. But in Shakespeare we find very few such references. To be sure, in one poem the speaker does suggest that he met his beloved three years before; but nowhere else does he allude to time in so specific a way. And Shakespeare is no more specific about place. We know that Sidney's Stella takes a ride on the Thames, while Shakespeare's Sonnets never mention a particular locale.

The omission of such allusions to place and time is all the more suggestive in light of Shakespeare's repeated—one is almost tempted to say frenetic—puns on "will." Like Sidney's play on "rich" or his adoption of the pseudonym "Astrophil," these puns are evidently intended to remind us that the poems in question are closely linked to autobiographical experience. One would presume that the same attitudes that lead a poet to pun on, and hence draw attention to, his own name might well encourage him to refer to specific dates and places. But this Shakespeare chooses not to do.

The lack of temporal perspective in most of the Sonnets reflects the absence of anecdotal sonnets. With only a handful of exceptions, Shakespeare's sequence omits not only the mythological stories that so frequently grace the sequences of other sonnet writers but also non-mythological allegories like Spenser's Amoretti LXXV ("One day I wrote her name vpon the strand"). Moreover, Shakespeare seldom chooses to narrate an incident that happens to the lovers, as, say, Sidney does in Astrophi and Stella 41 ("Having this day my horse, my hand, my launce"). It is as uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to begin a sonnet with "One day" as it is characteristic of Spenser to do so.

A sonnet that does not narrate an anecdote may, of course, be anchored in a specific event or situation nonetheless: it can be the outgrowth of an occurrence which, though not recounted systematically, is referred to frequently and specifically in the course of the poem. Many readers have assumed that the vast majority of Shakespeare's Sonnets are "situational" in this sense. But in point of fact comparatively few of them are. In some of Shakespeare's monologues the reflections are inspired not by a particular situation but by a general problem; thus in Sonnet 94 the speaker evokes a certain kind of personality, and Sonnet 129 is an anguished consideration of the nature of lust. Because poems like these rely so heavily on generalizations, critics regularly describe them as interesting exceptions to Shakespeare's approach elsewhere in the sequence. They are, however, merely extreme instances of their author's tendency to detach the speaker's emotions and speculations from an immediate situation.

Some poems in the sequence imply that a specific incident may lie behind the speaker's reactions but omit any discussion of details. We learn little about the "forsaking" to which Sonnet 89 alludes, for example, or the reasons for the parting described in the absence sonnets. As we read Sonnet 35 we do not know what the "sensual fault" to which it refers may be, or even whether "fault" indicates a particular lapse or a general character trait. If we try to enumerate the situations on which Shakespeare's Sonnets are based, we find that our list is short and the events on it shadowy. The poet encourages the Friend to marry; there is a period of separation, and there are one or more quarrels; the Friend is praised by another poet; the Friend betrays the speaker with the Dark Lady. By contrast, in Astrophil and Stella, a sequence about two-thirds the length of Shakespeare's, the situations include a stolen kiss, Stella's illness, her ride on the Thames, an absence, a quarrel, Astrophil's triumph in a tournament, and many more.

III
If most of Shakespeare's Sonnets do not tell stories, neither do they enact dramas in the way that, say, Drayton's Idea 61 does ("Since ther's no helpe, Come let us kisse and part"). And yet the reader becomes involved in these poems. One Shakespearean has attempted to explain why. "By setting up a system of tensions between forces presented as persons, Shakespeare's sonnets engage the reader's interest in a manner akin to the dramatic" [G. K. Hunter, "The Dramatic Techniques of Shakespeare's Sonnets" (1953)]. It is true that some of the Sonnets, notably the poems addressed to Time, do operate this way. But most do not: Shakespeare's Sonnets embody the tension of conflicting forces, but those forces are more often internalized within the speaker than dramatized as characters.

Though the Friend and the Dark Lady dominate the speaker's thoughts, in some important respects they do not function as active participants -within the Sonnets. The problems engendered by their behavior are frighteningly immediate, but the characters themselves are not. Except for the fact that the young man is attractive and the lady is dark, we do not know what they look like. Unlike the main characters in most sonnet sequences, they are never assigned names, even fictional ones, even in those poems that refer to them in the third rather than the second person. The epithets by which they are addressed serve, if anything, to distance us further from them. When, for example, Shakespeare opens Sonnet 56 on the command, "Sweet love, renew your force," he establishes an unresolved ambiguity about whether the poem concerns his beloved or the abstract quality of love, or both. "When he directs an apostrophe to "Lascivious grace" (Sonnet 40, line 13), he initially seems as much to be brooding on the abstraction that the epithet expresses as to be talking to a person who has been reduced (or who has willingly reduced himself) to the state expressed by that oxymoron. Similarly, only once (Sonnet 34, line 13) in 154 sonnets does Shakespeare allude to the movements or gestures of the beloved in a way that suggests that he is physically present and actually listening to the speaker. Contrast Astrophil and Stella 31, which so unequivocably sets up the fiction that Astrophil is in the presence of the moon, or Astrophil and Stella 47, whose "Soft, but here she comes" (line 13) so effectively signals Stella's arrival.

It is a truth as significant as it is neglected that the Friend and the Dark Lady are not quoted directly within the poems. Despite all his experience in writing plays, Shakespeare chooses not to create the kind of dialogue on which such poems as Astrophil and Stella 54 ("Because I breathe not love to everie one") or Idea 24 ("I heare some say, this Man is not in love") or even Amoretti LXXV ("One day I wrote her name vpon the strand") are based. On those rare occasions when the words of the beloved are recorded, they are presented in a form that distances us from the statements and their speakers: the poet either uses indirect discourse to report what the beloved has said ("When my love swears that she is made of truth" [Sonnet 138, line 1]) or predicts what he or she is likely to say rather than what has actually been said ("O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought: / Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age" [Sonnet 32, lines 9-10]).

If the lovers remain shadowy in the sonnets addressed to them, so too do the other characters who occasionally appear. We know surprisingly little about the Rival Poet himself, though we learn much about his impact on the speaker's emotions. When Shakespeare chooses to refer to society's reactions to his love, he characterizes it vaguely as "all tongues" (Sonnet 69, line 3) rather than evoking specific figures like the nymphs who berate Astrophil. Time is personified, of course, but it generally functions more as a threat looming over the speaker than as an active character. Even in Sonnet 19, the poet only anticipates the effects of "Devouring time" on his beloved, whereas Spenser is engaged in fighting with the waves (and Donne actually invites his "Busie old foole" into his bedroom). It is revealing, moreover, that the kinds of characters who populate other sequences and create miniature dramas by arguing with the speaker are totally absent from Shakespeare's poems. The ladies who are Laura's companions, the cynical friend who berates Drayton, the court nymphs who criticize Astrophil—no figures like these appear in Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Nor is Shakespeare prone to replace them with internalized characters. Though the morality tradition influences his sequence in other ways, only rarely does he depict the conflicts within his speaker as allegorical personages engaged in a confrontation. Many of his sonnets concern a debate between opposing forces such as reason and passion; but very few evoke that debate through allegorical characters like those that figure so prominently in Astrophil and Stella.

Most of the sonnets are not narrative, then, in the sense that the speaker is not recounting a story to the reader or to any other implied audience. And they are not dramatic in the sense that we are not witnessing a confrontation that occurs at a specific place and time between a speaker and a particular listener, or even between two clearly distinguished personages within the speaker. Instead, it is the lyric mode that predominates. Some of the poems resemble an internalized meditation, others a letter, others a monologue that the beloved hears but apparently does not respond to.

The soliloquy immediately presents itself as a parallel to and an inspiration for Shakespeare's unusual approach to the sonnet, and in certain respects the comparison is an illuminating one. The speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnets often seems to be thinking aloud, to be at once speaking audibly and meditating. But, as the passages that I have cited suggest, in one crucial way the Sonnets differ from the soliloquies that are so frequently embedded in their author's plays: the soliloquy normally takes place at a unique moment and is often provoked by a clearly defined event that has preceded it, whereas most of the Sonnets are signally lacking in those types of particularization.

IV
Most readers have found the differences between Shakespeare's sonnets and those of his contemporaries puzzling. Several of the most idiosyncratic qualities of Shakespeare's Sonnets stem from the poet's decision to shape so many of them as lyrics in the sense of subjective reflections. Thus his couplets, which fail to provide the reassuring summaries we have been told to expect at the end of a "Shakespearean sonnet," can best be understood if we remember the mode in which Shakespeare is generally writing. As long as we think of the Sonnets as dramas or stories, we will be conditioned to expect their couplets (like those of many other sonneteers) to be reasoned statements of objective truths: we will expect them to function rather like the chorus's commentary in a play or the narrator's judgments in a novel. When, however, we recognize that so many of the Sonnets are internalized monologues, we are in a position to observe that one purpose of Shakespeare's couplets is to reflect the chaos in the speaker's mind, a purpose to which a couplet that merely summarized the preceding twelve lines would prove inadequate.

Some of Shakespeare's couplets resolve difficult problems too neatly, an impression intensified by the tidiness and balance inherent in the couplet form. Thus, for instance, "Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye, / Ev'n that your pity is enough to cure me" (Sonnet 111, ll. 13-14) does not persuade the reader that the diseases of the heart chronicled in the previous twelve lines can be cured as readily as the speaker hopes. The jingly rhyme increases our sense that the speaker is whistling in the dark, our sense that the couplet is merely another vain attempt to solve his dilemmas.

Other couplets offer responses that seem inappropriate reactions to what has come before. Once again we are more aware of the stresses that make the speaker seek reassurance than of the reassurance that the couplet, if only by virtue of its innately epigrammatic tone, claims to provide. The quatrains of Sonnet 33, for example, draw attention to the wrongs that the poet has suffered at the hands of his beloved:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heav'nly alchemy,
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Ev'n so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
(ll. 1-12)

Here Shakespeare develops the metaphor of the sun in a way that emphasizes its guilt and hence by implication that of the Friend. Thus "Flatter" (line 2) and "Gilding" (line 4) have connotations that are at the very least ambiguous: flattery can be sycophantic, and gilding can be deceptive. The sort of couplet that these quatrains lead us to expect is something like "I thought our love an everlasting day / And yet my trust thou didst, my love, betray." If we try to read the poem through with this couplet tacked on the end, we find that the uncanonical lines fit the spirit of the poem. If, on the other hand, we read the sonnet through with the couplet that Shakespeare did in fact write—"Yet him for this my love no wit disdaineth; / Suns of the world may stain when heav'n's sun staineth" (ll. 13-14)—we become uneasy. Shakespeare's speaker is trying to fool himself; he takes one conceivable moral from the metaphor (the Friend's betrayal is justified by that of the sun) and neglects the more central one that the reader has been observing (the Friend, like the sun, has been culpably deceptive).

Similarly, the many couplets that offer an unexpectedly pessimistic interpretation of the issues in the poem suggest the impingement of new facts—especially new apprehensions and doubts—on the speaker's troubled consciousness. Sonnet 92, for instance, ends "But what's so blessed-fair that fears no blot? / Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not" (ll. 13-14). Just as an unexpected fear enters the speaker's mind and disturbs the peace he has been attempting to achieve, so an unexpected idea enters the couplet and disturbs its potential function as a neat summary of the preceding quatrains.

All of these couplets are a response to the fundamental paradox that confronted Shakespeare as he wrote the Sonnets. The sonnet is, as so many of its readers have remarked, one of the most orderly of literary forms; it is tightly structured and compact. Its couplet is the most orderly and ordering of its elements. No matter what the content of the couplet, in contrast to the syntactical and metrical complexities of the preceding quatrains it will often sound like an easily achieved truism. Frequently, too, the convictions expressed in the couplet will be so epigrammatic that they mirror and intensify the impression of assurance that the very form conveys.

The experiences evoked by Shakespeare's Sonnets are, however, unusually tumultuous even in a genre that specializes in psychological torment. As we have seen, in a number of ways his sonnets focus our attention on the speaker's chaotic reactions. We would no more expect a man who is wrestling with the kinds of unresolved contradictions plaguing Shakespeare's speaker to express them in the carefully structured and epigrammatically decisive lines of a couplet than the Elizabethans would have expected a madman in a play to speak in verse. Like the poet in Donne's "The Triple Fool," we assume that grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce.

Rather than ignoring or struggling to overcome these characteristics of his form, Shakespeare exploits them. The reader comes to view the sentiments in many of the couplets not as objective summaries of the problems that the quatrains have been exploring, but rather as yet another symptom of the anguish and confusion that those problems have caused. As we have seen, those couplets that abruptly reverse the ideas in the quatrains and thus disturb the way the sonnet form generally functions reflect the process by which troubling new thoughts disturb the speaker's emotions. Such couplets are the formal equivalent of the turmoil in the lover's heart. Similarly, those couplets that seem deliberately to oversimplify experience effectively mirror the speaker's vain attempts to resolve the conflicts in his own mind: he often appears to turn to the couplet with relief, to find in its easy absolutes of hope or despair (and the straightforward syntax in which these emotions are expressed) a welcome alternative to the torturing ambivalences with which he has been wrestling (and the tortuous syntax in which he has expressed them).

Though Shakespeare's couplets often resemble soliloquies in their evocations of a mind brooding on experience, those that oversimplify complex realities differ from most Elizabethan soliloquies in the unreliability of their reflections: the speaker is lying to himself and hence to us. On first reading we may be confused or even deceived into taking the lines at face value, much as the figure delivering them is himself confused or deceived. That speaker is in a sense compounding his lies by the very act of presenting them through the vehicle of an epigrammatic couplet. For in the sonnets in question that prosodic form itself functions deceptively: we have come to expect from it, not the unreliable and subjective half-truths or untruths that we may in fact encounter, but unexceptional verities. We may therefore be seduced by the very nature of the couplet form into momentarily believing the speaker's assertions.

Shakespeare's couplets explore and often exemplify an issue with which the whole sequence is very concerned: our predilection for deceiving ourselves and others. The Dark Lady uses her artfulness to lie verbally to her lover ("When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies" [Sonnet 138, ll. 1-2]), while the Friend's physical appearance is itself a kind of visual lie. The behavior of the Friend and the Dark Lady is contagious in this as in so many other regards, for the speaker himself comes to use art (in many senses of that term) to twist or destroy the truth. Some of the speaker's lies are offered in the service of his lovers, for whom he undertakes the process he describes in Sonnet 35: "Myself corrupting salving thy amiss, / Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are" (ll. 7-8). But the most disturbing of the deceptions in the sequence are the speaker's self-deceptions. By shaping so many of the poems as internalized lyrics, Shakespeare provides a forum for his speaker's repeated attempts to lie to himself. Sometimes a whole poem represents his effort to impose a more comforting but fallacious interpretation on a reality that, as the reader uneasily recognizes, demands a different response. At other times the couplet undercuts the neat but false interpretation in the quatrains. Most often, however, it is the couplet itself that contains the lie. The main reason that several of the most complex sonnets in our language end with couplets that are simple or even simplistic is that the pat answers in those lines demonstrate the habits of self-deception that repeatedly lead the speaker, like his companions, to distort his perceptions, his morals, and his language. In sonnets like these, the couplet form itself becomes a symbol of our cursed rage for order, our tendency to simplify and sanitize our experience, even at the expense of truth.

V
Their emphasis on the lyrical rather than the narrative or dramatic also helps to explain another characteristic of Shakespeare's Sonnets: how immediately and how intensely they evoke the speaker's feelings. The reader need channel little or none of his attention to an exposition of a situation or an exploration of the beloved's psyche: he focuses instead on the poet-lover himself. For example, the impact of Sonnet 12, at first glance a comparatively impersonal poem, in fact stems not merely from its vivid depiction of time's ravages but also from its moving evocation of its speaker's sensibility:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o'er with white,
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and brisdy beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defense
Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence.

In one sense this sonnet is a carefully documented argument. The quatrains, which present a series of facts marshaled to support the thesis in the sestet, function as part of a syllogism (all sweets and beauties die; you yourself are a sweet and beauty; therefore you will die). But in presenting this case the poem repeatedly directs our attention to the mind brooding on it: like Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," this lyric is as much concerned with the speaker's thoughts about death as with ways of combatting that inevitable but unendurable fact. The first five lines contain no fewer than four verbs referring to the speaker's processes of cognition ("do count" … "see" … "behold" … "see"), three of which are preceded by the personal pronoun "I." The anaphora in lines one and three ("When I") further heightens the emphasis on the speaker's sensibility. "Then of thy beauty do I question make" (l. 9), which follows these two quatrains, contains in microcosm the characteristics that we have been noting, for one may gloss those words in two ways: (1) I ask you a question ("thy beauty" functioning as synecdoche in this interpretation) or (2) in my own mind I raise a question about your beauty. Even while communicating with the beloved, then, the speaker also seems to be communing with himself. As he considers the beloved's behavior, therefore, the reader is also led to concentrate on how that behavior affects the speaker.

While a thorough affective study of the Sonnets would demand a separate essay, one important truth about the reader's responses is clear: the primary effect of the lyrical mode of these poems is to intensify our identification with the speaker. And one reason our identification becomes so deep is that these sonnets are far more universal than those by any other English poet (with perhaps the interesting exception of Wyatt). As we have observed, they are not linked to particular dates or seasons or places. More important, because the events and situations to which Shakespeare alludes are presented only sketchily, we can readily relate the Sonnets to our own lives; we are not conscious of local details that do not conform to our own experiences.

Above all, we identify closely with the speaker because the emotions and reactions we experience when reading the poems are very similar to the emotions and reactions the poems are about. Like the speaker, we are confused by ambiguities in language and in the situations language is exploring. 'When we read Spenser's Amoretti VIII ("More then most faire, full of the liuing fire") we have few doubts about the judgments being passed on the lady; when we read Sonnet 94, however, we have, and I suspect are meant to have, few certainties. We are forced to keep thinking about the issues being raised, to keep re-examining the charged and ambiguous words of the poem.

Like Shakespeare's speaker, his readers try to find oases of order and stability in the tumultuous world of the Sonnets. The speaker reaches out for the overly simple answers expressed in his couplets in a way that is not unlike the way we reach out for a reordering of the Sonnets that would lessen their complexities and explain their ambiguities. If it is true that the Sonnets are the record of meditations, it is equally true that they encourage meditation in their reader far more than most poetry does. Since we are not offered neat answers, we, like the speaker, keep brooding on the questions that have been raised.

VI
The nature of Shakespeare's Sonnets reflects the nature of the experience they evoke. Most of them are lyric rather than narrative or dramatic because they concern a world in which narrative and dramatic modes would be inappropriate. One reason so few of these poems reflect a chronological sequence of events is that their speaker is trapped in brooding rather than acting or even being acted on. His mind is tormented with calamities that the future may bring (his beloved will betray him, Time will destroy even this most precious of mortals) or that the present, unbeknownst to him, may already hold (his two friends may have already been unfaithful to him, the beloved may be morally stained). And these calamities are rendered more painful by the fact that the speaker is powerless, whether to prevent those disasters that the future may hold or to be certain that those the present may contain have not in fact come to pass:

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.
(Sonnet 24, ll. 13-14)

And even thence thou wilt be stol'n, I fear.
(Sonnet 48, l. 13)

In dramas, including the miniature version of drama that a sonnet can embody, characters often commit definite actions; in narratives, even fourteen-line narratives, usually definite events occur. But, as the passages above suggest, the dominant mood of Shakespeare's Sonnets is fearful anticipation and troubling suspicion, not clear-cut events. Narrative and dramatic modes would not have been as suited to evoking such a milieu.

Just as Shakespeare's decision to omit certain narrative and dramatic elements from his Sonnets aptly expresses his speaker's painful inaction, so it expresses the uncertainties suffered by that speaker and by the reader who is so intimately involved with him. If presented within the intense and concentrated form of the sonnet, both the narrative and the dramatic modes tend to suggest moral and epistemological certainties. When sonnet writers use mythological allegories, for example, they generally do so in order to make some simple but significant point about love; Cupid's tricks may remind us that love is deceptive, and Venus' fickleness that women are untrustworthy. Similarly, in narrating an event involving a lover and his mistress, sonneteers usually establish some important facts about the participants, such as the lady's unremitting and unremorseful chastity. And when sonnets imitate a dialogue between opponents, the two figures generally argue neatly antithetical positions. A victory for one position or the other, or possibly a synthesis of both, is achieved by the end of the sonnet. Even if the poet-lover himself remains trapped in his moral dilemma, a sequence relying extensively on narrative and dramatic modes can establish important verities. Thus Astrophil and Stella as a whole documents truths about Neoplatonism that Astrophil can only imperfectly grasp.

