SOURCE: “Making Love Out of Nothing at All: The Issue of Story in Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 470-88.

[In the following essay, Crosman studies the first seventeen sonnets and contends that a distinct narrative may be discerned.]

My thesis is that there is a discernible story in Shakespeare's sonnets, and I will support that thesis with a reading of sonnets 1-17, the so-called procreation sonnets. Because there is widespread distrust of finding narrative in the sonnets, I will begin by discussing the nature of that distrust, and will then argue in favor of permitting Shakespeare's sonnets to tell a story.

Let us begin with some characteristic and influential pronouncements on the subject:

1943

The sonnets may not be in an order which is absolutely correct but no one can deny that they are related and that they do show some development, some “story,” even if incomplete and unsatisfactory. … It is hard, therefore, not to read this poem [sonnet 146] biographically, not to be aware of its relation to Shakespeare's career as a man and an artist. When speculations are not carried far into fantasy it is natural and just to assume a personal and quite simple background for the sonnet.

Donald A. Stauffer

1954

Shakespeare's sequence differs in character as well as in excellence from those of the other Elizabethans. It is indeed the peculiarity of these sonnets which has led to a misreading of all the rest. For here at last we have a sequence which really hints a story, and so odd a story that we find a difficulty in regarding it as fiction.

C. S. Lewis

1977

Like most love poetry, the sonnets presume a reader who is aware of their situation; they put a reader in a position comparable to those into which audiences are thrust (and from which they are quickly rescued) during the opening lines of some plays—for example, King Lear, in which the opening lines remark on a surprising change in a situation we know nothing about. The sonnets keep us in that position. We constantly overhear comments on situations which we know only from inferences inherent in the comments on them. We have no difficulty understanding the comments, and, since in doing so we make effortless and efficient use of background information we do not have, the sonnets convince us that we have such information and can tempt us to reproduce it for our fellows. … they probably reflect a lot that is true about their author, but I do not know what that is.

Stephen Booth

1986

In short, and these examples could be multiplied, there runs through the dark lady sonnets a language of and about language which is opposed to the language of and about vision that runs through the sonnets addressed to the young man. … It is for this reason, referring to large themes and images, that I speak of a progress from eye to tongue. Taken together, the young man sub-sequence and the dark lady sub-sequence act this progress out as a succession of opposites: from man to woman, from true to false, from fair to foul. It is a downward movement, from good to bad, from love to lust, from kind to unkind, which is developed as a progress from vision to speech. In the second sub-sequence this progress becomes explicitly the story that the poet tells about his desire, about his poetry, and about himself.

Joel Fineman¹

The first three of these critics show some anxiety about applying the word “story” to Shakespeare's sonnets, yet all three—including Booth, though he substitutes the word “situation”—are willing to do so once they have made clear certain reservations. Stauffer and Lewis connect “story” with factual discourse—biography or history—and display nervousness about the status of inferences about Shakespeare's own life when they are drawn from the sonnets: Stauffer worries about speculation and fantasy; Lewis seems unhappy to think of Shakespeare's life as “odd.”

Since the story in question involves a complicated love triangle in which the poet proclaims his erotic involvement with both of the other people, and theirs with each other, it is not surprising that many critics have not wanted to read the sonnets as autobiographical. It is to this autobiographical dimension that Booth objects. The unstated assumption of his entire atomistic way of reading the sonnets is that since any story found there would be read as autobiographical, and since it would be both unfair to Shakespeare and historically unsound to attribute that story's seamy sexuality to him, we must close our eyes to the presence of story in the sonnets.

Thus it seems to me that what for Stauffer, Lewis, and Booth is at issue in the question of story in Shakespeare's sonnets is not whether it is present but whether that story is true: we ought not to read the sonnets for their story, they believe, lest we wrongly attribute that story to Shakespeare's biography. Joel Fineman, in the most recent of the four critical pronouncements, sidesteps this whole question of truth nicely by linking his term “story” with the semiotic entities “language,” “theme,” and “images,” rather than with epistemological terms like “true,” or historical genres like “biography.” The words “narrative” and “story” are not frequently used in Fineman's book—not nearly so often as rhetorical terms like “epideixis” and “chiasmus”—but when he does allude to story, Fineman invariably makes it clear that he makes no claim about that story's factual basis. Nor, for that matter, does he claim that it is not factual. It is story, merely, neither certainly history, autobiography, fiction, or fantasy. Its presence is indisputable, but its reference is indeterminate.