In so frequently avoiding the narrative and dramatic in his Sonnets, Shakespeare declines to provide the kinds of ethical truths and moral certainties that those modes can generate. He is achieving in formal terms the types of moral confusion he is exploring thematically. Just as the experience of the reader mirrors that of the speaker in these poems, so form mirrors content to an extent unusual in even the greatest art.

Source: Heather Dubrow, "Shakespeare's Undramatic Monologues: Toward a Reading of the Sonnets," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 55-68.

Michael Cameron Andrews
[Andrews maintains that many of the sonnets invoking the young man are dramatic in the sense that they are profoundly dynamic depictions of a mind at war with itself. Focusing on Sonnets 33-35, 40-42, and 87-96, Andrew traces the speaker's continuing struggle to avoid confronting the reality that he has been corrupted by his relationship with the young man. In the sonnets that directly address the youth as well as in those that function as interior monologues, Andrews sees a sharp contrast between the sentiment on the surface and the one that runs beneath it. In the critic's judgment, the moments when the speaker is totally honest with himself about his friend's deceitfulness are so painful that they must be quickly covered up and denied through elaborate strategies of exoneration, insincerity, and self-deception.]

Early in Sincerity and Authenticity [1971], Lionel Trilling comments on the "implicit pathos" of Polonius' final adjuration to Laertes [in Hamlet]: "Who would not wish to be true to his own self? True, which is to say loyal, never wavering in constancy. True, which is to say honest: there are to be no subterfuges in dealing with him." But as Trilling sadly observes, "We understand with Maithew Arnold how hard it is to discern one's own self in order to reach it and be true to it."

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel—below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel—there flows
"With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

In the Sonnets, as in our lives, words, thoughts, and feelings are often at variance. In the sonnets to the young man, the speaker passes from what may be called sincere delusion to efforts to rationalize or palliate what the eye cannot help perceiving. In the later poems in this group, particularly those I shall consider, we often encounter lines conspicuously deficient in poetic conviction. Are we to say that Shakespeare, despite himself, could do no better? It seems to me, as to Philip Edwards [in Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (1968)], that Shakespeare's "bad" poetry in the Sonnets is intentional. And one of its uses is the dramatic one of calling attention to instances in which the speaker is not expressing what he actually feels. I do not, of course, mean that the Sonnets are dramatic in most of the usual senses of that term; indeed, as Heather Dubrow has recently emphasized [in "Shakespeare's Undramatic Monologues"], they are genetically lyrical, not dramatic:

… we are not witnessing a confrontation that occurs at a specific place and time between a speaker and a particular listener, or even between two clearly distinguished personages within the speaker. Instead, it is the lyrical mode that predominates. Some of the poems resemble an internalized meditation, others a letter, others a monologue that the beloved hears but apparently does not respond to.

Shorn of particularity, highly subjective, these poems give us only the voice and point of view of the speaker. Nonetheless, many of the Sonnets are dramatic in a special sense—their intensely kinetic rendering of "the passions of a mind" [Stephen Booth, "Shakespeare in California" (1976)] in conflict with itself. Poems which, regarded purely as poetry, would be flawed sonnets, may be superb "dramatic" addresses or "meditations," combining unconscious or deliberate subterfuge with moments when the "central stream" of feeling pulses in the verse. In other sonnets, seeing and saying are for the most part neither disjunctive nor self-deceiving; in them the almost intolerable is confronted, not merely glimpsed. Yet there is perhaps no sonnet in which the speaker, having passed from ignorance to knowledge, can look at the friend without at some point flinching from the truth.

But who is this speaker? To use terms like sincerity and subterfuge implies the existence of someone to whom they can apply. In Professor [Kenneth] Muir's view, "the Sonnets, although not directly autobiographical, do at least reflect the poet's experience" ["The Order of Shakespeare's Sonnets" (1977)]. We have, I believe, no grounds for discounting the possibility of a strong autobiographical element—though Shakespeare, on the evidence of his plays, experienced much that he had not lived. But "reflect" is surely the appropriate word. A poet does not write "autobiographical sonnets," however much they may reflect his life. The poetic presentation of the self is in some measure the freeing of the self, the translation of life to art. One becomes a character in a poem. And Shakespeare, dramatist as well as poet, is native and indued to this kind of imaginative activity. Whatever the autobiographical basis of the Sonnets (and the question may be as irrelevant as it has been unanswerable), the Shakespeare of the Sonnets is no longer Shakespeare, but a dramatic character at one remove from his creator. The sincerity of this character, the speaker, may be gauged by what he says, and how. He is the imagined presence behind the actual words.

There is no need to discuss the ideal value with which the speaker invests the young man. The friend "becomes … a symbol of living perfection" [Douglas Bush, "Introduction" to the Sonnets in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (1969)]; "the friendship takes on a symbolic value … becoming the emblem of hope in a changing and discouraging world of unrealized desires" [Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1952)]. No one could doubt the sincerity of most of the sonnets which appear to celebrate him. Yet the young man proves, of course, something less than the embodiment of Truth and Beauty (Sonnet 14); and Beauty, where Truth is not, has in the Sonnets a special horror.

I
Often the movement from insincerity to honest anguish is dramatic, either within a sonnet or within a linked group. In Sonnets 33-35, for example, there is at first an effort at exculpation:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon, permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly wrack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with his disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow,
But, out alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

But even here the weight of felt experience subverts what is said—and perhaps thought—to be true. The sonnet expresses disillusionment and loss. To say that the friend "was but one hour mine" is, like Hamlet's telescopings of time, to use the natural language of one for whom time is the medium of betrayal. The idealized friend has proved a son of the world—as the pun bleakly intimates, more common than he seems. As he moves among the base companions who now surround him, there is no reason to expect him to "imitate the sun … By Breaking through the foul and ugly [clouds]" (1 Henry IV, I. ii. 185, 190). For the sun functions here as a symbol, not merely of vicissitude, but of the contamination of the beautiful. Today's cloud-choked sun may be tomorrow's glorious morning; but that is rarely true of the moral life of sons of the world. And if the friend should return in "all-triumphant splendor," as if nothing had happened, the illusion of love's security would not. We are left with a sense of stain.

Sonnet 34 begins as if the speaker were impatient with the insincerity of pretending to accept the friend's conduct. He abandons the effort, implicit in the use of "he," to stand somewhat apart from the emotions expressed. Address becomes direct, intimate:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding tiding thy brav'ry in their rotten smoke?
Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet have I still the loss:
Th' offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offense's cross.
Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

The colloquial vigor and plain-speaking stance, like the shift from "he" to "thou," make this seem an eruption of the emotions buried in the previous sonnet. The image of the sun is divested of its glory—the promise of a beauteous day hardly corresponds to the "sovereign eye" and "heavenly alchemy"—and is eclipsed by other figures after line six. The tone, moreover, is directly reproachful: Why did you make me trust you, then do this to me? To lack one's customary defenses is to suffer the more. For the emphasis here is on the speaker's sense of being wounded rather than on the sullying of an ideal. Though separation is less complete than in Sonnet 33 (sunny glances do pierce the clouds), the speaker has suffered a storm of grief. Far from working with "heavenly alchemy," the friend's commiseration dries his tears but leaves "disgrace," "grief," a painful sense of "loss."

After these tersely aphoristic lines, the couplet, which reverts to the language of conventional romantic hyperbole, must come as a shock. It is as if the speaker, fearing he has gone too far, attempts to give the friend's tears a value beyond what they actually possess. But the anguish expressed in the previous lines has too intense a reality to be asserted away by a couplet—certainly not by one which must impress us as more mechanical than felt. And if the speaker believes what he says, he is the more deceived; quite obviously, it is not what he feels.

In Sonnet 35, also in the form of direct address, the same emotional territory is re-surveyed, and a different conclusion reached. Reversing Sonnet 34, the speaker begins as if in exculpation; but as in Sonnet 33, deep misgivings lurk beneath seeming acceptance:

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense
(Thy adverse party is thy advocate)
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence;
Such civil war is in my love and hate
That I an accessary needs must be
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me,

What could sound more simple than the opening line? It is as if enough tears had fallen to wash away (or seem to wash away) the sins of the past. But we soon discover that this is not the reason tears are to be avoided. The friend is not to grieve because imperfection is an inescapable consequence of the natural condition. So stated, the idea is logically unexceptionable, if magnanimous. But in fact the first five-and-a-half lines give us something incomparably more complex. There could scarcely be a more untroubled way of accepting the friend's human imperfection than the proverbial "roses have thorns" analogy. It is extremely flattering to the friend; but it is also somewhat incongruous. The thorns of a rose serve as protection. They do not make the flower less beautiful, or less worthy to be admired; though an oblique reminder of the Fall, they are not a symbol of corruption. The second image, "and silver fountains mud," is—and sounds—more unpleasant: beneath the beautiful is found something common and potentially sullying. In the next two lines the note of disgust becomes more pronounced. The moon and sun are stained—a return to the imagery of Sonnet 33—"And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud." How different from the cheerful "nobody's perfect" "Roses have thorns" of line two. As a defense for misconduct, it clearly will not serve.

And such, indeed, the speaker realizes, feeling his way even as he attempts to formulate adequate excuses. Suddenly, in disgust, he turns on himself for "Authorizing thy trespass with compare." As Patrick Cruttwell observes [in The Shakespearean Moment (I960)], there is a notable shift in style: in place of the pointed sententiousness of the opening quatrain one suddenly encounters poetry that is "terse, subtle, complex to the point of obscurity … finding its imagery not in the 'poetical' of roses and fountains, but in the world of law courts and politics." In Professor Cruttwell's view, "this abandonment of the poetical diction corresponds to the complex fullness or what has to be said." I would modify Cruttwell's statement by saying that the first quatrain has its own subtlety and complexity: its style is entirely successful for a self-deceived effort to defend the indefensible. Without the contrast between surface and depth it could not be what it is. The rest of the sonnet, which voices feelings previously no more than intimated, is equally well suited to expressing corrosive self-awareness. "[C]ivil war is in my love and hate," and the speaker acknowledges that he has perverted reason on behalf of "that sweet thief which sourly robs from me." We have reached, to alter Johnson's phrase, the instability of truth. Here is no shuffling.

II
In Sonnets 40-42, all in the form, of direct address, there is a good deal of shuffling. Sonnet 40 begins with a desperate attempt to justify the friend's infidelity; the nature of his theft, implicit in Sonnet 35, is now made explicit:

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

The first line, as abject as it is dramatic, has the authority of authentic anguish. After such an outcry we do not need to be told why the friend can "Take all my loves." But between it and the couplet we encounter desperate sophistries which obviously do not convince the speaker. The movement of lines 2-7, slowed by frequent repetition and feminine rhyme, testifies to the violence of the emotions the speaker strives to transmute to studied reasonableness. He cannot blame his friend for using "my love" as his own "if [it is done] for my love." But "if," of course, equivocates; and in what follows the speaker gives up the line of defense he has chosen. "But yet be blamed if … " (l. 7) initiates the imputation of guilt, but does so while attempting to preserve an idealized sense of the friend: he is to be blamed if, in being false to the speaker, he is also being false to himself. Paradoxically, what the speaker hopes for is insincerity in sin: for if the friend is really what his actions imply, what hope remains? It is this latter possibility, most evident in the couplet, which dominates the rest of the sonnet. The "gentle thief" is forgiven and not forgiven; the speaker will "bear love's wrong" because he must. In the couplet, the promise of line one is fulfilled in language utterly naked of defense:

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

The oxymoron quivers with peculiar horror. But along with this appalling insight into the friend's nature is an acknowledgment, stripped of all self-respect, that any suffering is preferable to losing him. In the immense sadness of the final phrase the worst is glimpsed.

Sonnets 41 and 42 draw back from this abyss, and continue the futile efforts at self-deception. Sonnet 41, the more intense and dramatic, is—like Sonnets 35 and 40—a self-correcting monologue:

Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Gentle thou arc, and therefore to be won;
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman woos what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?
Ay me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth:
Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.

Of the tone of the opening we may say, in [Randall] Jarrell's phrase, that the "dishonesty is so transparent / It has about it a kind of honesty" [The Complete Poem (1969)]. The friend's betrayal is not susceptible to being so characterized: "pretty wrongs," "liberty," and "sometime absent" leave no doubt as to the speaker's real feelings. The friend's conduct is appropriate for one of his age and beauty, because (and here the tone turns ominous) "still temptation follows where thou art." And what man can resist temptation? As the structure of lines five and six implies, this one yields before he is even assailed ("gentle" in this context may remind us of the chamber-visitors in Wyatt's "They flee from me"). Who can say no when a woman woos—and to say "woman's son" makes refusal sound like ingratitude to the sex. Then, abruptly, the speaker expresses what he thinks and feels: among the "pretty wrongs" is infidelity with the speaker's own mistress. What was termed liberty is really "riot." And the beauty of the friend, tempting and provoking temptation, has effected a double breach of truth. By beauty the speaker is undone.

Sonnet 42 begins in comparable sincerity, but does not maintain it. Instead of the transparent dishonesty of the first lines of Sonnet 41, we encounter a totally unpersuasive exercise—a kind of pseudo-tour de force in sophistic argument:

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her because thou know'st I love her,
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suff'ring my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And, losing her, my friend hath found that loss:
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross.
But here's the joy! my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

All the abusing and approving, then, is for his sake. But even the joyless joy of this "sweet flattery" is preferable to confronting the truth. The couplet, however, surprises by what it does not say. The friend, whose loss touches the speaker more nearly, is not the subject of the final line. There is no pretense that the speaker and his mistress are one, and that the friend's infidelity may thus be regarded as testifying to the love it seems to violate.

III
I come now to the last of the three groups I wish to consider, the "estrangement sonnets" (Sonnets 87-96). Here, as we might expect, the interplay of sincerity and subterfuge may be observed in its most intense and fascinating forms.

Sonnets 87-92 may be dealt with briefly, as an induction to Sonnets 93-96. In Sonnet 87, for twelve lines a "farewell" to one "too dear for my possessing," the speaker seeks to camouflage his real feelings with legal imagery and a coolly ironic tone. In the couplet, however,

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

we hear a different voice. The image, which attests to the enormous value the friend has had, also intimates that he never really gave himself. What the speaker possessed, he now realizes, never existed except in his own mind.

If Sonnet 87 is, but for the couplet, more self-protective than sincere, Sonnets 88 and 89 embody a different kind of falseness. The speaker in Sonnet 87 uses irony as a defense; its astringency attests to his self-awareness. There is no possibility of deception here: we realize at once that the speaker is assuming one of the most familiar of "deliberate disguises." But in Sonnets 88 and 89 we encounter something more subtle. Sounding the very base-string of abnegation, the speaker presents himself as love's martyr; under the guise of selflessness, he attempts emotional blackmail. The insidious attractiveness of this tactic has already been apparent, particularly in Sonnet 71:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe. …

In Sonnet 88, the speaker is less sentimental and more aggressive. The first quatrain sets the tone:

When thou shalt be disposed to set me light
And place my merit in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side against myself I'll fight
And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.

The speaker, in short, makes the most of his role: he looks like the innocent flower, but is the serpent under it. The sudden uncoiling of the self, so notable here, is repeated in the couplet:

Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
That for thy right myself will bear all wrong.

Sonnet 89, which is utterly abject throughout, serves as a foil for Sonnet 90. Its last line—"For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate"—is a fair indication of the speaker's lack of conviction.

In Sonnet 90 we are back in the real world of felt emotion:

Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
……
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.

The speaker says nothing fraudulently self-effacing; he speaks of the pain of loss, not of justifying the friend's conduct. In the image of Sonnet 34, he ventures forth without his cloak.

Sonnet 91 ends in a confession of vulnerability: the speaker is "Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take / All this away and me most wretched make." But in Sonnet 92 he expends much ingenuity on dispensing with this formidable truth. According to the argument, the friend is his "For term of life" because his own life will immediately cease if friendship is withdrawn. This idea is developed in such pallid language that one is never in danger of believing the speaker means what he says. "O, what a happy title do I find, / Happy to have thy love, happy to die!" sinks no roots into living experience. But in the couplet—and shockingly, after such a tissue of artifice—the speaker opens his mind with brutal directness:

But what's so blessed-fair that fears no blot?
Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.

It is widi this recognition that Sonnet 93 begins:

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceived husband; so love's face
May still seem love to me though altered new,
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place.
For there can live no hatred in thine eye;
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change;
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange:
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

The sonnet recapitulates much that has been both active and implicit in earlier sonnets. The friend's involvements, sometimes confronted in their intrinsic painfulness but often at least partially rationalized, are here likened to marital infidelity. A kind of sacrament has been profaned; but the speaker has his human claims too, his possessiveness. For, whether or not we are to imagine physical consummation, this is sexual jealousy, an emotion that, in Helen Gardner's phrase, "involves the whole personality at the

There is widespread agreement that in Shakespeare's sonnets both verbal and stylistic patterns are closely linked to themes and topics. Philip Martin, for instance, argued that these poems characteristically display an intimate connection between themes and linguistic modes. Calling attention to the pattern of repetition and extension that occurs throughout Sonnets 1-17, Martin suggested that in addition to iterating the idea that the youth must marry and have children, this group of verses opens the way for all the central themes of Sonnets 1-126. Jane Hedley emphasized the regular appearance of ambiguity, obsessive repetition, contradiction, and specious argument in Sonnets 1-126. She linked this verbal pattern to the Poet's frequent shifts between identification with and estrangement from the young man.

There is also a consensus that the words and images in Shakespeare's sonnets have multiple meanings and associations. Stephen Booth compiled an exhaustive commentary on the many connotations, nuances, and references in almost every line of the 154 sonnets. He also offered encouragement to modern readers, asserting that Shakespeare's original audience would have been as challenged or bemused by the poet's words and phrases as we are. Philip Martin recommended that readers proceed slowly through a sonnet in order not to miss the network of meanings embedded in each lyric; this is "a poetry for contemplation," he advised, that can only be fully understood by carefully considering each line and phrase. Hilton Landry offered a close reading of Sonnet 94, remarking that this verse has been interpreted in many different ways. The language is so allusive, he argued, that the poem must be read in the light of those that precede and follow it, in order to locate some context for its richness, complexity, and subtlety.

Among the many critics who have discussed images and metaphors in the sonnets—and their connections with thematic issues—are Winifred M. T. Nowottny, James Dawes, Arthur Mizener, Neal L. Goldstien, and Anne Ferry. Focusing on the first six sonnets, Nowottny demonstrated that within an individual sonnet various images may at first seem unrelated, but closer examination shows that they are connected to images in adjacent verses. Shakespeare used imagery not merely for its beauty, she argued, but as a means of integrating different parts of his sequence and as a way of intensifying the expression of the speaker's experience. In an examination of images that represent mutability and constancy, Dawes similarly noted the unifying effect of the imagery in Shakespeare's sonnets. Clusters of images that recur throughout the sequence function as substitutes for a traditional narrative or plot, weaving together different parts of the sequence, he contended. Mizener analyzed Shakespeare's compound metaphors, calling attention to the rich blend of connotations in many of them. No one meaning stands out from the others, he declared, or claims our exclusive attention; instead, we must see them all simultaneously. Goldstien directed readers' attention to various forms—and associations—of money imagery in the sonnets, noting that while Shakespeare often uses riches as a synonym for sexuality, he also frequently links treasure and beauty. Goldstien argued that these ambiguous or contradictory associations underscore the poet's profoundly ambivalent attitude toward love. Ferry assessed the significance of Shakespeare's immortalizing metaphors or conceits, particularly in Sonnet 15. Through metaphors that associate immortality with art and vegetation, she argued, the poet accentuates the principal idea of the poem: that he is at war with time. Ferry also pointed out that the use of the present tense in this sonnet represents another expression of the poet's attempt to control time.

Finally, both Winifred Nowottny and Douglas L. Peterson have offered analyses of the prevalent styles in the sonnets. Both of them commented on the frequent juxtaposition of an artificial or ornate style with a more direct or simpler one. Nowottony pointed out that the artificial style predominates when the speaker is most self-conscious; by contrast, when he expresses his feelings more sincerely, the style tends toward the commonplace. Peterson focused on the Dark Lady and Rival Poet sonnets, concluding that the verses in both these groups demonstrate that Shakespeare found the traditional plain style employed by some sonnet writers just as insincere and exaggerated as the overly eloquent mode used by others.

Winifred M. T. Nowottny
[Nowottny examines in detail the relation between diction, syntax, and imagery in the first six sonnets of Shakespeare's sequence. Particularly in Sonnets 5 and 6 she finds a carefully crafted organization of formal elements that enhances the development of the principal motifs in this group: beauty as a physical attribute and beauty as a treasure or inheritance that must be accounted for. Nowottny maintains that this harmony of ideas and style is sustained tbroughout the collection]

Despite Shakespeare's own description of his sonnets as being 'far from variation or quick change', they have proved to be remarkably resistant to generalizations. It is, however, the purpose of this article to suggest that there is one generalization that can be made about them; one, moreover, that affords a point of view from which it is always helpful to regard them: namely, that the Sonnets reveal Shakespeare's strong sense of form, and that it is with respect to their form that the peculiar features or striking effects of individual sonnets may best be understood. There are in the Sonnets so many experiments with form that it would be difficult to lay down at the outset a definition of 'form' at once comprehensive and precise, but the meaning of the term as it is used here will be sufficiently indicated by describing 'form' as 'that in virtue of which the parts are related one to another', or indeed as 'that which manifests itself in the relationships of the parts'. What is important for the purposes of this article is not the precise definition of form, but rather the indication of elements which commonly contribute to the manifestation of form. At the present day, the most illuminating criticism of individual sonnets is characterized by its concentration on imagery, and though it is true that imagery in the Sonnets is of great importance, it is not of exclusive or even of paramount importance. In this article I shall try to show that in Shakespeare's sonnets imagery is subordinated to the creation of the form of the whole and that imagery itself is at its most effective when it supports or is supported by the action of formal elements of a different kind.

Sonnets I-VI of the 1609 Quarto afford illustration. Shakespeare is often praised for his power of using imagery as an integrating element, yet in these sonnets it is evident that he has sacrificed the integration of the imagery of the individual sonnet to larger considerations of form; this sacrifice has features which show that it is in fact a sacrifice and not the ineptitude of a novice in sonnet-writing. In Sonnet I, the degree to which the images assist the organization of the poem is slight indeed. Almost every line has a separate image, and these images are heterogeneous (for instance: 'Beauty's rose'—'heir'—'contracted'—'flame'—'famine'—'foe'—'herald'—'buriest'—'glutton'). The relation between the images is, for the most part, a relation via the subject they illustrate; it is not by their relations to one another that the poem is organized. This, however, is not ineptitude. The separateness, the repetitiveness (in that there is no increasing penetration of the object, but only an ever-renewed allegorization) and the regularity (a single new image in each of the first twelve lines) give this sonnet the character of a litany. If Sonnet I is indeed in its rightful place, there would seem to be here a recognizable decorum of form in the poet's electing to open by a litany of images a sonnet-sequence which makes extended use of each. Further, the hypothesis that in Sonnet I there is a decorum of form which to the poet seemed more important than the congruity of images within the individual sonnet, is borne out by some features of Sonnets II-IV. The imagery of Sonnet II falls into two distinct parts connected by a modulation. In the first quatrain there is a group of images all referring to the beauty of the face; in the third quatrain a very different group, not visual like the first, but moral or prudential, relating to beauty considered as treasure, inheritance, and a matter for the rendering of accounts; the intervening quatrain is entirely devoted to a modulation from one type to the other:

Then, being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

(In this modulation the visual and the prudential—'beauty' and 'treasure'—are formally balanced, and the 'deep-sunken' unites the eyes and the treasure in a single imaging epithet.) This careful four-line modulation suggests that Shakespeare was well aware of the virtue of relating images one to another as well as to the object they convey, yet the very necessity for a modulation here derives from the remoteness from one another of the two types of imagery. Here again the discrepancy finds its justification in larger considerations of form: namely, in the relation of Sonnet II to Sonnets III and IV. Sonnet III takes up and expands the first quatrain of Sonnet II, turning as it does upon the beauty of the face ('Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest … '), and Sonnet IV takes up and expands the third quatrain of Sonnet II, turning as it does entirely upon beauty as treasure, inheritance and a matter for the rendering of accounts. It is further to be observed that Sonnets V and VI repeat this pattern, V dealing with visual beauty in visual terms, and VI dealing with 'beauty's treasure' in a long-sustained conceit drawn from usury. Would it be fanciful to suggest that the infelicity of the usury conceit in Sonnet VI reflects the difficulty the poet found in bringing this little sequence to a formally symmetrical conclusion?

In each of these six sonnets, features of the individual sonnet are illuminated by a consideration of the design of the whole group. But since we have no external warrant of the correctness of the 1609 order, the case for Shakespeare's sense of form must further be argued on grounds affording independent corroboration. This is found in Sonnet IV where, though the imagery chosen relates the sonnet to its fellows, the development of that imagery within the sonnet is a self-contained exercise in abstract form. The sonnet must be quoted and discussed in full.

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And, being frank, she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For, having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone?
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unus'd beauty must be tomb'd with thee,
Which, used, lives, th'executor to be.

Here we have a sonnet in which, patently, there is a high degree of organization. Firstly, the imagery of financial matters is sustained throughout. Secondly, there is within this integrated scheme a number of strongly marked subsidiary systems. The most immediately striking, which may therefore be cited first, is the ringing of the changes in lines 5-8 on 'abuse'—'usurer'—'use', which is taken up in the couplet by 'unus'd', 'used'. Another marked system is that of the reflexive constructions associated with 'thee': 'spend upon thyself'—'traffic with thyself'—'thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive', taken up in the couplet by 'thy … beauty … tomb'd with thee'. That these are deliberate systems, not inept repetitions, is proved by the way in which they interlock in the couplet: 'unus'd' is, in the first line of the couplet, linked with 'thy beauty … tomb'd with thee', and this contrasts with the second line of the couplet, where there is a linking of 'used', 'executor', and 'lives', to produce the complete formal balance in thought, diction and syntax, of

Thy unus'd beauty must be tomb'd with thee,
Which, used, lives, th'executor to be.

This formal balance is of course closely related to the thought of the sonnet: Nature, which lends beauty in order that it may be given, is contrasted with the youth, whose self-regarding results in a usurious living on capital alone, which is a negation of Nature and of life; these paradoxes of the thought make possible the correspondences and contrasts of the verbal systems. "What is remarkable is the way in which the poet evolves from this material an intricate and beautiful form which is very close to the art of fugue. Like the fugue, its effect resides in the interaction of the parts; critical analysis, which cannot reproduce the simultaneousness of the original, must labour heavily behind, discussing first the development of each part and then their interaction. We may note, then, that 'Unthrifty loveliness', with which the sonnet opens, is, as it were, a first blending of those two distinct voices, 'why dost thou spend upon thyself' and 'Nature's bequest'. The second quatrain blends them again in 'beauteous niggard', which is itself an inversion, formally complete, of 'unthrifty loveliness', and moreover an inversion which leads on to the extreme of 'profitless usurer'; further, the movement towards the judgment represented by 'profitless usurer' has all the while been less obtrusively going on in the verbs as well as in the vocatives ('spend'—'abuse'—'yet canst not live'). Then, with 'yet canst not live', the sonnet brings out the second voice, that reflexive (and self-destructive) action announced in 'spend upon thyself', but kept low in the first eight lines, maintaining itself there only by the formal parallels of 'why dost thou spend'—'why dost thou abuse'—'why dost thou use'. This voice now emerges predominant in 'For, having traffic with thyself alone', and this voice in turn reaches its extreme of formal development in the line 'Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive'. The remaining lines bring the two voices to a sharp contrast with 'nature calls thee to be gone' (where 'nature' and 'thee' achieve a syntactical nearness embodying a conflict of opposed concepts, and this conflict-in-nearness is fully stated in the complete formal balance of the couplet). In this rough analysis of the blending of the voices in this sonnet, much has had to be passed over, but now we may go back and point to the incidental contrast and harmony of 'beauteous niggard' with 'bounteous largess'; to the transition, in the pun of 'canst not live', from usury to death (which leads on to the contrast in the couplet); to the felicity of 'audit' in line 12, which is relevant not only to all the financial imagery that has gone before, but also to the rendering of an account when life is at an end; to the subtle conceptual sequence of 'unthrifty loveliness' (the fact of beauty), 'beauteous niggard' (the poet's reproof), 'profitless usurer' (the youth's own loss), and finally, 'unus'd beauty (the whole tragedy—of beauty, of the poet, and of the youth—in the hour of death). Thus this sonnet, which in its absence of visual imagery has little attraction for the hasty reader, reveals itself to analysis as having an intricate beauty of form to which it would be hard to find a parallel in the work of any other poet.

Though Sonnet IV is a tour de force in the handling of form, Sonnet V is even more important to the critic who would make much of formal elements, in that it has a quality which sets it apart from the preceding four: a quality the average reader might call seriousness or sincerity. Here Shakespeare deals with Time and Beauty (and for the application of these to the particular case of the youth requires Sonnet VI, linked to V by 'Then let not … '). The evident artifice of Sonnets I-IV (emblematic imagery, conceits, punning and patterned word-play) gives place in Sonnet V to language which, though it is of course figurative, derives its figures from that realm, of common experience in which processes conceived philosophically by the mind have in fact their manifestations to the senses: from the seasons which figure Time, from the flower and its fragrance which figure Beauty and Evanescence. In short, the poem appeals to us in that realm of experience where we are all, already, half poets. Yet despite this change from the 'artificial' to the 'sincere', this poem too derives much of its strength from its formal design. This design is simple but perfect. The easy continuous process of Time is stated in lines themselves easy and continuous:

Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

and in the next two lines, which suggest that this process implies a coming reversal, the reversal is still a thing of the future and is indicated not by any change in the movement but only by the verbal contrasts between 'gentle' and 'will play the tyrant' and between 'fairly' and 'unfair'. So the continuous movement flows uninterrupted through these lines and on into the fifth:

For never-resting time leads summer on

but in the sixth line,

To hideous winter and confounds him there

the reversal so casually foretold in the first quatrain becomes, by the violence of 'hideous winter' and 'confounds' and by the change of tense, a present catastrophe, and the movement of the fifth and sixth lines taken together perfectly corresponds to the sense: the running-on movement of summer is checked by 'hideous winter' and again by the heavy pause at 'there'. The next two lines embody perfectly, by sound and imagery as well as by sense, this checking and reversal:

Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere.

(Particularly subtle is the way in which the alliteration of 'lusty leaves' gives place to that of 'beauty with 'bareness'.) Now in the remaining six lines the poet in his turn attempts a reversal, and the beauty of the form is to be seen in the way in which he now uses the two kinds of movement already laid down in the sonnet (the one of flowing, the other of checking). What he does is to transfer to Beauty the flowing movement of Time, and then to arrest Beauty in a state of permanent perfection; this he does by the long flowing movement, ending in arrest and permanence, of the fine,

Then, were not summer's distillation left …

This triumphant transfer to Beauty of the movement formerly associated with Time, is of a piece with the imagery of the next line ('A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass'), where Beauty's distillation is at once arrested ('prisoner', 'pent') yet free ('liquid') and visible ('glass'); this image of course reverses the implications of the earlier images of winter, where the sap was checked with frost and beauty was o'ersnow'd. Thus the movement of the first eight lines proves to have been designed not merely to make the sound repeat the sense, but rather to lay down formal elements whose reversal enables the poet to reverse the reversal implicit in Time. Similarly, the image of distillation is seen to be not merely an illustration of the concept of preserving Beauty, but also an answer to the image of winter's freezing of the sap and obliteration of Beauty. Clearly, the formal elements of Sonnet V are part of the poetic logic: the movement, as much as the imagery, is a means or poetic power. It is because of this that the study of formal elements in the Sonnets is not an arid academic exercise. Such a study can help one to arrive at a fuller understanding of Shakespeare's means of communication and a fuller possession of those poetic experiences with which the Sonnets deal.

This article has dealt only with the first six sonnets of the 1609 Quarto. These six sonnets are not exceptional in their successful handling of form; from the whole range of the Sonnets many examples more subtle and more striking might have been chosen but it seemed to me best, in order to argue the case for Shakespeare's interest in form, to make no arbitrary selection, but simply to begin at the beginning and scrutinize what is to be found there. The findings warrant a much greater attention to formal aspects of the Sonnets than is at present customary. The result of such an attentiveness to Shakespeare's handling of form is the discovery that the greater the immediate effect of a sonnet, the more surety does it prove, upon examination, that the effects rest no less upon the form than upon the appeal of the sentiments or of the imagery (as, for instance, in the famous Sonnet CXVI, 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds … '). Again, it will be found that many of the sonnets which are not commonly held to be of the finest, reveal an unsuspected depth and strength when they are, after scrutiny of their form, revalued. It is upon this last point that particular stress may well be laid, for it is here that one becomes aware of new possibilities for the interpretation of Shakespeare's language, not only in the poems but also in the plays. A close study of the language of the Sonnets makes it clear that, great as was Shakespeare's ability to use imagery not only for its beauty but also for its integrating power, he possessed in even greater measure the power to make the formal elements of language express the nature of the experience with which the language deals.

Source: Winifred M. T. Nowottny, "Formal Elements in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Sonnets I-VI," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. II, No. 1, January, 1952, pp. 76-84.

Anne Ferry
[Ferry analyzes Sonnet 15 in the context of the speaker's claim that through the medium of language he can defeat time and immortalize his beloved in verse. She illustrates how, in this sonnet, Shakespeare seems to suspend the inevitable process of death and destruction by generalizing time in terms of particular verbal comparisons—especially metaphors of gardening and vegetation. She also describes the way Shakespeare's use of the present tense and a dispassionate tone disengages the speaker and the young man from the ordinary sequence of time.]

The speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 declares self to be "all in war with Time for loue of you," the friend whose precious quality he would preserve from mortality. Throughout the first one hundred and twenty-six poems in the collection we find sonnets concerned with this struggle. The speaker varies in the attitudes he takes toward it, challenging or lamenting time's power, in tones arrogant or despairing, detached or resigned. His preoccupation with its destructiveness is evident from the first poem urging the young man to father a child, that his beauty might not "by time decease." Beginning with Sonnet 15, the lover who feels himself to be time's enemy is explicitly and repeatedly identified as an artist whose weapon in love's battle is his poetry.

The figure of the poet-lover dominates English lyrics during the later sixteenth century. Poets of this period, ultimately influenced by Petrarch but also by the French, characteristically introduce the lovers in their poems as poets, inspired to write or made tongue-tied by their feelings, eternizing, praising, persuading, complaining in verse, or comparing their beloveds to beauties celebrated in other poems. Astrophil and Stella, the earliest English sonnet sequence and of measureless influence, begins with three poems spoken by a lover struggling to find a literary language in which to write about his feelings, and throughout elaborates on the speaker's role as poet-lover. Following Sidney (and Petrarch), Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton, as well as many of their imitators, begin their sequences with poems explicitly "about" writing love poetry: Spenser's lover addresses his completed book of sonnets which he imagines the lady will read.

Shakespeare's collection (perhaps because it is a collection rather than a sequence) does not begin with a lover who identifies himself explicitly as a poet, though he is pre-eminently an appreciator of beauty, but elsewhere it adopts all the conventional postures of the poet-lover; expands or alters them; even introduces the (perhaps autobiographical) motif of a rival who is also a poet. Shakespeare's uses of the figure are distinctive because they are more pervasive and more various and therefore point us toward his most central concerns in the sonnets. The poet whose verse is love's weapon against time declares the nature of his own power in that struggle and so defines his conception of the nature and power of poetry.

The earnest declaration is Sonnet 15, which appears in the midst of the opening group of related sonnets where the speaker urges a young man to immortalize his beauty by reproducing it in a child. Although connected to the poems in this group by images of time as the enemy of youthful beauty, this sonnet opens new interests which are pursued with many variations throughout the rest of Sonnets 1 to 126.

Sonnet 15 is the first to identify the lover explicitly as an artist, and the first of many to do so by adapting the convention of the eternizing conceit—"I ingraft you new"—immediately recognizable to readers of Italian, French, and English love sonnets as a metaphor for the poet's power to immortalize his beloved in verse. Allusions to this convention occur more often in Shakespeare's than in any other group of English sonnets. His poet-lover, obsessed with the effects of time, refers to the traditional promise so often and with such variousness, so frequently asserts, questions, modifies, finally even attacks, ridicules, and condemns it, that its recurrent uses may be one of the principal reasons why readers tend to think of the speakers in these poems as one personality. So much emphasis accumulates that Shakespeare's changing uses of the eternizing conceit can point to ways we may define his changing concerns about love and also about poetry in the sonnets.

In Sonnet 15 the poet's promise to preserve his beloved from time's decay, although he vows it in full and sad awareness of mutability, is finally asserted with a confidence supported by his ways of manipulating the language of the poem. These devices are characteristic of a kind of poetry, found more often among the lower-numbered poems in the collection, which is designed to support the eternizing conceit, or the attitudes associated with its appearance. The assumptions implicit in this kind of sonnet are first consciously argued in Sonnet 15:

When I consider euery thing that growes
Holds in perfection but a little moment.
That this huge stage presenteth nought but showes
Whereon the Stars in secret influence comment.
When I perceiue that men as plants increase,
Cleared and checkt even by the selfe-same skie:
Vaunt in their youthfull sap, at height decrease,
And were their braue state out of memory.
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay,
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wastfull time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.

The language is designed to persuade us, as well as the friend addressed directly in line 10, that an assertion may be true which we know to be contrary to fact. We know that all creatures in the temporal world must decline and eventually die as surely as we know that day must change to night and that seasons pass. The speaker even seems to insist on this knowledge, by his sadness in contemplating how brief and precarious is living "perfection," and by the way he ponders with lavish illustration the fate of "euery thing that growes." Yet the very language in which he dwells on the inevitable waste wrought in the much-loved world by time is his instrument for arguing and so promising his friend that he can defeat its universal power with his art.

The speaker's authority to challenge time is expressed most obviously by the detachment in his tone throughout most of the poem. We recognize it in the leisure he initially enjoys to "consider" and "perceiue," and in the generality and Latinate objectivity of his diction. We hear it in the ways his considerations seem to exclude him from the unconscious life of "euery thing that growes" or of "men as plants," toward whom he feels kindly pity for their vaunting in ignorance of their fate. We find it in his role as spectator which joins him in "secret" knowledge with the stars who also "comment" on the vast scenes presented for their entertainment by the ever-shifting "showes" of the mortal world. This tone of detached sympathy is itself achieved in contradiction of fact, for in fact the speaker as well as his friend belongs to the category "men," and so is subject to time. The authority expressed in his detachment must therefore depend on the ways in which his language manipulates the inescapable facts of temporal experience. The language of the sonnet itself must demonstrate, by its essential characteristics and their peculiar effects, the power of the poet at war with time.

It does so in part by making the passage of time a subject for contemplation while excluding its process, insofar as possible, from the language itself. There are no changes of tense in the poem. "When I consider" exists in the same expansive present with "euery thing that growes / Holds in perfection" and "Where wastfull time debateth" or "To change your day of youth." The prominent series, "When … When … Then," with which successive quatrains opens, is essentially not a temporal but a logical pattern. "When" and "Then" do not mark stages in a narrative of consecutive events but terms in a syllogism whose structure dictates the design of the poem. Of course, in any argument there is a sense of advance or development, created by a sequence of logically connected points, as the speaker proceeds from one term to that which necessarily follows from it. Even more prominently, as this poet-lover unfolds his argument, his involvement grows, his feelings deepen and change, so that we hear a dramatic development as well as a sequential argument. Yet the ordering principle is different in kind and in its effects from that of a narrative recounting a temporal sequence of events whose succession is dictated by the order in which they happened. For it begins with the opening proposition and is derived from it, so that it seems to develop according to logical necessity. Within this order there are no references to single events, happening at specified moments in time, although the poet does speak of activities, his own or in the world he considers. In our experience outside of poems, actions are events which take place at particular times and in temporal sequence, but within the language of the sonnet all action is generalized and made to take place in the continuum of the argument. That is to say, the activities of "euery thing that growes," of "this huge stage," of "men as plants" are not presented as particular events in the speaker's remembered experience of individual times in his past, but as general illustrations of his major and minor premises. They point to his deduction, not by the inevitable passage of time, but by the direction of his own argument. In the language of the conclusion, it is not time which impels him to recognize how his meditation applies to his friend, but his own operations as observer and as poet:

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay,
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wastfull time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night.