In my view the decision that the sonnets can tell a story without that story being entirely true—even a modest amount of invention would disqualify it as reliable history—signals the moment when interpretation of the sonnets has rounded a corner and can resume talking about their narrative dimension without being misunderstood as making historical or biographical claims for that narrative. As Donald Foster put it in his elegant demystification of the historical identity of the elusive “Mr. W. H.”:

Master W. H. dies hard. … We keep him breathing so as to preserve the illusion that we know what these sonnets mean. In fact, we know nothing of the sort. We cannot even agree on whether to treat them as autobiography or fiction. As a result, we are continually tugging them in two directions at once. … Indeed, the poet himself often seems unsure whether to present his verse principally as literary artifice or as personal chronicle. His text dwells, as it were, in the twilight of both autobiography and fiction, with metrical feet in both worlds. But then again, if these, the most private of Shakespeare's poems, were only one or the other, they would doubtless be far less interesting.²

Sonnet sequences have in fact since Dante's Vita Nuova alleged a connection with the real world and with the poet's actual life and yet have altered or added to that life in order to give it a more ideal or expressive shape. Such, too, is the case with Shakespeare's sonnets. The truth of the matter is that we do not know whether they are fact or fiction.

Too elusive to count as reliable history, the sonnets also do not give the kinds of signals that would proclaim them as fiction. The story the sonnets seem to tell has too much feel of the ad hoc, of the day-to-day repetitions, misdirections, and incompletions of “real life” as opposed to fiction to be called by the tidy name of “plot”: the imprecise word “story,” hovering as it does between antithetical senses of the true and the fictive, precisely conveys the vague and muddled quality of the tale the sonnets seem to tell. If we need a generic term for the truth-claims of the sonnets, I suggest the French term “autofiction.” Autofiction displays both historical and fictional attributes. Typically, it speaks in the first person about a character who has recognizable affinities with its author—Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and Proust's Marcel are notable examples in our century—yet it reserves for itself the right to invent fictional characters and incidents. Its relationship to historical truth is complex and contradictory, and the problematic nature of that relationship is often foregrounded. That is, autofiction is often about the way narrative conventions learned from literature shape the ways we live our lives and the ways we subsequently represent our lives.

That Shakespeare considered it an artist's right to tamper with the facts of history is amply demonstrated in his history plays; the Chorus in Henry V broadly hints—whether to warn or to boast I am not sure—that we are being given something other than a straight historical account. Moreover, many of Shakespeare's more openly fictional plays are in an important sense about the uncertainty of the line that we suppose divides fact from fiction. Over and over again, from Love's Labor's Lost to The Tempest, his plays obsessively suggest, argue, and enact the proposition that the world and the people in it are made out of words and are hence subject to the will of the one who can wield words best—i.e., Will Shakespeare. Just as obsessively, however, they report the failures of this project of verbal world-mastery, both by Shakespeare's most brilliant word-masters (Henry V, Hamlet, and Iago come to mind) and even by the bard himself.

What distinguishes the sonnets from the plays is that they are first-person discourse, and thus invite the reader to interpret them as autobiographical. Like Shakespeare's history plays, they seem to straddle the line that divides fact from fiction; like his comedies, tragedies, and romances, they point to that line and to the act of straddling, and lead us to an immensely complex awareness of the way human discourse and human lives traffic back and forth over that border.

The story the sonnets do not so much tell as whisper, each of us hearing that story a bit differently from our fellow readers, is one that figures forth a satisfyingly complex picture of the inner life of our greatest poet, and, at the same time, like all great fictions, one that fuses our features to his, so that in reading his story, we seem to be living it as our own. In other words the sonnets, I would argue, are not an awkward fiction, nor are they an evasive autobiography, but are rather a great and moving example of autofiction. Thus, our inability to exclude story from our experience of reading the sonnets or to agree precisely as to what that story is, like our inability either to prove that it is or is not an autobiographical story, is not simply a product of our incapacity or insufficient knowledge but is a direct result of the way the sonnets are written. We could know ten times more about Shakespeare's private life and still be puzzled by the sonnets.

We see this clearly in the first seventeen of these poems, which seem to be private communication referring to a situation that is never fully explained and that we were apparently never meant to hear. If these are the “sugred Sonnets” referred to by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia in 1598, then we must suppose that Shakespeare's friends enjoyed watching the poet fawn over a (real or fictive) young man so narcissistic that his only motive for marrying could be the begetting of an image of himself. Can the poet think so little of this young man that he sees him as such a monster of self-love? And can he think so little of himself that he will play shamelessly on that narcissism, using outrageous flattery to try to wheedle himself into the young man's good graces? Apparently so. Though the message of the poems is that the beautiful young man should beget an heir, love is for a long while not even mentioned.

Questions about the story told in the sonnets relate to the implicit narrative framework in which the individual sonnets are embedded. If the framework is not autobiographical, then it mimics autobiography uncannily—or mimics the materials out of which autobiography is made: letters and journal entries. The sonnets record constant revisions of attitude, as if in response to day-to-day events. They predict their own future course poorly, return to topics already covered as though they were new, shift directions suddenly, and leave gaps unexplained. Most of them, like private letters, neglect to state background information that any reader other than the young man needs to know. Yet they paradoxically assert, over and over, as though the poems were meant for publication, that the nameless recipient's name will live forever in them—surely one of the great literary ironies of all time, though no irony seems intended.