Here he perceives his friend's subjection to cruel changes, not because time has already wrought those changes and so forced his admission, but because his own verbal comparison has reminded him, as it actively "Sets … before my sight" the decline of "men as plants," that his friend will, like plants and men, cease to be. Yet even this painful recognition, forced upon him by the workings of his own comparison, does not ultimately destroy the speaker's control over his unfolding argument. That is, because the metaphorical action is performed by his own "conceit," it seems to operate according to philosophical or verbal laws rather than the cruel dictates of time. Because the act performed by his "conceit" is to set the youth before his "sight" like a scene on a stage or a subject of formal debate, both the friend and the speaker's "conceit" of his subjection to time seem of a different order from temporal experiences. They are like illustrations in an argument, which are also metaphors in a poem, existing outside of time within the verbal order that creates them.

The verbal order of Sonnet 15, which is in part logical and also, as we shall see more fully, metaphorical, is completed by the poet-lover's vaunting of his own power in the battle with time:

And all in war with Time for loue of you
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.

This promise is made in the same present tense used by the poet all through the sonnet. It is designed to lift the destructive action of time, the poet's opposing action, and the fate of the friend out of temporal sequence and to incorporate them in the continuous present of the poem.

The conjunction "And" joins the couplet to the preceding quatrains as an additional conclusion of the syllogism: "When … When … Then … And." In this sequence "And" does not have primarily narrative suggestions of "then the next thing happens after" but has rather the meaning of "an additional conclusion is the following." The speaker therefore makes two deductions from his initial premises:

When I see that every thing growing in the temporal world including "men as plants" must "decrease" and die, then I see you who belong to that category must "decrease" and die, and I renew you.

Acceptance of this second conclusion, as a possibility contrary to the facts of the timebound world, depends on the design of the poem, which is logical, we have seen, but also metaphorical.

In his last words, "I ingraft you new," the speaker identifies himself figuratively as a gardener, and his means of combating time as grafting. This art he devotes to the preservation of his friend who, like a plant, is continually diminished by time. We are prepared to accept this claim by the ways in which the poet's metaphorical language all through the sonnet has directed us to think of time's power as it acts on vegetative life. To be sure, his first consideration—"euery thing that growes / Holds in perfection but a little moment"—applies to all living beings. It includes men as well as other natural creatures, but by using the verb "grows" to define the existence of "euery" undifferentiated "thing" he has already begun to speak of "men" as "plants." The second quatrain is therefore the minor premise of his syllogism and the extension of his metaphor. Here he calls attention to the comparison by explicitly naming its terms—"men as plants"—and then elaborating it by describing the flourishing and wilting of human and vegetative life in the same vocabulary. The working-out of the "conceit" points to the poet's means for rescuing his friend. Perceived in vegetative terms, his friend's "day of youth" is bound to "decrease" and die, but because he has been transformed into a plant, his existence in time, comparable with day and night, may be seen to belong to nature's cyclical pattern of decline and renewal—"As he takes from you, I ingraft you new"—and therefore like a plant he can escape individual mortality.

We are therefore able to accept the possibility of this second conclusion within the order created by the language of the poet, although our experience in the world outside the poem has taught us that man cannot be rescued from time's destruction by any human skill. Because the speaker's metaphor makes us perceive his friend as a plant, it makes possible the conclusion that like a plant his declines do not have the finality of human deaths and like a plant he can be renewed by grafting. The emphasis is less on the friend's power of survival, however, since as a plant he is made to seem fragile and helpless, than upon the speaker's manipulation of it by his ability to "ingraft." As a gardener he uses his knowledge and skill to make of a beautifully passive natural creature a new, more enduring creation, blooming as he has artfully designed within the whole order of his garden domain.

That life-giving knowledge and skill is shown in his capacity to "consider" the facts of experience in time, to transform them into the "conceit of this inconstant stay" (a phrase which, through the pun on "stay," itself seems to arrest the passage of time) and so to create a nontemporal order, where sequence is ruled by philosophical necessity. The language of the poem is therefore a demonstration of what the couplet bravely claims, the poet's power through his art to combat destruction by time. It persuades us to accept the possibility of his final assertion contrary to fact, and to recognize his authority to assert it despite his own sad awareness of mutability. This authority is earned by his triumph over time, which he admits to achieve strictly within the design of the poem, his garden world. Although his assurance here is saved from complacency by his tender appreciation of his friend's "day of youth" and by his sorrow that time "takes from" that brief perfection, it allows the tone of detached sympathy with which he first considers the fate of "euery thing that growes" and the confidence with which he eventually engages the power of his art "all in war with Time."

Source: Anne Ferry, "Shakespeare," in All in War wth Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell, Harvard University Press, 1975, pp. 3-63.

For many commentators, the speaker's expression of his tortured thoughts and feelings represents the chief interest of Shakespeare's sonnets. The Poet has been variously described as enigmatic, self-deluded, inconsistent, and servile. Both Philip Martin and John Klause have tried to explain his deferential attitude to the young man. In Martin's judgment, the Poet exchanges the self-effacing demeanor of the early sonnets once he and the Friend have achieved a relationship of greater intimacy. By contrast, Klause has argued that the Poet's self-deprecation is one of the strategic ploys he uses as he tries to teach the youth the meaning of love. In Klause's estimation, the Poet's other strategies include flattery, rebuke, forgiveness, and lies.

The Poet's dishonesty—his distortion of the truth or evasion of it—has attracted a large measure of critical attention. Heather Dubrow (1981) has argued that this characteristic reflects the Poet's moral confusion and underscores the general absence of truth and certainty in the sonnets. Furthermore, she suggested that our wavering confidence in his truthfulness influences our responses: sometimes we identify with him, but when we doubt his honesty we become more detached. Whether the Poet is deceiving himself as well as his audience is a central critical issue that has been addressed by a number of commentators. Emily E. Stockard, for example, maintained that when he can no longer deny the reality of his friend's desertion, the Poet adopts a strategy of consolation designed to isolate him from that reality; thus he claims to find comfort in the Friend's absence, even though he knows that this strategy is based on illusion. Michael Cameron Andrews argued that in the sonnets to the young man, the Poet is initially unaware of the Friend's true nature, but when the young man's duplicity becomes evident, the Poet devises a series of expedients to rationalize or justify what he cannot bear to confront. From Andrews's perspective, the Poet is caught up in a profound struggle as he tries to hide his feelings from himself.

Other critics who have considered the issue of the Poet's self-deception include Philip Edwards and James Winny. Focusing on the Dark Lady sonnets, Edwards argued that here the Poet desperately tries to make sense of his life—to understand why a man would betray the nobler aspects of his nature and be ruled by base instinct. Edwards traced the Poet's various attempts, all grounded in self-deception, to portray carnal desire as something other than a degradation. Also directing his attention to Sonnets 127-51, Winny maintained that these poems depict the Poet struggling with the recognition of his mistress's unworthiness on the one hand, and his inability to resist her on the other. In Winny's opinion, the Poet judges himself as harshly as he judges the Dark Lady.

John Klause
[Though many commentators have disparaged the Poet's frequent self-abasement and his seeming inconsistency, Klause regards these as part of the speaker's strategy to create and preserve the affection of a young man who is neither lovable nor aware of what love means. Thus in his role as guide and instructor, the Poet employs whatever tactic will serve his purposes: flattery, rebuke, sophistry, forgiveness—even lies. Klause reads the final sonnets to the Friend as indications that despite the Poet's loving patience and selflessness, his attempts to teach and motivate the young man have been unsuccessful. The critic also discusses the candor of Sonnets 127-52. In Klause's judgment, the Poet despises the Dark Lady and knows he's a fool for desiring her.]

To call the man whose travail is recorded in Shakespeare's Sonnets a protagonist may seem to grant him a status beyond his desert. Of a protagonist we expect at least that he struggle for or against something and that in his exertions, even when he is inconsistent, he prove himself a coherent personality. Shakespeare's Poet, it has been suggested, does neither.

Yvor Winters once complained [in "Poetic Styles Old and New" (1959)] of a "servile weakness" in the Poet. And indeed, one is tempted to underscore evidence of an emotional and moral supineness in a man who is everywhere full of self-denigration: "To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws, / Since why to love I can allege no cause" (49.13-14), who envisions himself a "sad slave" without personal prerogatives, existing to serve through his presence or absence the pleasure of a sovereign Friend and living vicariously through him (57; 37.1-4); who allows his Friend moral obliquity, which he will rationalize for his master even when he is himself its victim: "Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth" (33.14); who professes to have no rights, not even to pardon the injury inflicted on him (58.9-14); who blesses the Friend who steals his mistress ("sweet thief," "gentle thief" [35.14; 40.9J, and will then find more blame in himself for excusing the crime than in his Friend for committing it (35); who stumbles after his Lady like a "babe" after its mother, "crying" for attention (143); who knowingly, helplessly acquiesces in the falsehood necessary to keep a wildly irrational love alive: "Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be!" (138.13-14). It is no wonder that critics have proceeded beyond the view that the Poet is sometimes "trapped" into inertia, to the conviction that, in some poems at least, he exhibits "an almost masochistic humility'' [Giorgio Melchiori, in Shakespeare's Dramatic Meditations (1976)] or a "masochistic generosity." [R. P. Blackmur, "A Poetics for Infatuation" (1962)].

But is the Poet ever consistent enough to be described as passive or prostrate? His art and his self-confidence are alternately feeble and potent: his rhyme is now "barren" (16.4), now "pow'rful" (55.2). He acknowledges that "nothing'gainst Time's scythe can make defense / Save breed" (12.13-14); yet he promises his Friend:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade.
……
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(18.9, 13-14)

The Poet humbly confesses his verse to be plain—even monotonous and unadventurous (76), a "worthless boat" beside his Rival's "tall building … of goodly pride" (80.11-12). He nonetheless takes pride in his "true plain words," which are free from the "strained touches rhetoric can lend" (82.12, 10).

So is it not with me as with that Muse
Stirr'd by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use,
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a complement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.
(21.1-8)

This from the same Poet who compares his love to "a summer's day" and the "eye of heaven" (18.1, 5); to "the lily's white," the "sweet" of the "violet," and "the deep vermilion in the rose" (98.9-10; 99.1-3); to Helen and to Adonis (53); and, by implication, to the triune God himself (105). The Poet's love seems self-abnegating in the extreme:

If you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
That I in your sweet dioughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
(71.5-8)

But this love candidly pleads for "recompense" (23.11). It is generous in granting the beloved independence: "Thee have I not lock'd up in any chest" (48.9). Or perhaps it is not:

So am I as the rich whose blessed key
Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
The which he will not ev'ry hour survey.
(52.1-3; cf. 75.3-8)

The lover who proves that love must be forever changing, growing (115), then insists that "it is an ever-fixed mark" (116.5) and in the next breath admits his own inconstancy (117). A voice remorseful ("Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there" [110.1]), self-convicted of "transgression" (120.3), can suddenly turn defiantly proud of its essential righteousness:

On my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own;
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown.
(121.7-12)

These psychological somersaults may seem too spectacular and unconnected to be turned by a character in a dramatic praxis or action—hence the impulse of many critics to abandon story in favor of idea.

Some, however, have tried to face squarely the problem of the protagonist. They have challenged the portrait of the supine lover in either of two ways: by appeals to irony or to an ethical code.

The Poet's profession of vassalage, it is said, should not always be understood naively:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
(57.1-4)

Here and elsewhere one may find the words heavy with equivocation, called upon to express simultaneously devotion and reproach. "I am utterly yours. 'So true a fool is love / I have no needs but yours. Indeed!" And where the expressions of "self-naughting" are ingenuous, they are not the whines of servile helplessness but, in an almost religious sense, the effects of an active heroism (what Milton was to call "the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom" [Paradise Lost, 9.31-2]). "I may not evermore acknowledge thee' (36.9), "No longer mourn" (71.1), and "Although thou steal thee all my poverty" (40.10) spring "from a region in which love abandons all claims and flowers into charity." C. S. Lewis's formulation of this view has become classic:

The self-abnegation, the 'naughting', in the Sonnets never rings false. This patience, this anxiety (more like a parent's than a lover's) to find excuses for the beloved, this clear-sighted and wholly unembittered resignation, this transference of the whole self into another self, without the demand for a return, have hardly had a precedent in profane literature. In certain senses of the word 'love', Shakespeare is not so much our best as our only love poet [English Literature cf the Sixteenth Century].

The question of the Poet's consistency is also addressed under two assumptions: either that the problem would dissolve if the true "order" of the Sonnets were known, or that the contradictions, real enough in themselves, are precisely the kind we might expect of a complex human being in turbulent love affairs. Thus a plausible story may be seen to lurk in the Sonnets, and a plausible protagonist; and both can be discovered if only art may be rearranged to suit the logic of life or the illogic of life allowed to invade the ritual of art.

There is merit in all of these views. But aside from the obvious fact that at some points one may be incompatible with another (the lover either abandons all claims or ironically does not, is consistent or is not), none of these solutions is sufficiently cogent or comprehensive to escape major objections. Irony is a quality of mind, not of character, and may be found in a spirit morally feckless. A lover's ironic protest against his friend's faithlessness hardly qualifies as an "action." We might remember Carlisle's admonition to Richard II:

My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes,
But presendy prevent the ways to wail.
(R2, III.ii.178-9)

If the Poet's self-naughting is genuine (and we shall see that it is not as straightforward and radical as Lewis proposed), it may in the abstract be deemed heroic and wise. But the Poet's generosity towards this particular Friend is in some ways less charity than connivance. The freedom granted from "claims" (insofar as it is granted) is the opportunity to receive with ingratitude, to ignore, forget, steal, and betray with impunity. Rearrangement may bring the Sonnets closer to a plausible sequence; but there is no authority to guarantee that Shakespeare's is one of those "likely" stories that are all too rare in and out of fiction. Furthermore, true contradictions will not be resolved by shuffling. And if they are allowed to stand, either an explanation must be found for the Poet's inconsistency or he must be judged helplessly, pointlessly wayward.

Discovering a rationale for inconsistency is not, in fact, an impossible task. We may see that irony and ingenuousness coexist in a lover whose self-martyrdom is at once real and strategic, generous and self-interested, noble and tainted, variable and utterly single-minded. In order to do so, we must dwell upon the implications of two facts about the Poet, to which he calls attention and which are so obvious that we tend to take them for granted: he is old and he is a liar.

The Poet's age in Shakespeare's Sonnets is not merely a hackneyed, implausible convention. Petrarch's reference to his own "weary spirit," "wrinkled skin," "decaying wit and strength" (Sonnet 81) had indeed inspired many of his successors (like Samuel Daniel, Richard Barnfield, and Michael Drayton—the eldest of whom was thirty-one years old at his work's first printing) to pose as superannuated in all but "desire." But the counterfeit silver hair and furrowed brows of most of these sonneteers could not disguise the youth of the passion which they portrayed. Theirs were "the propositions of hot blood and brains." Like many youthful suitors, then-lovers were young enough in sensibility to look upon desire and its sublimation as the only important facts of life. Even where the lovers' attitudes were reflective, the reflection, though sometimes deep, was narrowly channeled—as it tends to be if a young person decides that the problems surrounding love must be addressed before the rest of life can be attended to. When Shakespeare's Poet speaks of his age, however, we sense no discrepancy between his psychology and his pose.

…my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie.

… she knows my days are past the best.
……
And age in love loves not t' have years told.
(62.9-10; 73.9-10; 138.6, 12)

Whatever his chronological age (he regards "forty winters" as an "antiquity" [2.1]), the Poet everywhere speaks from the perspective of a man who has weathered life. The disparity in years between him and his "lovely boy" (126.1), between him and the lady before whom he tries to suppress the "simple truth" of his age (138.8), colors almost every motive and action in the relationships to which the Sonnets refer.

That an older man should speak in sonnets, with the benefit of experience, is not a situation we would expect after reading Shakespeare's plays, where sonnet-lovers, mostly young, are almost invariably treated with condescension. In Two> Gentlemen of Verona "wailful sonnets" are by definition "serviceable," little more than devices for a young man to use who would "lay lime to tangle" a lady's "desires" (III.ii.68-70). The poetical flights of the wooers in Love's Labour's Lost are products of immature, insincere, uneducated sentiment, which must be chastened; its language made more "honest" (V.ii.413). Orlando's "odes" and "elegies" in the forest of Arden are harmless and touching enough; they are also ridiculous, and Rosalind is right to call the young poet a "fancy-monger" in need of "good counsel" (AYL, III.ii.361-4). The romantic intensity of Romeo and Juliet, who speak in a sonnet at their first meeting and kiss on the couplet (Rom, I.v.93-106), is no less callow for being genuine; and use of "the numbers that Petrarch flowd in" (at which an overwise Mercuito sneers [II.iv.38-9]) marks the couple for trouble who take the sonneteers' hyperboles too seriously. As a form, then, the sonnet does not promise Shakespeare much. He takes it away from the young, however, among whom it has been abused, doing so not simply to parody an institutionalized silliness, but to give "age in love" its proper voice. This voice is both consistent, true to the character from whom it issues, and inconsistent, as it must be to achieve the character's ends.

If the Poet in Shakespeare's Sonnets "loves not t' have years told" (138.12), he is forever telling his age anyway—not only by railing attention to his physical decline ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold" [73]), but by consistently revealing in himself the attitudes and preoccupations of a man whose "days are past the best" (138.6). He lives with memories of "precious friends hid in death's dateless night" and can "weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe" (30.6-7). He speaks with nostalgia of a past when standards were simpler but higher, nobler, than those of a sophisticated present. "In the old age," in "days long since, before these last so bad," when hours were "holy," beauty was unambiguously "fair" (67.14; 68.9; 127.1); "antique" pens were as eloquent as modern ones—for all their "newfound methods" and "compounds strange"—are inarticulate (106.7; 76.4). The "time-bettering days" of this age of progress (82.8) have amassed a rich harvest of "new-fangled ill" (91.3). The Poet also dwells much upon the future—that is to say, the little time he has left, the "twilight" (73.5) from which he can already contemplate his death (71) and wish for it (66). He often raises issues of time and eternity with his Friend, who seems too young to be seriously concerned about them (see 77, especially). The Poet's many exhortations to the Friend to achieve immortality through procreation and his offers to the youth of an immortality in verse spring more from his own obsessions than from attention to the other's frame of mind.

It is understandable that a man who feels his living substance devoured by time, or rather "transfix[ed]," "mow[n]," "beated," "chopp'd," "crush'd," "drain'd," and "consum'd" (19.1; 60.9,12; 62.10; 63.2, 3; 73.12), is most sensitive to "accounts" owing and owed, honored and neglected. Tallies become extremely important when supplies run short. Seeing himself in the growing shadow of extinction, the Poet allows his imagination to be filled with commercial and legal metaphors, which, though on occasion used ironically to remind a lover that love should not be mercenary, are in general approved analogies. Having long grappled with the world and provided a life for himself by "public means" (of which, one must admit, he sometimes seems ashamed [111.4]), the Poet naturally looks to the courts and the marketplace for a vocabulary to express his sense of (his own or another's) threatened or waning personal treasures, his understanding of love's privileges, rights, obligations, audits, losses, expenses, and "use" (e.g., 4, 21, 30, 49, 67, 74, 79, 87, 120, 122, 126, 134, 142, 146). In this respect Shakespeare's economic and judicial motifs are more functional than those of most of his predecessors and contemporaries among sixteenth-century love-poets.

The Poet's social status requires his deference to the Friend as to a superior. The older man bears the "canopy" for the young person of eminence (125.1), relies on him for patronage in competition with a rival (76-86). Love, of course, demands its own kind of obsequiousness (125.9), and, with whatever ironic demurrals, the Poet becomes the loved one's "slave" (57, 58). But age gives the elder the inclination and the right to treat the youth as a son in need of a father's care. Thus, running counter to the voice of dependency in theSonnets (with a wholly plausible inconsistency) is that of the preceptor, who tries to teach his charge the value of a family, the lessons of time, and definitions of love; of the patient, concerned parent, ever ready to "play the watchman" for his loved one's sake, even when his love is betraying him (61.12); of the doting parent, quick to make excuses for the youth's "pretty wrongs" (41.1); of the protector, who vows to bear his Friend's heart, keeping it "so chary / As tender nurse her babe from faring ill" (22.11-12), and who pleads with the Lady who has enslaved his "sweet'st friend":

My friend's heart let my poor heart bail
Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard.
(133.4, 10-11)

Even when the Poet speaks in words of self-pity he does not relinquish the paternal mantle:

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
(37.1-4)

In weakness he maintains his authority.

The Poet's affair with the Dark Lady, like Antony's with Cleopatra, is rather a combat between powers who are equals if not in age (the Poet seems older) then in stature. Adults stepping out of earshot of the youth who plays a part in both their lives, they must settle the issue of his possession themselves, with their own kind of frankness (133-4). Indeed, although age in love may feel compelled to hide its years (138), it speaks for the most part with a cynical honesty about itself and its object. The Poet's bawdy jokes and insults at his mistress's expense are the humorously bitter quips of a man tired of the illusions used by romance to dignify lust.

No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her "love" for whose dear love I rise and fall.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
And thence this slander as I think proceeds.
(151.13-14; 135.5-6; 131.13-14)

The Poet is old and wise enough to see clearly that he perjures his eye in forcing it to swear its object lovable (152.13). Age will sin no less than youth, but it may be doomed to suffer a livelier appreciation of the preposterousness of its evil and the vileness of its guilt.

What merit do I in myself respect,
That is so proud thy service to despise,
When all my best doth worship thy defect,
Commanded by the motion of thine eyes?
But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind:
Those that can see thou lov'st, and I am blind.

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action.
(149.9-14; 129.1-2)

The very fact of the Poet's age, then, continually insisted upon, is the source of two of the great incongruities in the Sonnets: that an older man has become "vassal" to a youth much inferior to him in insight and (though the elder is no saint) moral character; that (as seems most likely) this same man lives in open-eyed thrall to a passion which, as the young Hamlet believed, is supposed to be conquered by time:

Ha, have you eyes?
You cannot call it love, for at your age
The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment, and what judgment
Would step from this to this?
(Ham, III.iv.67-71)

Since love in all its forms is rarely scrupulous in observing rules of logic, common sense, or common expectation, we must acknowledge the incongruities to be part of a constant truth about human nature.

Some of the inconsistencies in the Sonnets, however, are too refractory to be accounted for by the Poet's forthright revelation of his age. In order to see how he might consciously and therefore plausibly be responsible for many of them, we must understand how in age he has become mendacious.

The Poet's attitude towards the truth is a complicated one. Defined as something more than the "correspondence" of thought and fact (148.2), truth has for him a moral dimension—as fidelity ("I will be true" [123.14]) and authenticity ("Without all ornament, itself and true" [68.10]). 'With goodness and beauty truth is a transcendental value, the goal of human striving, and when found in a person occasions the highest compliment (105). Departure from such truths is either madness or a criminal betrayal. Yet a certain land of verity, the Poet believes, is no more than a bland literalness, which as his practice indicates may be improved by hyperbole. Historical "records" he knows to "lie"; not only may the writers of history be in error, but "what we see," the facts themselves (123.11). This is not the kind of truth that will win one to its service. And devotion to another may lead a lover to abandon the truth in forsaking himself:

Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,
Against thy reasons making no defense.
(89.3-4)

The Poet thinks he has grounds for appealing to the "virtuous lie" against a truth that is "niggard" (72.5, 8).

Shakespeare's plays often portray with some approval an idealism that is not too saintly to compromise itself. Tricksters like Prince Hal and Duke Vincentio [in Measure for Measure] become morally ambiguous in their resort to deception; but their diminution is the price exacted by a wicked world, perverse in its paradoxes, for the achievement of good. The sanctity of absolutists like Isabella [in Measure for Measure] and Cordelia [in King Lear] is always splendid but not in every respect benign. If the world would be spiritually poor without martyrdom, it would be poorer still if it lacked the flawed but elementary moral successes of a flexible soul like Helena, the heroine of All's Well that Ends Well, who is mundane enough to banter with the crass Parolles on his own terms, who can imagine that "virtue's steely bones" may look "bleak i'th' cold wind" (I.i.103-4), who deceives her way to justice and love.

There is, in fact, a strong kinship between Helena and the Poet of the Sonnets which ought not to go overlooked in favor of more obvious parallels between male characters from the plays and the sonneteer. The middle-aged Antonio ofThe Merchant of Venice hazards himself for the prodigal young Bassanio, as does the sea-captain Antonio for the young Sebastian in Twelfth Night. But Helena, if not the same age or sex as the older male friends, is their equal in devotion and in other respects much more like the figure in the poems. Not old herself she yet has the older generation on her side—the King, the Countess, Lafew—and acts as a representative of a past whose nobility threatens to become attenuated in "these younger times" (I.ii.46). She is a poet, author of a sonnet in the Shakespearean form (III.iv.4-17), which sounds familiar notes of self-denigration and selfless love:

He is too good and fair for death and me,
Whom I myself embrace to set him free.

In Bertram Helena loves a man superior to herself in rank but who is, though of a "well-derived nature" (III.ii.88), so far beneath her in moral stature that she must strive mightily to overcome his iniquity and to make him, not only her lover, but an object worthy of her love. (Whether or not she succeeds, of course, is a "problem.") As a woman rendered "inferior" by social conventions (the Poet of the Sonnets suffers a lowliness dictated by other social codes) she must be active in secret to pursue her goals; and secrecy involves lying and deceit.

The lies of the Poet are not so spectacular as a fabricated death-notice or a bed-trick, but they are just as real and just as purposeful. They are of several kinds. One may deny the "simple truth" to another person: "I lie with her, and she with me" (138.8, 13). One may also try to deny it to oneself, to make, as Macbeth says, "The eye wink at the hand" (I.iv.52). The Poet has been accused of such attempts at self-deception, and the charge seems substantiated in his own professed resolve:

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceived husband, so love's face
May still seem love to me, though alter'd new.
(93.1-3)

He would lie to himself about the extent of the Friend's devotion and innocence, rationalize the Friend's obvious treachery, perjure his own eyes to love a formidably worthless Lady. As Macbeth's case reminds us, however, an acute mind cannot easily un-know a momentous, insistent truth already in its possession. In acknowledging that he sees himself lying, the Poet proves that he has not escaped an inconvenient knowledge. He is a manipulator of lies, not their victim, for his prevarications are primarily rhetorical.

Reading most of the Sonnets as rhetoric rather than as drama or meditation (although rhetoric may of course grow out of meditation and play its part in a dramatic action) may drastically alter our approach to the poems. Such a reading makes less crucial the search for a linear plot and helps to explain contradictions that would remain even in a definitively established sequence of events. It may also affect significantly our estimate of the Poet's character. A rhetorician's design upon an audience (here, the Friend or Lady), his concern to teach or to move, may lead him to suppress or falsify history, his own motives, or his own condition. There is no need to trace a developing awareness in the Poet if, as his age and experience suggest, he knows most of the truth from the beginning, allowing only as much or as little of it into each poem as will serve his ends.

His purpose in the poems to the Friend, like Helena's in her dealings with Bertram, is to win the love of a man who must be made lovable and taught how to love. In the very first sonnet of a group which is almost universally believed to pertain to the early stages of the relationship the Poet reveals something of his method:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender chorl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

No less aware of the friend's self-absorption here ("Widain thine own bud buriest thy content") than he is later ("The summer's flowr is to the summer sweet, / Though to itself it only live and die" [94.9-10]), the Poet withholds an explicit condemnation (plainspeaking, it is clear, would do no good) and attempts to make use of this trait in his argument. "Don't violate the logic of your narcissism," he suggests. "Produce another self." There is criticism in the subtle plea to the young man that he become a different kind of "glutton" than he already is, but the irony is too sugar-coated to alienate a vain sensibility ("to thy sweet self too cruel," "tender chorl"). The rhetorician's flattery is offered on the premise that the youth will be moved to go out of himself, and thus "give the world its due," only by an ignoble appeal to his pride. The world needs, has a right to the "fairest creatures."

This exhortation is hardly calculated to bring the youth immediately to a state of heroic virtue. But the Poet, proceeding with the tolerance or patience that his own long lifetime of imperfection has taught him, is willing to settle for the slightest improvement, even if purchased with debased currency, in his pupil's art of giving. And whether or not the Poet was commissioned by a concerned parent to write the sonnets advocating marriage and begetting, it is in his own interest to encourage the young man whom he loves, or will love, to learn self-surrender. In order to teach this, the Poet must persevere, as the illogic of love urges him to do, in his concern for a Friend who over time comes to wound him deeply ("Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes" [40.14]) and must direct his pleas and arguments by expediency.

What is expedient will change from moment to moment in a relationship that spans three years or more (104) and suffers a number of significant reversals. Flattery will alternate or combine with, displace or yield to, rebuke as quickly as the Poet feels they must to suit his purpose. So will "strained rhetoric" to "true plain words." Thus in Sonnets 33-5 the Poet's initial reaction to an injury done him is to accept it, even to prettify the wrong, for to do otherwise would be to lose the malefactor:

The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth:
Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.
(33.12-14)

The irony in "no whit" and in the outrageous analogy between the two suns cannot be doubted. Yet the criticism is muted until the Poet feels it opportune to ask plainly and in anger, "Why didst thou promise?" (34.1). "Base clouds" then lose their "brav'ry," becoming "rotten smoke" (34.3-4); the Poet speaks with a frankness and an authority not heard before:

Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss,
Th' offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offense's cross.
(34.10-12)

But of what use is this naked blade of truth if it severs the bonds that love would keep whole? The Poet allows "tears" to "ransom all ill deeds" (34.13-14) (or pretends that they do) not because the injured man has melted before the penitent's weeping, but because he would keep the possibility of love alive. Forgiveness, hollow-sounding as it is, will by fiat prevent a breach, while providing an example of selfless devotion and proving the forgiver worthy to be loved. The Poet goes so far as to take upon himself the "sin" of "excusing" his Friend's "amiss" (35), relinquishing the brief authority that injured innocence had given him; for the Friend probably could not abide an extended awareness of his moral inferiority.

In these poems, then, are two great violations of the truth: the lies required by forgiveness and the lies told in self-diminishment. The Poet resorts to them here and throughout the Sonnets because to utter them is the only way to render them unnecessary—or rather, the only means allowed by a love that will not abandon its object. The lies are told in an irregular pattern. Retreat from the truth is made for the sake of an ultimate advance toward it, and the forward pressure diminishes or increases as circumstances change.

The conflict is especially tense after the Friend has seduced or been seduced by the Poet's mistress. "Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all" (40.1). Outrage is tempered even as it is voiced, directed at "my love." A specious casuistry absolves the thief: "All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more. … I cannot blame thee" (40.4, 6), then absolution is invalidated: "But yet be blam'd" (40.7); then reaffirmed: "I do forgive thy robb'ry, gende thief" (40.9); and allowed to stand, with a reminder to the sinner that forgiveness is heroic:

And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
(40.11-12)

The pattern is repeated in Sonnets 41 and 42: extenuation of "pretty wrongs"; a change of mind expressed in a bitter sexual joke: "Ay me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear"; renewed forgiveness: "Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye," attached to a reminder that the injured party lies on a "cross" and that forgiveness is gratuitous, since its rational grounds are the feeblest of logic:

But here's the joy, my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.
(41.1, 9; 42.5, 12, 13-14)

The sign of a more thorough forgiveness would be a more complete forgetfulness, and this the Poet tries to demonstrate to the Friend. Some of the Sonnets have seemed to many readers to be out of place because the Poet speaks in them in apparent unawareness of events which previous poems have recounted. In Sonnet 48, for example, not long after suffering his Friend's infidelity, the Poet anticipates losing what has already been lost: "thou wilt be stol'n, I fear." In Sonnet 70 he speaks of the youth's "pure unstained prime":

Thou hast pass'd by the ambush of young days,
Either not assail'd, or victor being charg'd.
(70.9-10)

These poems may well be out of order. It is just as likely, however, given the Poet's practice elsewhere, that he is passing over the truth in forgiveness and compliment. The Friend may have strayed, but he was not definitively "stol'n"; he was indeed "assailed" (41.6), and if not a "victor" in every battle, triumphant in the campaign as a whole. In the Poet's eyes, the young man's prime was "unstained," the scarlet of his sins made white as snow. The same fiction, after all, is used by the Poet when, after a period of separation (estrangement?) (97-8), love no longer "new" (102.5), he celebrates the Friend's "truth" (101.2; 105.9) as though he had never cause to question it, or had not questioned it in fact (41.14). Then, confessing a guilt of his own, hoping that the forgiven sinner has learned the lesson of such generous deceit, he pleads with the Friend for a similar favor: "o'er-green my bad" (112.4).

The lies of self-diminishment, more varied than those spoken in the name of forgiveness, are as undeviatingly aimed at creating, preserving, and educating love. The "sad slave" describes his vassalage as a reproach to the master who abuses him (57-8). In the altruist's self-naughting there is surely a plea for sympathy:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead.
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From, this vile world with vildest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if (I say) you look upon this verse.
(71.1-9)

If the Poet really wished to be "forgot," he would not write and keep reminding his Friend to read. Much of the Poet's self-criticism is offered in the hope that it will be protested. The author who boasts of his "pow'rful rhyme" (55.2) and prides himself on the honest humility of his verse (82) does not in competition with a rival intend to convince his Friend that his own Muse is "tongue-tied" (80.4; 85.1) or that his "numbers are decay'd" (79.3); he seeks affirmation.

Thus wisdom wishes to appear most bright
When it doth tax itself; as these black masks
Proclaim an enshield beauty ten times louder
Than beauty could, display'd.
(MM, II.iv.78-81)

A young lover may try to win the admiration of a lady by parading his vigor, his potential, or his achievement, as Astrophil does in his forty-first sonnet after he "obtain'd the prize" at a tournament. An older man will have to be loved for different reasons: not for his prowess, but for his tenderness, understanding, constancy, generosity, what is called in A Lover's Complaint "the charity or age" (70), and in spite of his growing infirmities. The Poet, far from attempting to aide his debility, is forever proclaiming it, for it cannot be hidden and can at least be turned to modest account in flattering the Friend's sense of his own potency or virtue:

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So l.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
(37.1-3; 73.13-14)

Weakness, however, is not of itself attractive. To prove that discrepancy in age does not matter, that love

Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page,
(108.10-12)

the Poet distinguishes himself in selfless dedication. If he is "nothing worth" (72.14), his whole energy will go to promoting and proclaiming the worth of his Friend, whose interests supersede the poor lover's own:

Bending all my loving thoughts on thee,
The injunes that to myself I do,
Doing thee vantage, double-vantage me.
Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
That for thy right myself will bear all wrong.
(88.10-14)

Nevertheless, the Poet does not relish or thrive on self-diminishment. His admission that he can "allege no cause" for his Friend to love him can hardly be ingenuous. The Sonnets, the self-naughting ones especially, offer a multitude of causes and, at least indirectly, ask the beneficiary of so much giving for a return. The "slave" would be made an equal. The eulogist would have his own worth affirmed. The constant lover would be shown loyalty. The trespasser would have his own trespasses forgiven even as he has forgiven a deep betrayal. Sonnet 120 is an open attempt to teach reciprocity: "if you were by my unkindness shaken / As I by yours, y'have pass'd a hell of time" (as the memory of my agony tells me).

But that your trespass now becomes my fee,
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.
(120.5-6, 13-14)

One cannot easily inspire gratuitous forgiveness except by granting it, and the Poet has already offered it in full measure.

Since the Poet has continued to love his Friend despite "love's wrong" (40.12), the recompense he seeks is for an action that, despite its place in rhetorical arguments, is essentially unfeigned. Forgiveness is itself genuine. But it involves lying; and so does moral education. We may suspect that in Sonnet 62 the self-incriminator plays with the truth in order to challenge a complacent egotism that rarely gives.

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part.
(62.1-2)

Although the Poet is not immune to pride, his confession and repentance before a young man who seems distinguished for narcissism is probably an invitation to follow a salutary example. We may also wonder if the Poet's contritions after he has "rang'd" and "made old offenses of affections new" (109.5; 110.4) are purposely exaggerated. They follow a separation for which the Friend seems responsible (87-96); and when a man goes elsewhere after being rejected, he would hardly have cause to consider himself unfaithful. It is probable that the friendship can be repaired at this point only if the Poet assumes a guilt he never knew and allows himself to be forgiven. Only thus may virtue be "rewarded."

Other gambits are available to the resourceful lover, and the Poet makes use of them without regard for their consistency, which is far less important to him than results. In the midst of all his sophistries, he sometimes risks forthrightness—an undisguised sermon:

Oh how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
(54.1-2)

or a direct calling to account:

For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near;
(61.13-14)

or a less direct (because attributed to the "world") yet daring insult:

But why thy odor matcheth not thy show,
The soil is this, that thou dost common grow.
(69.13-14)

His avowals of selflessness are interrupted by a reference to his desperate needs: "So are you to my thoughts as food to life" (75.1). When overtures seem to fail, he utters a "Farewell" (87), but of course does not immediately depart. He mingles with pleas for sympathy an angry challenge:

Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.
(90.1-2)

All of these episodes are desultory steps in an experiment that fails. If the final sonnets addressed to the Friend (97-126) are in anything close to chronological sequence, they suggest a story that ends in the preceptor-lover's acrimonious defeat. Sonnet 97 refers to an "absence" which may have resulted from the friendship's temporary collapse. The previous sonnet, following upon statements of candid reproach (93-5), seems to represent a climactic complaint and a breaking off. The Poet has sensed that his Friend is trying to "steal [him]self away" (92.1), is seeking ways to let the rejected lover down easily ("there can live no hatred in thine eye, / Therefore in that I cannot know thy change" [93.5-6]). Although the Poet determines to live like a "deceived husband," supposing his love to be "true" (93.1-2), he knows the truth of his abandonment and proclaims to the Friend, who has "pow'r to hurt, and will do none":

The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flow'r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
(94.1, 9-14)

That is, the Friend may soothe his conscience with the thought that his kind appearance will not reveal a treachery which will therefore do no harm. But such a grand deception is impossible. "When lilies fester, they smell— all the more foully for being so fair. In Sonnet 95 there is a sardonic warning: "The hardest knife ill us'd doth lose his edge." And in Sonnet 96, where the Friend is close to becoming a "stern wolf," betraying innocent lambs, the Poet urges:

But do not so, I love thee in such sort,
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.
(96.13-14)

This couplet repeats word for word that of Sonnet 36, where it had the meaning: "Do not honor me publicly, for by so doing you detract from your own reputation. For you to be honored is all that I need." In the later poem, the words have a different sense: "Do not lead innocents astray. Since my love has so closely identified me with you, I would share your dishonor." The repetition and reversal are an economical means both of reminding the Friend of a longstanding devotion and of asserting that love will no longer tolerate perfidy.

The Poet marks his return to the Friend after the "absence" by pouring forth extravagant compliments as though no breach had occurred (97-9). The Friend, apparently resentful of long inattention, is not easily soothed; and the Poet strains to apologize for his reticence or his silences and to prove that they are not irredeemable (100-3). He returns to some of the old eulogistic themes (104-7), now, however, manifesting an impatience with them. When previously he had spoken with the youth about the true (or the good) and the beautiful, it was often to remind him that beauty had to earn the honor of goodness (e.g., 54; 68-70). Now, faced with the Friend's insistent and inordinate appetite for praise, the eulogist offers him the kind of excessive tribute that ought to embarrass any recipient. The true, the good, and the beautiful,

"Fair," "kind," and "true" have often liv'd alone,
Which three till now never kept seat in one.
(105.13-14)

A special significance has been given to what becomes the Friend's epithet, "a god in love" (110.12)—"hallowed" be his name (108.8). "What's new to speak, what now to register," after this (108.3)?

But the Friend's mind is not to be swayed from what he perceives to be the Poet's infidelity, however vague a crime it may be; and the young man whose majesty has been wounded must be reassured, confessed and apologized to, and flattered (109-14). He is given what he wants. A silly bit of sophistry (115), however, (like Donne's "Loves Growth") proving that love can be both full and growing, ends with a double-edged couplet that hints at the Poet's exasperation: "Love is a babe, then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth grow" (115.13-14)—one interpretation of which is: "I've had to lie in order to give our love a chance." Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds") advances closer to the truth, for it describes the objective ideal ("Love alters not") measured against which no love is perfect:

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
(116.13-14)

"And if this be not error, no man has loved. At any rate, I have not, nor have you; for we both have strayed." Such is the implied coda if the poem is written (as the context suggests) in response to the Friend's charges of inconstancy. This frankness is returned to, with less indignation, in Sonnet 120, after three pieces of half-serious casuistry which set out a faulty "logic" of forgiveness; and thereafter the tone of pleading disappears. Sonnet 121 betokens a new era of truth-telling that will be short-lived, for it marks love's "doom and date."

I am that I am, and they that level it my
At my abuses reckon up their own.
(121.9-10)

The Poet will no longer denigrate or apologize for his imperfect love. He has thrown away the Friend's book, or "tables," and its "tallies," for he does not need them to remind him of his obligations (122.1, 10). His contrition has yielded to pride in his integrity; "No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change" (123-4). Love's law is "mutual render, only me for thee"; and he has given from his side all that he can (125.12). Since the Friend has not done and will not do so, despite all the Poet's efforts to teach and to move him, the only words that remain to be spoken are those of a sadly bitter twelve-line envoi, addressed to a "boy" who remains "lovely" and a boy, and who is left with a somewhat ungenerous reminder (there is no final forgiveness) of the important word whose higher meaning he has failed to learn:

[Time's] audit (though delay'd) answer'd must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
(126.1, 11-12, emphasis mine)

It is not clear that all of the poems which follow those addressed to the Friend are rhetorically directed to another person. "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame" and "Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth," are meditations that require no audience; and those sonnets in which the Poet speaks to the Lady (or ladies) do not reveal the same complex purposes as those in the larger group. "Lust in action" does not need the help of subtle or heroic lies; indeed, as we have already noted, except in the suppression of the "simple" truths of age and infidelity (138) this passion is better served by a witty, prurient, sometimes brutal honesty.

But candor may serve a rhetorical purpose, upon which we may reflect briefly. The Poet freely insults both the Lady and himself: she is only ambiguously beautiful (127, 130, 131, 137, 141, 147) and a slut ("the bay where all men ride" [137.6]); he, a fool, whose eyes and judgment desire has blinded (137, 148) and who loves his foolishness too much to become wise. These indignities yoke the two together in a corrupt complicity which, the argument goes, they might as well enjoy:

Will, will fulfill the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
(136.5-6)

Insults also serve either as threats or as compliments, to be presented as occasion demands. The dishonored Lady is pushed toward compliance by being reminded that she is not worth an extended effort (142). Or she is "flattered" by learning the extent of her power to degrade her lover's mind and conscience (149),

There are other kinds of appeal in these poems: to the Lady's pity (139), to her fear of detraction (140), to her sense of humor (143). In constructing a piece of Donne-like casuistry for her (151), the Poet compliments her wit. Not all is rhetorical game, however. The sonnets which pray for the Friend's release arise out of a pathetic helplessness in the Poet, which, he knows, no amount of pleading can remedy, for the Lady is "covetous" and the Friend only fictitiously "kind" (133.3-4; 134.3-6). The sufferer addresses only to himself the vulgar humor which this helplessness evokes in him:

I guess one angel in another's hell
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
(144.12-14)

In his complaints to the woman whom he despises yet craves, his reproaches are on occasion scathing enough to undermine any ulterior purpose in the rhetoric: "the bay where all men ride"; "the very refuse of thy deeds" (151.6);

Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted,
Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone.
(141.5-8)

And his reflections on lust (129) and mortality (146) stand self-contained, the former in its own fierce disgust, the latter in its longing for a transcendent purity.

There is no sign in the second group of sonnets that the Poet simply moves from rhetorical assault to introspective meditation. He is never unaware of the moral and psychological truths in his case, and he adverts to them as he will. Having spun no great lies to be unraveled, these poems come to no conclusion. They portray in a credible randomness conflicts which, as the platonism of one sonnet acknowledges, will not be resolved until "there's no more dying" (146.14).

The Poet once admits to his Friend that in public displays "I have … Gor'd mine own thoughts" (110.1-3). Whatever its meaning in context, the phrase may be seen as relevant to the speaker's private story as well, suggesting that he has "wounded" his thoughts in a denial of his knowledge; that he has made them particolored (as "gores," or wedges of cloth, turn motley a fool's breeches); and that he has dishonored them (a heraldic "gore" was "a shaped area interposed between two charges, and was used as a mark of cadency or abatement of honour" [W. G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath, eds., Shakespeare's Sonnets]). This admission itself may, as has been suggested, involve a goring of thought, but its use as a tactic does not detract from its basic truth. To his Friend the Poet offered his mind in a pastiche. To his Lady he presented the oblation of a stabbed and bleeding conscience, still alive to see but too weak to move a Will to action. On each count he has suffered an "abatement of honour." He feels himself shamed by "Th' expense of spirit" to which the wounding of his moral judgment has led. And in the "virtuous" lies which he told for the noblest of causes, it is impossible to separate heroism from ignominy. His fatherly concern, loving affection, patience, forgiveness, and long-suffering were all real; yet these virtues had to be devious (age in love knew how to be) to express themselves. Altruism was sometimes put to "use," flattery dispensed, wrongs publicly countenanced, truth suppressed, as love sacrificed some of its integrity that it might exist. And the sacrifice was also real. Unlike Helena's character, which was much more protected by appearing in an adult fairy tale, this liar's "nature" was "subdu'd / To what it work[ed] in, like the dyer's hand" (111.6-7)—and in vain, for the end which required but could not justify the means was lost. One might say in condescension that the Poet was proud and foolish to believe that he could ever succeed in creating love almost ex nihilo; and in saying so, such is Shakespeare's achievement in portraying a human dilemma in its bewildering complexity, one would be both correct and ungenerous. It is simpler to insist on what should now be evident, that the character whose situation has been examined here was neither an abjectly submissive nor an implausible protagonist.

Source: John Klause, "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Age in Love and the Goring of Thoughts," in Studies in Philology, Vol. LXXX, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 300-24.

Commentators frequently maintain that the young man of the sonnets is an indistinct figure, presented suggestively rather than concretely. David R. Shore, for example, agreed with others that there is a remarkable lack of visual specificity about him: the speaker praises the Friend's extraordinary beauty but doesn't tell us what he looks like. Similarly, J. B. Leishman remarked that we don't know how tall he is or the color of his eyes and hair; nor do we ever see him in the midst of some activity where he displays the charms and graces the Poet ascribes to him. Heather Dubrow (1981) further noted that the Friend never functions as an active participant in the sonnets. In addition to being nameless and shadow-like, he has no voice of his own, she pointed out. The speaker either reports what the young man has said or predicts what he's likely to say. In Dubrow's judgment, this contributes to a sense of detachment—a failure of engagement—between the reader and the Friend.

A number of critics have proposed that the Friend is a profoundly contradictory figure. Stephen Spender, for instance, described him as having a double or divided nature. On the one hand, Spender observed, there is the Poet's idealized portrait of the Friend as a youth of incomparable beauty and worth, yet we are also shown a young man who is cold, selfish, proud, and decadent. Though Hallett Smith focused on the sonnets' depiction of the Friend's merits and beauty, he also remarked that the young man is capable of slighting the Poet and even rejecting him. With a less sympathetic view of the Friend, John Klause emphasized the youth's inferior judgment and character. From Klause's perspective, the young man has not yet learned how to love or how to be worthy of love. Also suggesting that the Friend is a contradictory figure, Michael Cameron Andrews remarked on the disparity between the youth's attractive appearance and his offensive behavior. In Andrews's judgment, the Friend's unusual beauty masks a "rampant sexuality," and his most prominent attribute is deception.

Several commentators have called attention to a significant change in the relationship between the Poet and the Friend after Sonnets 1-17. Hallett Smith proposed that Sonnet 18 signals that the Poet's friend has become his beloved. Kenneth Muir also noted a distinct change in relations between the two men after Sonnet 17; furthermore, he argued that in Sonnet 20 the Poet recognizes that his love for the young man is erotic as well as spiritual. Robert Crosman interpreted Sonnets 1-17 as reflecting a period when the Poet and the Friend were establishing a personal association—one that would grow from friendship and patronage to a union of kindred souls, linked by mutual sympathy and understanding.

Stephen Spender
[Spender—the distinguished English poet and critic—suggests that the young man of the sonnets possesses a double or divided nature. Sometimes the Friend's mind and heart appear to be as beautiful as his outward firm, but on other occasions he is cold, selfish, arrogant, and dissolute. The Poet reacts to this basic disparity in various ways, Spender observes, ranging from objectivity and irony to bitterness and despair. Spender also discusses what he sees as the Friend's narcissism. He suggsts that the Poet's determination to preserve the young man's beauty in his verses reveals that he endows it with the same inestimable value as does the young man himself.]

Clearing our minds of preconceptions, if we read the sonnets simply accepting what they tell us about [the young man], what impression would we get? The first thing that would strike us is, I think, that he has opposite characteristics. He is divided between his ideal nature, corresponding to his outward beauty, and his actual behavior, which is shown to be cold, self-seeking, proud, and corrupt.

On the one hand the poet reiterates the theme of "kind and true" and "For nothing this wide universe I call, / Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all" (109). On the other hand the rose is cankered (95):

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!

On the one hand the young man is pure essence; on the other hand he is essence tainted at the source.

Shakespeare was, of course, addressing the sonnets to the friend. He was not making a word portrait of him, and we attempt to deduce his character from things written to him, about him. What we see are two things, characteristics which the poet doubtless found present in the real young man, but which are so idealized that it is difficult to form a realistic picture from them: and, opposite to this, references to the friend's lasciviousness, sensual faults, coldness, falsity, and his ill reputation, a kind of counter-image held up before his eyes as a terrible example. One cannot but be reminded of the scene in which Hamlet holds up before his mother's eyes "the counterfeit presentment of two brothers," one with "a station like the herald Mercury," the other "like a mildew'd ear."

From reading the sonnets and making my own deductions—which may be very different from those of other readers—the picture I have is of a person who produced in the minds of others the double impression of the self-fixated. The doubleness in such people consists essentially in their being loved, but being unable to love back in return, through the cold self-sufficiency and self-attachment which is the result of their very beauty. They like to be loved partly because being loved is reflected self-admiration, but partly also because they would themselves perhaps like to love and think that through being loved they may learn to do so. The combination of beauty, coldness, and desire to learn to love, gives them a kind of purity. But in their behavior they may be corrupt because they accept, with involuntary indifference, whatever love they get, though they retain the air of perpetual seeking. "What they are genuinely seeking is those qualities which they lack. When such a person is loved by an artist, he has the attraction of being an empty vessel, a blank page into which the admirer can read his own ideal.

[Bernard] Shaw points out that however much Shakespeare may have suffered on account of the dark lady, it is wrong to regard him as a victim. She can hardly have been happy reading about herself in 127, 130, and 138. The same holds good for the young man, whose behavior the sonnets analyze and excoriate. From the internal evidence of the sonnets he sometimes tried to answer accusation with counter-accusation. In 120 the poet admits in lines close to doggerel:

For if you were by my unkindness shaken
As I by yours, you've pass'd a hell of time,
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffer'd in your crime.

There are critics who idealize the young man and others who abhor him. But the poet's attitude to the friend is hardly discussed; and there is surely an element of unfairness in putting pressure on him to be something that he is not, and of then turning on him because he has failed to be the ideal. The poet seems often as much in love with the picture in his mind of the arranged relationship of complete mutuality as with the young man, who has to fit into this picture.

Yet so long as the poet continued to write sonnets I think that he must have believed in some ultimate quality of pure being which resided in the young man, under the misbehavior and the falsity. Even after bitter disillusionment he reverts to the purity of the original concept; in 105, for example:

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence.

So the sonnets express the conflict between idealization of the young man as the living equal of the poet's imaginings, and the realization that he is different from this. Sometimes the difference is analyzed as betrayal, sometimes the poet endeavors to find a basis on which he can accept it and yet retain the relationship. Sonnet 36 is an extreme example of acceptance of difference, in which he admits that their ways must be separate: "Let me confess that we two must be twain" and yet their "undivided loves are one." He invents metaphors for the relationship which suggest a rethinking of what it really is or must be. In 37, it is of father and son, and, indeed, where the young man fails, it tends to shift from the pattern of mutuality to that of a son whose errors are seen and suffered and forgiven by a loving father. In 33, contemplating the withdrawal of the "sun" into the "region cloud," the poet resumes the pun in the couplet with:

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

In 93, desperation drives the poet to the metaphor of a "deceived husband"; and frequendy he is a slave who tends upon, and waits for, his lord.

Whether one thinks, as I do, that Shakespeare continued, in spite of everything, to love and (like a forgiving father) believe in the young man, or that the disillusionment of realization led to his regarding him only (or with very little qualification of charitable feeling) as a subject for irony, affects one's interpretation of the very important 94, "They that have power to hurt and will do none."

After a very close analysis, William Empson concludes (in Some Versions of Pastoral) that this sonnet expresses almost total contempt for the friend. The contempt is qualified only by the poet discovering, through his pretending to praise what he does not admire, "a way of praising W. H. in spite of everything."

It is not possible here to argue my way through Empson's close analysis, for which I have great respect. My disagreement with him is not in disputing his interpretation of references and complexities of meaning in particular phrases, but because I think that, through the irony and the realization, there seems to me a note of exhortation which still clings to belief, and which arises from a love that endures. In a word, I would say the sonnet found "a way of loving in spite of everything," rather than, or as well as, a way of praising. The love is cruel, but praise would be nothing except cruel and contradictory, since it means praising what the poet did not regard as praiseworthy. If it is praise, the sonnet is, as Empson notes, an "evasion." But if it is love, it is more in the nature of a desperate warning.

My argument is clear if I say that the two last lines of the previous sonnet (93), "How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow, /If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!" are more exhortatory than condemnatory. The poet still clings to the hope that even if while the young man's face shows nothing but sweet love (" … heaven in thy creation did decree / That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell") his heart (unlike others whose false hearts show in the "wrinkles strange" of their faces) may be false—that even so, he can, by an effort of willing truth, make inner being conform to the outward appearance of love. The kind of exertion required is not of making a lie true, but of making what is true, which has for some perverse reason become falsified, revert to its real nature, become true again. It is an argument based on love which appeals to the imagination to realize in action the truth which exists. It is a creative attitude different from a modern irony, though of course it uses irony. In fact it is very much the type of argument which Hamlet uses to his mother when, showing her the pictures of her two husbands, he appeals to her to use her eyes (her inner eyes) in order to make a choice which is imposed on her simply by her seeing which is false and which is true.

Condensing the argument of 94, the desperate appeal, based on a cool appreciation of the young man's nature, seems to me of this kind: "If you are cold and self-centered as I have now come to realize you are, then you may perhaps participate in the power, justice, and virtue of those who are detached from passion, but who nevertheless control the lives of others; but to be like them, you must have the virtue of coldness which is chastity. You are, after all, more like the funereal lily than the generous rose; but remember that when the cold are false, their corruption is far more evil than that of the warm." The thought is perhaps that the warm, being essentially more alive (and not like stone) go on being capable of self-renewal and repentance.

This is very much the attitude that a father, himself believing in the personal values of human relations and love and imagination, might feel toward a much-loved son, whom he discovered to be of a cold nature, but possessed of beauty and power to entrap others. The father does not cease to love his son, but begins to realize that his moral character will be ruined, unless he match his power with scrupulousness, his coldness with chastity. Otherwise the corruption of his personality will be worse than that of a person who is lascivious but warm-hearted, and because warm-hearted, capable of contrition and change.

The sonnet expresses, of course, a change of attitude, coming—as 93 and 95, the sonnets on each side of it, show— from a shock of realization of the deep corruption of the young man.

That the powerful are praised has surprised many readers. Previously, although a world of power has been taken for granted, it has not been discussed; it has remained the background to personal relations. But suddenly the poet expresses his admiration for the cold and powerful. If one remembers once again that the sonnets are one side of a dialogue, this is not so surprising. Number 94 was written perhaps during a phase when the poet was most critical of the friend's character. Surely, the friend may have said to the poet: "The truth is that your sorts of people are not mine. The people I admire are the great and powerful, and I want to belong to them." In this case the sonnet may be seen as taking up the theme, accepting, with whatever undertones of bitterness and despair, that the friend might belong to this other world, but using the acceptance as another way of hammering in the lesson of pure being.

Although 94 expresses such a shift from personal to public values, from the imagination to the world of power, the thematic material introduced in the sestet, which indicates the presence of the young man, remains the same as in earlier sonnets.

In fact the poem takes the form of a general statement about the virtues of the great and powerful, in the octave and then, in the sestet, applies this to the young man.

The octave is, as it were, a different voice, not quite that of the poet, but to which the poet assents, indeed lends his gift, stating a case in the strongest and most favorable terms.

The case is that those who are great and powerful and who, although they might do so, do not use their power to cause others pain—those who, while making others act, remain immovable themselves, and are untempted, incorruptible—merit their position. There is a feeling of rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. There is irony, but there is also assent. Angelo, in Measure for Measure, is admired so long as he remains cold and powerful. It is when he becomes lascivious and corrupt that he appears far worse than the carnal sinners on whom he sits in judgment.

In the first line of the sestet the young man appears in a guise with which we have been made familiar very early on, in fact in the first sonnet, where we read of the young man, " … thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, / Feeds't thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel." Here he is the summer's flower, "to the summer sweet, / Though to itself it only live and die." The position is restated. In the first sonnet the self-sufficient lovely boy is asked to marry. Later he is asked to love the friend. Now he is being warned that perhaps he would do well to model himself on the coldly powerful, since he is himself cold. But if he does so, let him remain like them, solitary, chaste. If he does not do so, the lily (which he has chosen to become rather than the rose to which he has previously been compared) will, festering, "smell far worse than weeds."

Doubtless there is irony here, and bitterness, but what seems to me the strongest feeling is a despairing acceptance of the young man's coldness combined with an equally despairing warning.

The first seventeen sonnets are usually … regarded as being outside the main series. They are so, but they are also a kind of prelude, and throw light on the character of the friend.

Here, when the poet is exhorting the friend to marry, he also makes very apparent the reasons why he should not do so. They are that he is concentrated on, almost married to, his own image. The arguments used to persuade him to marry are that a son would provide, as it were, a mirror projecting the image of that beauty which culminates in his face now, into the future (13):

O, that you were yourself! but, love, you are
No longer yours than you yourself here live.

So while the friend is warned of the dangers of "having traffic with thyself alone," the poet nevertheless shares with him the view that he is the paragon. The poet puts himself at the young man's side fighting for the cause which is that a means should be found to perpetuate his beauty exactly as it now is. The poet offers two means of achieving this result. One is fathering a child, and the other, which plays an even more persistent part in the sequence, is the poetry. Sonnet 17 unites these two themes in the culminating couplet:

But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme.

So that while the poet dutifully uses the poetry to urge the friend to marriage, his verse itself is advertized as a means of achieving the same result as a son might do. In a manner of speaking, both child and poetry are mirrors of the young man's own face.

The modern reader may well be tempted to condemn the obvious narcissism of the friend, which Shakespeare exploits so much as argument. But it should be noted that Shakespeare does not appear to condemn it, though he may, later, deplore its callous effects. But he is in complete agreement with the friend as to his beauty, as though it is a value which both share, the young man having his face, and the poet having his poetry, which he identifies with the lovely boy. The poet has an attitude towards the young man's beauty which seems exactly the same as that of the young man himself. Both regard it as a unique value which must by every means possible be preserved.

The young man's narcissism—which, versed in modern psychology, we are apt to condemn—may indeed have been precious to the poet. For it is very difficult in the world of the sonnets to draw a line between the young man's self-regard—which the poet supports—and the claims that the poet makes for his immortal verse. To us, the readers, they may seem very different, but given the extraordinary aesthetic cult of the young man's external appearance, which is central to the sonnets, they may seem the same thing. Again and again the argument is put forward that the poetry is the immortalization of the young man's beauty. The boy's beauty has the inestimable virtue of being life. The virtue of the poetry is as a perpetuating mirror which freezes on its bright surface the fleeting image which will die. The attraction of the young man is that of all life, made incarnate in an incomparable beauty of form.

Narcissus fell in love with himself, but the water in which he gazed at his reflection surely also fell in love with his image. The mirror is in love with the mirrored because it becomes the gazer—that which the gazer never succeeds in doing himself. The poet through his poetry can retain the beauty which the friend himself is bound to lose. Moreover, the poet is changed into the beauty of the youth by virtue of retaining that image in his heart (22):

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date …

Most critics are puzzled by the insistence of the poet on the contrast between his "chopped antiquity" and the young man's beauty and youth. Nothing is really less surprising. For a relationship which is based on the idea of identity is inevitably upset by dissonances. So the great and perhaps excessive insistence on the immortality of the poetry in these poems is a claim made not for the poet but for the friend. It is he who is going to survive in these lines, we are told through many variations (63):

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

So the poet was occupied in giving back, by the means of his poetry, the image of the friend to himself. To us this bargain seems unequal, because all we have of the young man is the written words, which are Shakespeare's self. We should remember, though, that for the poet, the matter was different. He was taking life in its miraculous complexity and giving back words. The fact that the words are so marvelous is due (or may have seemed to him due) to the fact that the living reality was of such extraordinary value. Occasionally, for example, in 53, we experience the impact of million-faceted flesh, worshipped as the moment of beauty never matched in all past time:

What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

The mirror image constantly occurs in the sonnets. There is also implicitly the idea of two mirrors reflecting one another with rays that reach into infinity. When the "lovely boy" looks into the friend's poetry, he sees not only his own image, but that the physical presence of the poet has been changed into that beauty.

Perhaps the significance of the narcissism of the friend may be that if the narcissist has a character that requires a mirror, the artist also requires a mirror of life in which to see his art. As Hoelderlin observed in Socrates and Alcibiades, "often in the end the wise pay homage to the most beautiful." The world of art or thought which fills the mind of genius is essentially lonely. He finds it least of all reflected in the minds of other artists, and the public. He seeks it therefore in the beautiful, particularly among those in whom nature seems to have flowered spontaneously without the interruption of too much intellectual process. The narcissist, in his self-cultivation (Montherlant describes the poet as one who gives himself up to "noble self-cultivation") may appear to have an affinity with the artist. The narcissist might be described as a living poem going in search of a poet.

At the same time, the discovery that the narcissist is vulgar, that his self-absorption and isolation do not prevent his belonging to the "region cloud," that he will look in any broken fragment of glass to see the same reflection of himself, is inevitable. But there was a time in the sonnets when the young man's beauty seemed of the season which is fresh in nature and which was also incomparably fresh in Shakespeare's poetry.

The failure was that of the poet to discover his own inner being mirrored—as it should have been—in the young man's external beauty, and leading there to the love in which they shared their being. The poetry is a plea to him, to be true to his own appearance, and in doing this, true to the poet's imagination.

Source: Stephen Spender, "The Alike and the Other," in The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 91-128.

Hallett Smith
[Smith surveys the personality of the Friend and his relationship with the Poet as these are generally represented in Sonnets 18-126. What is most distinctive about the Friend, the critic proposes, is that he is an ideal subject for courtly love poems; in addition, he seems to be blessed with as much virtue as physical beauty, and, at least for a time, he returns the love bestowed on him by the Poet. With respect to the Friend's fault or flaw, Smith considers what this might be and concludes that whatever its nature—and no matter how grievious it is—the Poet will always try to justify it and exonerate the young man.]

It has been said that in the first seventeen sonnets "Shakespeare wrote not so much as if he were in love himself, but as if he were trying to persuade a friend to love and many, they describe, as it were from the outside, the fruits of love" [John Russell Brown, in Shakespeare and His Comrades]. It has also been noticed by many readers that the first group of sonnets advocates prodigality, urges procreation, and tries to influence a young man about whom the reader can gather almost nothing except that he is a bachelor. He has no "character" or personality; he is physically beautiful and should therefore pass on that beauty to succeeding generations. Not to do so would be not only miserly but also a sin against nature and against the heritage he has from his ancestors.

The focus is very different in the sonnets numbered 18-126 in 1609. The Fair Friend is now the beloved of the speaker; he has a personality and a character. The sonnets express over and over again a moral concern about him. Prodigality is not encouraged, it is deplored. Great attention is paid to "inward worth" without neglecting "outward fair" (16.11). Even the conventional praise which promises to confer immortality is different. No longer is there a half-serious rivalry between a son and poetry to perpetuate the beauty of the young man. Poetry has won the contest; it is now the "mightier way" to make war upon that bloody tyrant, Time (16.1-2).

Sonnet 18 is fuller, more confident, more resonant than its comparable poem in the first series, "When I consider everything that grows" (15). It begins by displaying the speaker as "a poet whose art is the creation of metaphor." [Anne Ferry, in All in War with Time].

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too shore a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The promise of immortality through verse is a commonplace of classical and Renaissance poetry. But Shakespeare's use of the word "summer" drifts from the literal to the figurative in a very subtle way. When Titania, Queen of the Fairies, introduces herself to the transformed Bottom, she says

I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee, therefore go with me.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (III, i, 154-56)

And the soliloquy which opens Richard III begins

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York.

The literal summer has its all too brief a time; its weather is sometimes too hot, or perhaps cloudy; but the Fair Friend's eternal summer shall not fade, or become less fair, or die, because poetry preserves it. In another mood, reflecting on the transience of beauty, Shakespeare calls the Fair Friend "beauty's summer" (104.14).

The most important thing about the Fair Friend addressed in the sonnets after 17 is that he is the perfect subject for poetry. He is more consistent, more reliable, more permanent than a summer's day because of the poetry about him. This brings the poet and the Fair Friend into a far more intimate relationship than existed between the bachelor and the advocate of marriage in the first seventeen sonnets. As Rosalie Colie put it [in Shakespeare's Living Art], "clearly, the relation of poet to this friend is based on poetry; poetry is not only the conventional instrument of appeal to patron, friend, and lover, the conventional voice in beauty's praise; but poetry is also the poet himself, ingrained in his personality and thus marking (the dyer's hand) all his human realizations and relations."

As a subject for poetry, the Fair Friend is inexhaustible. "How can my muse want subject to invent" asks Sonnet 38, "While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse / Thine own sweet argument?" Sonnet 76 maintains that the poet has no other subject: "O know, sweet love, I always write of you, / And you and love are still [always] my argument." In Sonnet 79 the poet declares that the subject exceeds his poetic powers: "I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument / Deserves the travail of a worthier pen." This modesty is traditional, and though it may seem inconsistent with the claims made for immortality through the poet's pen, readers of Shakespeare's sonnets (and indeed some parts of the plays) must be prepared to abandon logic when the occasion requires.

In other collections of Elizabethan sonnets, most of which can be called sequences with better justification than this one can, the beautiful person celebrated is a woman. Sometimes she is a real person; Sidney's Stella is Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich. Sometimes she is an invention, as Giles Fletcher's Licia is. Into which class the Fair Friend falls is quite uncertain. There have been many real persons suggested for the role, but all of these suggestions are wasted effort if, as is quite possible, the Fair Friend is an invention of the poet's. On this subject there is no certainty; the theories flare up and fade out, get lost among the shadows; the poetry remains.

It does matter, of course, what sort of figure the sonnets are addressed to—those which are clearly addressed to someone else, not to the poet himself and not to nobody. First of all, the Fair Friend has one quality in common with the heroines of Elizabethan sonnet cycles addressed to women: he is beautiful. But unlike the ladies of the other sonneteers, he loves the poet: Sonnet 25 contrasts the situation of the poet with that of people who can boast of public honor and proud titles, with great prince's favorites, with military heroes—all of whom may lose what they most enjoy.

Then, happy I that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove, nor be removed.

But the Fair Friend's beauty is not all external. He is said to have surpassing "worth" or virtue:

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behavior.…
(79.7-10)

At times the poet has failed to do justice to his worth:

And therefore have I slept in your report,
That you yourself, being extant, well might show
How far a modern quill doth come too short,
Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.
(83.5-6)

Sometimes this worth or virtue is identified with constancy, which is, of course, natural enough in love poetry:

In all external grace you have some part,
But you like none, none you, for constant heart.
(53.13-14)

A recent critic finds "worth" to signify something about poetry: "Throughout the sonnets, the paradox of poetry turns on the question of 'worth.' Even in his most disillusioned moods when thoughts of the world's corruption lead him to anticipate his own decay and death,

Shakespeare never forgets the power of art to redeem life." [John D. Bernard, "'To Constancie Confin'de': The Poetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets"]. Finally, I think, "worth" is an aspect of love that is fundamentally mysterious, as in the proclamation that love is

the star to every wand'ring bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his highth be taken.
(116.7-8)

The Fair Friend is younger than the poet: "My glass shall not persuade me I am old / So long as youth and thou are of one date / … How can I then be elder than thou art?" (22.1-2, 8). He is of superior rank "Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage / Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit" (26.1-2).

In fact, the poet is sometimes apprehensive that close association with him may cause social embarrassment or disgrace to the Fair Friend:

I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed, guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honor me,
Unless thou take that honor from thy name.
(36.9-12)

He carries this attitude to the extreme of warning the Fair Friend not to mourn for him after his death, lest the "wise world" mock him for caring about one so lowly (71 and 72).

Yet for all his "worth" and constancy, the Fair Friend is capable of snubbing the poet, of rejecting him as Prince Hal, newly become King Henry V, rejected his old crony Falstaff:

Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,
When love converted from the thing it was
Shall reasons find of settled gravity …
(49.5-8)

As M. M. Mahood says [in Shakespeare's Wordplay], this quatrain is "the rejection of Falstaff in little. The parallel is strengthened by the sun image (as in Hal's 'Yet herein will I imitate the sun') and by the way gravity calls to mind the Lord Chief Justice's reproach to Falstaff." She continues to characterize the Fair Friend as "a brilliant, prudent, calculating egotist."

Sonnet 87 ("Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing"), … is one of several in which the Fair Friend has rejected the poet or in some way broken with him. Sonnet 88, which begins

When thou shalt be dispos'd to set me light,
And place my merit in the eye of scorn,

promises casuistically that the speaker will take the side of the Fair Friend and so win glory because he indeed belongs to the Fair Friend. Sonnet 89 likewise embraces the reason why the poet has been abandoned:

Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offense;

He will, he promises, side with the Fair Friend against himself:

For thee, against myself I'll vow debate,
For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate.

Sonnet 90 is closely linked, arguing that the Friend should hate him now, if ever, "Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross"; the Friend's abandonment should come first, in the vanguard of the other troubles, because in comparison the other troubles will then seem light.

These sonnets have a common theme and they share the same rhetorical strategy. But just as, in the plays, dialogue may lead up to and prepare for a soliloquy, so these sonnets, addressed to a persona, can be viewed as preliminary to the meditative Sonnet 94, "They that have power to hurt and will do none." This sonnet generalizes; it is a "fearful meditation," connected of course with the commonplace, optimae corruptio pessima [the worst corrupts the best]. But it should be understood as a reverie after the speeches of Sonnets 87, 88, 89, and 90 have been made.

What else do we know of the fault or the flaw of the Friend? Sonnets 33-35 portray it in a favorite Shakespearean metaphor, that of the sun being obscured by clouds. It is used, we recall, by Prince Hal in his soliloquy notifying the audience that he will emerge from the cloud of dissipation now covering him and shine as a true prince should. Sonnet 33 is one of the most eloquent:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alcumy,
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
'With all-triumphant splendor on my brow,
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth:
Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.

The structure shows a clear division between octave and sestet. The sound texture is very rich, displaying alliteration and assonance not only within lines but across them. The movement is steady and regular, broken only by the exclamations in line II. The rhyme words are firm and strong, modified by the feminine rhyme in the couplet. The sonnet is an example of a rhetorical figure which Puttenham describes [in The Arte of English Poesie] as "the figure Paradiastole, which … we call the Curry-favell, as when we make the best of a bad thing … as, to call an unthrift, a liberal! gentleman: the foolish-hardy, valiant or couragious: the niggard, thriftie … moderating and abating the force of the matter by craft, and for a pleasing purpose."

Sonnet 34 is more severe, even though the Friend seems to have repented:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy brav'ry in their rotten smoke?
Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a slave can speak
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace;
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief,
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss,
Th' offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offense's [cross].
Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds,
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.

This is addressed directly to the Fair Friend, in contrast to the meditative Sonnet 33; it is full of personal pronouns. There is no structural division after line 8, though the imagery changes after line 6 from weather to medicine. However, there may be a link between the raindrops on the poet's face and the tears on the Friend's. The poem gains strength from a concentrated vocabulary including disgrace, shame, gref, loss, sorrow and cross. The idea of a wound that could be cured by a salve but leaves a disgrace has led some editors to refer to Tarquin as he leaves Lucrece's bed:

Bearing away the wound that nothing healeth,
The scar that will despite of cure remain.
(731-32)

Sonnet 35, the last of the little series on the Friend's fault, continues the exculpation of the friend and accordingly is another Curry-favell, but it also confesses the casuistry of the poet, which the rhetorical figure Paradiastole was not supposed to do. This emphasis on the self consciousness of the poetry itself is very characteristic of Shakespeare, though it has baffled some of the critics and expositors:

No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss.
Excusing [thy] sins more than [thy] sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense—
Thy adverse party is thy advocate—
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence.
Such civil war is in my love and hate
That I an accessary needs must be
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

The opening words, "No more be griev'd" give us warning that platitudes are to follow, as in all attempts to offer consolation to a grieving person. A good example is Claudius' exhortation to Hamlet in I, ii, 87-117 of that play. The second quatrain involves the speaker in the fault making: it is a fault to justify a fault. From line 9 we learn that the Friend's fault was sensual, and the poet brings in "sense" or reason to justify it.… The identification of the fault as sensuality puts this sonnet into the company of Sonnets 40-42; in the first of these the Fair Friend is called "Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows," but these sonnets are apparently out of place in the 1609 order and seem to belong with the Dark Lady sonnets.… The couplet of Sonnet 93 is perhaps germane:

How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

Sonnets 67 ("Ah, wherefore with infection should he live") and 68 ("Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn") accuse the Friend of artificiality and reflect the bias against cosmetics and extravagant dress which seems almost a personal trait of Shakespeare. But the following sonnets, 69 ("Those parts of thee that the world's eye doth view") and 70 ("That thou are blamed shall not be thy defect") are more specific about the Fair Friend and his reputation in the world. People who praise his beauty also look into his character:

[Thy] outward thus with outward praise is crown'd,
But those same tongues that give thee so thine own,
In other accents do this praise confound
By seeing farther than the eye hath shown.
They look into the beauty of thy mind,
And that in guess they measure by thy deeds,
Then, churls, their thoughts (although their eyes were kind)
To thy fair flower add the tank smell of weeds:
But why thy odor matcheth not thy show,
The [soil] is this, that thou dost common grow.
(69.5-14)

… Line 12 takes us back, quite direcdy, to Sonnet 94, with its reference to those who "rightly do inherit heaven's graces / And husband nature's riches from expense" and of course to the smell of weeds. Even more closely does it approach the two following sonnets, 95 ("How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame") and 96 ("Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness") whose first lines suffice to show the nature of the fault in the friend. From the poet's point of view, however, the fault is mainly important because it is the poet's business to defend and justify it.

Source: Hallett Smith, "Personae," in The Tension of the Lyre: Poetry in Shakespeare's Sonnets, Huntington Library, 1981, pp. 13-41.

As many critics have pointed out, Sonnets 127-52 generally portray the speaker's mistress in a disparaging way. J. B. Leishman noted that not only does the Poet despise her, he loathes himself for loving this woman who has enslaved his young friend. Philip Edwards compared the warm and charming description of the woman in Sonnet 130 with the subsequent depiction of her as "an agent of damnation" from whom the speaker turns away in disgust. By comparison, John Klause argued that the Poet continues to desire her despite his revulsion, and their mutual depravity keeps them together. In his important essay on the Dark Lady, James Winny pointed out that most of the speaker's descriptions of her suggest, rather brutally, that she is fickle, ill-favored, and cruelly contemptuous of his feelings. And yet, as Heather Dubrow (1987) and others have remarked, negative appraisals of the woman are frequently followed by positive ones. Dubrow maintained that the speaker's inconsistent portrait of his mistress should make us wary of trusting his judgment and forming any definitive interpretations about her character.

Similarly, S. Schoenbaum suggested that because the disclosures about the Dark Woman are obscure and contradictory, and because the speaker's hostility toward her is so apparent, it is difficult to draw reliable conclusions about her. M. L. Stapleton has recendy argued that the Poet's description of his mistress is neither accurate nor reliable. We must always keep in mind, she warned, that the Dark Lady is entirely a creation of the Poet's voice—and he is a self-admitted liar. Kenneth Muir is one of several critics who have emphasized the bitterness and anger in many of the Dark Lady sonnets, but Muir also pointed out that this mood changes swiftly and frequently as the speaker turns from attacking or insulting her to begging for her kindness or forgiving her transgressions.

Many commentators—including Douglas L. Peterson, Katharine M. Wilson, and James Winny—have read the Dark Lady sonnets as a satirical treatment of Petrarchan sonnet conventions. Peterson maintained that Shakespeare's verses mock the Petrarchan ideal of the fair beloved and parody the traditional sonnet modes of praise, complaint, and plea. Wilson, on the other hand, asserted that the Dark Lady sonnets specifically satirize the artificiality of sonnets written by Shakespeare's English predecessors and contemporaries. Reading the Dark Lady series as a subversion of conventional attitudes toward love in the Petrarchan tradition, Winny identified several targets of Shakespeare's satire, including the lover's devotion, his beloved's moral perfection, and the ennobling power of love.

Philip Edwards
[Seeking an explanation for the different moods and tones in Sonnets 127-52, Edwards proposes that these reflect the Poet's struggle to exercise his feelings of hopelessness by expressing them in terse. In the critic's judgment, the Dark Lady represents carnal love—a debilitating and contaminating passion that degrades the Poet and imperils his soul. The Poet fully comprehends the threat this liaison poses, Edwards contends, yet he cannot extricate himself from the bondage of sexual desire. Caught in this dilemma, he experiments with a variety of poetic perspectives, searching for one that will make sense of his predicament and allow him to transcend it.]

The characteristic of the Dark Woman sonnets is that the suggestion of a 'real' relationship is created, running beneath poems which, sometimes ostentatiously, show their failure to crystallize and comprehend this relationship. It is the impression of failure which provides the evidence of the 'real' relationship. It is like defining God by negatives, showing the inability of language to describe Him. We may often enough indulge our fancy about the real relationship which lay behind some love poem and imagine that in life things were not quite as the poet has put it. But love poems do not usually make the effort to hint at a discrepancy; the sense of life is what most of them try to give. I suggest that the most profitable way to read the Dark Woman sonnets is to think of Shakespeare watching his creature-poet at work The sonnets, strung along a thin line of narrative about wooing, conquest and disgust, are a poet's ordering of his own life, his answering 'the daily necessity of getting the world right; and Shakespeare is observing his grim failure. As the affair intensifies from courtship to consummation to bitterness, Shakespeare's ironic detachment from his creature becomes less and less, but a distance is maintained throughout.

Each of the first four sonnets is a posture; each introduces a particular kind of artistic ordering which is to be followed up later. Sonnet 127, 'In the old age black was not counted fair', proves that the dark woman is beautiful and is the first of a number of courtship poems in which the sonneteer, delighting in his own poetic wit, denies the distinction between ugliness and beauty, and hence, by traditional symbolism, denies the distinction between evil and good. The second poem, 'How oft when thou, my music, music play'st', is one of those classed as 'independent' by Professor [Brents] Stirling. It seems to me the very necessary introduction of the purely conventional wooing-poem. The humble lover watches his mistress at her music, envies the keys which touch her hand and pleads for the gratification of a kiss. To explode this world of sighing poetry-love, there follows the great sonnet on lust (129):

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this me world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun, the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Magnificent though this sonnet is, taken by itself, it gains a special force from its position. The early sonnets in this sequence, before the reversal in 137, provide a study in self-deception, and the evidence for this is sonnet 129. Here the poet has a momentary vision of himself as a madman, here he sees his courtship as the longings of lust for its reward of self-loathing. Every wooing-poem which follows this is coloured by it; the poet who has had this vision of what he is doing in seeking the favours of the dark woman goes on writing poems which 'convince' him that he is in no danger, poems in which he is able to smother his moral sense in his delight in his own poetic skill. Far from being an ending to the sequence, the sonnet on lust finds its proper place near the beginning. It poses the question to which the sequence as a whole finds that there is no answer; why does a man willingly poison himself?

In the fourth sonnet, 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun', the poet explores the possibilities of the common anti-petrarchan convention.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

At first, this sonnet seems to be a direct attempt to cut through the nonsense of 128 and to come to a 'real' relationship. Rejecting idiotic comparisons, it seems a sane and human acceptance of a woman for what she is. The poet's love seems truer and warmer in its independence of poetic flattery. For the reader to see the poem only in this way, however, is to slip into the very trap which Shakespeare wants to show his poet falling into. Who is the woman who is contemplated so humanly, so warmly, so confidently? The Dark Woman, who is shortly to be shown as an agent of damnation. When we read this poem in its proper context, we can see that the final couplet conveys a double impression. First we congratulate the poet on the honesty of his love which needs no lying comparisons to assist it. Then we reflect on the continuous play in these sonnets between fairness-beauty-virtue and darkness-ugliness-vice, and we wonder whether a sophistical confusion between these two poles is not at work here too. Because all women, however beautiful, are 'belied' by being compared with goddesses, are all women equally beautiful and equally worthy of love? The poet has a right to love whom he will, and to accept a plain woman is no crime, but in so far as the ground of his acceptance is the equality of women as non-goddesses, he shows himself insensitive to the distinction (symbol of a moral distinction) between ugliness and beauty. Shakespeare does not say outright that the woman is ugly; students are taught that 'reeks' does not imply halitosis or garlic. But no one can read the poem without a sense of considerable unattractiveness in the dun breasts, black hair, pallid cheeks and breath which, if it is not sour, is not exactly sweet. The sonnet may be seen as a parody of the usual anti-petrarchan sonnet in which the poet rejects ornamental comparisons because true beauty needs no such aids. While showing that a woman gains nothing from false flattery the poet implies that physical demerits (the emblems of spiritual demerits) are of no account with him. With the gallantry of his wit, he once more confounds all distinction between women. To understand what the lover really achieves in this sonnet, we can turn to any of the later poems, sonnet 150 for example:

To make me give the lie to my true sight
And swear that brightness doth not grace the day.

The ugliness of the woman is made obvious in the subtle poem which follows (131). The poet jokes that in spite of her unpromising face, his mistress must be a conventional beauty because she tyrannizes over his heart like the heroine of any ordinary sonnet-sequence. He again denies distinction ('Thy black is fairest in my judgement's place') and tells us outright, for the first time, of the woman's viciousness:

In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
And thence this slander, as I think, proceeds.

What a great joke it is for him to be in love (if that's the word) with an ugly woman of dubious character and to be able to prove her as fair as the fairest—and, by means of the proof, insult her.

Sonnet 132 carries the jesting on and deepens the sense of ugliness. Conventional comparisons, rejected in 130, are trotted out with an accent which cleverly degrades the woman as they seem to praise her.

And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west
As those two mourning eyes become thy face.

The denial in this poem is emphatic, 'Then will I swear beauty herself is black', and the denial is promised as a consequence of her granting him 'pity'. The denial of value is a price he is willing to pay for the satisfaction of his lust.

The 'triangle' sonnets, which follow, are important in reminding us at this stage of the existence of the other kind of love and of the contamination of the higher by the lower kind. The two poems make the woman's 'black deeds' more real as they describe her promiscuity and draw her as a demon whose loathsome magnetism enslaves her victims. The extraordinary 'will' sonnets, 135 and 136, show what wit can do to turn what is dreadful into amusement; the lover's plea for pity is advanced in a crudely physical way. His arguments for being admitted to her favours are at the level of mutual sexual satisfaction; he equates his whole being with his carnal desire and his virility:

And then thou lovest me, for my name is Will

He is still laughing at the joke as he unites with the woman he knows the worst of in a congress whose emotional and spiritual consequences he has already foreseen in sonnet 129. The climax of the sequence—the 'kiss' sonnet of discreeter series is sonnet 137. At the moment of fruition, there is immediate and overpowering revulsion.

Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes
That they behold and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks,
Be anchored in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes' falsehood hast thou forged hooks
Whereto the judgement of my heart is tie?
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world's common place?
Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,
To put fair truth upon so foul a face?
In things right true my heart and eye have erred,
And to this false plague are they now transferred.

The question, why does a man betray himself and swallow the bait?, continues for the rest of the sequence, but in the end there is no answer to give beyond the simple statement that it has happened.

The sequence continues with a series of sonnets written in bed. The rapid alterations of mood, the contradictions in viewpoint, may seem bewildering, but they are by no means an indication that the order is haphazard. The mood as a whole is of restless conflict in the single attempt to write the poem that makes the unbearable look bearable. Sonnet 138 ('When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her though I know she lies') tries to follow the pattern of conciliation used in the sequence to the young man—not to insult and despise but to recognize and accept one's own imperfections as well as those of one's partner. But the resolution has a very hollow sound; they will lie to each other and each will pretend to believe the other, for 'love's best habit is in seeming trust'. On this thin surface they will try to build, but all that they have with which to build is sexual pleasure:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

In 139, he shows himself afraid of his own facility for consoling himself by writing down specious excuses for the woman. The mood is very similar to the mood of sonnet 35 in which the poet begins to pour out tired exculpatory analogies on his friend's behalf, and then pulls himself up in disgust at his own lack of moral courage. In sonnets 141 and 142, the word 'sin' enters for the first time, and the poet sees his suffering as punishment. Orthodox moral judgement of himself and his mistress as adulterers brings a new perspective into the sequence.

Sonnets 143, 144, 145, 146 seem to me to be of central importance. Two of them are very weak, the other two are very powerful. Indeed, in 145 ('Those lips that Love's own hand did make') we have one of the worst of all the sonnets, and in 146 ('Poor soul the centre of my sin earth') one of the best. But when he is writing badly, Shakespeare does so intentionally, not for the first or the only time (we may think of the sonnets given to the young nobles in Law's Labour's Lost). In each of these sonnets, Shakespeare—or rather his poet—tries to make the peculiarly unhappy fact of his predicament conform to a different poetic 'idea'; he tries out different objectifications of the intolerable position he finds himself in—and none of them 'works'. Sonnet 143, a study in whimsical self-derision, turns the lover into a neglected baby crying for the mother who is chasing a hen. If this ludicrous image for deserted lover and predatory female lowers the poet, the poem yet provides in the rounded movement of its own logic the promise of consolation:

But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me
And play tbe mothers part, kiss me, be kind.

The next sonnet in the group is 'Two loves I have of comfort and despair', which we have already discussed. Like the lust-sonnet, it gains extra depth from its position, rudely cancelling out the propositions of a weak preceding sonnet. It is followed in its turn by a remarkable song (145). A characteristic and understandable note on this appears in the Harbage and Bush 'Pelican' edition of the Sonnets: "The authenticity of this sonnet, in tetrameters and rudimentary diction, has been questioned, with considerable show of reason; in any case, it is not in context with the adjacent sonnets.' The Ingram and Redpath edition says:

These trivial octosyllabics scarcely deserve reprinting. Some editors have considered the poem spurious on account of its feeble childishness. It would seem arbitrary, however, to rule out the possibility that one of Shakespeare's trivia should have found its way into a collection not approved by him.

Those lips that Love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate'
To me that languished for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet;
'I hate' she altered with an end
That followed it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away.
'I hate' from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying 'not you'.

It can surely be argued that this absurd song does fit the place it is given. The idea of the woman's hate, as opposed to coldness or indifference, was first introduced in 142 and is continued here and in later sonnets. The metaphor of heaven and hell makes a direct link with the preceding 'two loves' sonnet and with the mortification-sonnet which follows next. I suggest that this despised poem should be taken as a satirical picture of a poet smoothing out life's problems, whistling to keep his spirits up. All's well that ends well; the fiend flies out of the window. The feebleness of the poem is an exaggerated comment on the weakness of poetry as a means of arranging one's life or even portraying it. Yet, exaggerated as it is, it does make a comment on poetry as a whole. It uses a magic which is quite patently ineffectual, but it draws our attention to poetry as a kind of magic which may or may not work. The poem which follows is a particularly powerful poem. Although, as with two earlier poems I have mentioned, it gains extra force from exploding a namby-pamby predecessor, I believe we must also say that it is coloured by its predecessor. The mortification-sonnet is akin to the song in being a poet's attempt to relieve the pressures on his life through the perspective of art.

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Fooled by] these rebel pow'rs that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, Eve thou upon thy servant's loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

That mortification of the pride of the flesh and a life turned towards God can be an answer to the attack of the female devil ('there's no more dying then') is ruled out by the next sonnet—

My love is as a fever longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease.

('still' is at least as likely to have here its modern meaning as the older meaning of 'always'.) Death is not dead: 'I desperate now approve / Desire is death.' Sonnet 146 does not put the claims of religion any the less nobly because it does not serve the poet as more than a transient insight into what might be. It may seem a greater poem because of its hint of tragedy in that a man should know what this poem knows and yet be unable to avail himself of what the poem offers. And I certainly do not think that its value is lessened if we see it as one of a series of poems in a dramatic sequence in which the hero, a poet, restlessly turns to different poetic images of his own troubles.

The wild music of the few remaining sonnets puts them among the greatest writing of Shakespeare. There is never a last word. The poet accepts his incurable condition as a madness in 147, but then he goes on to degrade himself in anger (149 and 150), blaming her for entangling him;

If thy unworthiness raised love in me,
More worthy I to be belov'd of thee.

The obscene sonnet 151 tries vainly to find refuge in the idea that there being nothing nobler in man than his sexual desire, he might find contentment in simply being the woman's drudge. Sonnet 152 ends with yet another repetition of the inexplicable:

And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see;
For I have sworn thee fair; more perjured eye,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie.

After this, the sequence evaporates in two perfunctory sonnets on the theme of Cupid's brand heating a well.

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.

The story of the poet and the dark woman is not some isolated adventure. Shakespeare is writing about sexual desire, and he portrays it as a degradation that a man cannot withstand. "What is perhaps not improperly called the fear of desire is partly submerged in Shakespeare's earlier plays but it reappears at the turn of the century and in almost every play from Measure for Measure onwards there is an acknowledgement of the supposed disjunction between the marriage of minds and the union of bodies. In the last plays there is much that is perplexing on this subject. What we have read in the Sonnets helps to explain the chiaroscuro of Marina in the brothel [in Pericles], Polixenes' vision of childhood innocence, [in The Winter's Tale] and the anxiety of Prospero's spirits to keep Venus out of the wedding masque, [in The Tempest]. Auden was right to conclude his essay on the sonnets [introduction to the Signet edition of the sonnets (1964)] with the address to all-enslaving Venus from Shakespeare's last offering, The Two Noble Kinsmen.

At the moment what concerns us is not Shakespeare's 'attitude to sex' but his attitude towards art. The drama of the Dark Woman sequence is not alone the drama of the curse of the granted wish, but the drama of the poet groping to materialize his emotions in verse. Shakespeare sets poetry the task of describing a certain kind of hopelessness and he shows poetry pulling like a tidal current away from hopelessness towards resolution of one kind or another. Although individual poems, however brilliant, may be 'failures' in that they are shown to be separated from the Me they pretend to record, the cumulative effect of the sequence is success of the highest order, not failure.

Source: Philip Edwards, "The Sonnets to the Dark Woman," in Shakespeare and the Confines of Art, Methuen, 1968, pp. 17-31.

S. Schoenbaum
[Noting that most of what has been written by commentators about the Dark Lady is speculation about whether she can be identified with a historical person, Schoenbaum summarizes what the sonnets themselves tell us about her. Little can be derived, he points out, from the mostly enigmtic clues in Sonnets 127-52: she has dark hair and eyes, and a complexion that is not light; she is not conventionally attractive; she has a lusty sexual appetite and is perhaps married; and she has a volatile temperament. Schoenbaum also briefly discusses Sonnets 153 and 154, where he finds a suggestion that the speaker has contracted a venereal disease as a result of his affair with the Dark Lady.]

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go—
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
(Sonnet 130)

It was, I believe Aldous Huxley who once spoke of the imbecile earnestness of lust. Shakespeare can certainly be earnest on the subject; witness the tremendous sonnet (just preceding the one quoted) in which, in an explosively forceful series of self-lacerating modifiers, he excoriates a passion that post-coitally he despises, and which yet tyrannises over body and spirit. But Sonnet 130 reflects another mood; the lover is at once clear-eyed and high spirited. His mistress's attractions can survive his own denigration of them. So she withstands the anti-Petrarchan assault of the three quartets—the reference to disagreeable breath seems especially devastating in an age of oral hygiene—to assert her allure, and attendant mystery, in a concluding couplet that draws its special force from not being dependent upon romantic illusion.

This is the Dark Lady who, more than three and a half centuries ago, sauntered into the best-loved sequence of lyric poems in the language. They describe with a playwright's art how she captivated the poet, against his reason, and seduced the golden youth he adored. One of the great sorceresses of literature, she has since added innumerable readers to the tally of her conquests.…

Familiar as the poems are, it may be well to begin by piecing together what we can about the Dark Lady from the revelations, sometimes obscure or contradictory, that they afford. She makes her entrance obliquely, a felt presence rather than a directly introduced member of the dramatis personae. 'Base clouds' suddenly overcast a sunny day. Somehow the poet's friend has given offence. We hear of a wound, of disgrace and shame, and of penitent tears. The trespass, the next sonnet (35) reveals, was theft, and the fault 'sensual'. Five poems later the nature of the larceny becomes clearer, although not yet explicit. 'Take all my loves, my love', the poet cries, 'yea, take them all.' It seems that the friend has taken Shakespeare's mistress.

At last, in Sonnet 41, indirections cease, the circumlocutions of tact and poetical conceit give way, what has happened is starkly stated:

Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman woos, what woman's son,
"will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?

So she—whoever she is—has taken the role of aggressor, and the beauteous friend has succumbed. It is an interesting triumph. The lovely boy is high-born, the poet's patron, and of ambiguous masculinity. Nature has fashioned him to be a woman, and given him a woman's face; but rather spoilt things for the heterosexual poet by outfitting her exquisite creation with a male organ. The emotional and psychological weight of these poems resides in the relationship between the two men. The woman who has come between them is still only a shadow—or cloud.

Later she comes into her own. In Sonnet 127 we meet her properly and for the first time learn about the colouration that sets her apart. Black wires grow upon her head, Sonnet 130 adds, and If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun', which the Oxford Dictionary helpfully defines as 'of a dull or dingy brown colour; now esp. a dull greyish brown, like the hair of the ass and mouse'. If the Dark Lady is beautiful, hers is an unfashionable beauty; but some question emerges as to whether she is beautiful by any standard:

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note.

This is 141; just two sonnets earlier the poet has commended her 'pretty looks'. Are all these poems, one may wonder, addressed to the same woman? Or is it merely that we are witnessing a lover's varied moods? The old adage holds that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, perhaps the report shifts, not the object reported. It is one of many puzzles.

Elsewhere we tread on firmer ground. We learn that the lady is musical, and (in Sonnet 128) catch a charming glimpse of her seated at the virginals. Perhaps she sings as she plays. Her fingers dance over the wooden keys, the jacks leaping nimbly up to kiss the inside of her hand. Her lover, envying the jacks, kisses his mistress on the lips. It is rather like a seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting.

Other poems show the Dark Lady as a belle dame sans merci, tyrannising over her lover. She breaks her bed vow—does this mean she is married, as most have assumed, or merely that she has broken a vow made to her lover when they were in bed together? About her sexual appetite and promiscuity, however, there is no question; she is 'the bay where all men ride'. Even when with the poet she humiliates him by eyeing other men. Older than his mistress—'my days', he laments, 'are past the best'—and consequently insecure, he wearily accepts her infidelities, and deludes himself into crediting 'her false-speaking tongue'. The word lies furnishes an opportunity for rueful word-play:

Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Will, another key word, could mean 'carnal desire or appetite'. It might also signify the male or female genitalia. And of course the poet's name was Will. He plays with all these meanings simultaneously in Sonnet 135, where (in the 1609 quarto) the word will is italicised—with an uppercased W—seven out of the thirteen times it appears:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in over-plus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

The only thing virginal about this lady is the musical instrument she fingers so fluently.

In an extraordinary sonnet (151) the poet contemplates her powers of conjuration over another instrument, which stands erect at the mere mention of her name: 'flesh stays no farther reason, / But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee / As his triumphant prize'. What are we to make of a mistress who can be thus addressed? Was she, as some have thought, a common prostitute? Standards of propriety of course vary with the times and with individuals; one man's grossness is another's refreshing candour. If we may occasionally lament the loss of past reticences, a flesh-and-blood Shakespeare is perhaps preferable to the impassive statuary of the culture-worshippers who wend their pious way to the Stratford shrines and cough through a performance at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. We do well every now and then to remind ourselves that Shakespeare, father of three, had a penis.

The 144th Sonnet sets in perspective the complex triangle involving Poet, Fair Youth, and Dark Lady:

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.

But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell.
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

This seems straightforward enough: Hell fits nicely into a scheme that includes good and bad angels, saint and devil, and gains here another dimension by alluding to the game of barley-break, in which the last couple playing found itself 'in hell'. But hell was also a cant word for the female organ; hence the sexual innuendo of: 'I guess one angel in another's hell.' The last line possibly harbours a grimmer allusion. 'To fire out', which meant originally 'to smoke a fox out of its den'— cf. King Lear, V, iii, 23: 'fire us hence like foxes'—also signified 'to communicate a venereal disease'.

A similar allusiveness may help to explain the otherwise puzzling last two poems of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence. These, as a recent critic [James Winny, in The Master-Mistress: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1968)] sums up,

are generally looked upon as an appendix not connected with the story, which Shakespeare or the printer added simply to enlarge the collection. Both tell a fanciful story about the origins of a medicinal spring, brought into being when a nymph extinguished Cupid's torch in a well, which 'took heat perpetual' from this fire.

'I, sick withal, the help of bath desired', the poet reports, 'and thither hied, a sad distempered guest.' The Greek Anthology, the ultimate source of these poems, makes no reference to the curative powers of the waters. As early as the eighteenth century, a commentator queried, 'Whether we shall read Bath (i.e. the city of that name)?' Bath is still celebrated for its medicinal hot springs, the fountains of the town proudly displaying the dubious motto, 'Water is best.' Although in Shakespeare's day it had not yet become a fashionable spa, Elizabethans sought out the waters of Bath for curative purposes.… True, the word bath is not capitalised, or placed in italics, in Sonnets 153 and 154 in the 1609 edition, as are other proper nouns (Cupid, Dian's); but one cannot expect nice distinctions to be scrupulously maintained by a typesetter unchecked by authorial supervision. A topographical identification is in any event not required: there were other spas, and the reference may point, not to natural springs, but to the sweating tubs, filled with hot water, used by the victims of venereal infection. Some such allusiveness seems to be indicated by the sexual innuendoes of these two sonnets.

'I, my mistress' thrall, / Came there for cure', Shakespeare concludes in the last lines of his last sonnet, but the waters appear to have vouchsafed no cure, only the awareness tint: 'Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.' Thus, ingloriously does the cycle end. If this reading is correct, and underneath their fanciful surface Sonnets 153 and 154 reveal the unpleasant medical consequences of an illicit affair, they perhaps afford an autobiographical clue to the sex-nausea that so many critics have remarked on in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and King Lear.

Whatever the merits of such speculation, the Dark Lady is (within the limits of lyric poetry) as vitally realised a dramatic creation as Cressida, with her wanton spirits looking out from every joint and motive of her body, and some have wondered whether both portraits were drawn to life from the same sitter. Never mind; we have enough to occupy us with the Dark Lady on her own, although the information is not always so clear cut as either one would wish or some have surmised. To sum up: she is younger than the poet, musical, raven-haired and raven-eyed, dark-skinned (how dark is not clear), and either unattractive or unconventionally beautiful, depending upon the viewer and the viewer's mood. She is certainly seductive, gives free rein to her appetite, may be married, and is possibly infected with venereal disease. In character she is a femme fatale proud, fickle, overbearing, and deceitful. No wonder scholars have sought to find for her a local habitation and a name.

Source: S. Schoenbaum, "Shakespeare's Dark Lady: A Question of Identity," in Shakepeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, edited by Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter, Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 221-39.