As I will try to show, Shakespeare, in the procreation sonnets, invents a relationship with the young man, creating love out of nothing at all—nothing, at least, but will and words. When he has succeeded in asserting that love's existence, the pretext of persuading the young man to marry disappears from the sonnets, never to return. But their insincere, manipulative aura remains. For the story the sonnets go on to tell is a story of a poet—resembling in many ways the historical Shakespeare—trying through all the powers of language that his genius grants him to make two people love him. This attempt is ultimately a failure. Like King Lear, which depicts another failure to compel love, the sonnets record the failure of the project, and, like Lear, they also record a growth through suffering and a triumph of an entirely different sort—in the case of the sonnets, the making of great poetry.

II

The tendency to hover, to send multiple messages, to have it both ways or all ways at once is characteristic of Shakespeare at all times but is especially present in the sonnets, which are this most elusive of poets' most elusive works. “Great works of art are daredevils,” Stephen Booth has written:

They flirt with disasters, and, at the same time, they let you know they are married forever to particular, reliable order and purpose. They are, and work hard at being, always on the point of one or another kind of incoherence, always on the point of disintegrating and/or of integrating the very particulars they exclude, always and multifariously on the point of evoking suggestions of pertinent but syntactically impertinent auxiliary assertions or even saying things they cannot want to say, things irrelevant or antipathetic to their arguments or plain untrue.³

Of no great work of literary art is this description more true than of Shakespeare's sonnets, which invoke all sorts of cultural and literary conventions, but with no sense of needing to obey them or even to flout them consistently.

This polyvalent polysemy is what makes the sonnets difficult to read. Just as they hover disconcertingly between our conventional categories of fact and fiction, they also hover between the conventions of Elizabethan sonnet sequences and unconventional or anti-conventional elements such as the choice of love-objects: one a dark lady, the other a master-mistress.

First-time readers of the sonnets typically assume that they are addressed to a woman. Conventionally they should be addressed to a woman, so it is not necessarily homophobia that makes one feel a shock at discovering that they are addressed to a man. Once that discovery has been made, probably the most urgent question the reader has is about the nature of the relationship between the two. “What man in the whole world,” asks C. S. Lewis, “except a father or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets married?”⁴ Who are these two men? the reader wonders. What is the social status of each, and what the degree of their intimacy? What possible relationship, real or fictive, homosexual or not, prompts one man to make seventeen successive pleas to another to marry and beget an heir?

The clues the sonnets give to answer these questions are suggestive and complex, contradictory even. Already in sonnet 1 at least three different answers can be discerned. From its formal tone and argument we might conclude, first, that the speaker does not know the young man well. However, from its suggestions of intimacy we might conclude, second, that they are good friends. Finally, from its erotic subtext we might conclude that they are more than friends: lovers, whether platonic or sexual. But who is the speaker in this sonnet, and who is he to advise this young man to procreate? Nowhere in sonnet 1 does the poet mention himself, as though he wished in every way possible to disguise the impertinent familiarity of his choice of topic. The formal, distanced tone conceals this familiarity, and yet certain half-disguised suggestions of intimacy peek through, such as the oxymoronic teasing of “tender churl” (1:12), which is flirtatious and provoking, simultaneously praising and blaming, stinging and soothing.

As early as sonnet 1, then, we find a poem that, stodgy and dull though it seems at first, actually contains multiple messages that, both in their mutual reinforcements and in their contradictions, sketch out a complex narrative situation that is as yet but faintly heard. The poet begins by lecturing, Polonius-like, on the duty a man has to beget a child, causing us to wonder at this eccentric choice of topic and tone for a sonnet sequence, usually a vehicle for love poetry, and to ask ourselves rather urgently who is talking to whom and why. These questions are made more urgent by the hint of perversity attributed to the addressee, which reaches even to subliminal hints of sexual “self-abuse,” with the poet and the reader watching.⁵

This hint of sexual perversity implies an intimacy between the poet and the young man that is heard most clearly in the coy reproach of “tender churl.” The young man is addressed as both perverse and dear, as though the poet had called him a naughty boy. It is this note of loving blame that the poet will gradually modulate and amplify until it comes to seem itself a kind of bond between the two, until the poet has invented and brought into being a love that did not preexist its poetic creation.

III

For texts as difficult to read as Shakespeare's sonnets, it is probably foolish to talk about a “first-time” reader. Most of us knew a score of the more famous sonnets from anthologies before we ever tackled the whole sequence, and even then we may have skimmed these early sonnets looking for an easier place of entry, like the famous and beautiful sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” If an utterly innocent first-time reader can be imagined, he or she will not see much that I have described, except for the overt message that the “tender churl” should procreate. My reading assumes a reader who knows something of what lies ahead, both from his or her general fund of literary experience and from a familiarity with anthologized sonnets that come later in the sequence.

For such a reader both the experience of other sonnet sequences and a foreknowledge of this particular sequence will lead him or her to read reflexively. Sonnet sequences typically cause us to imagine a dramatic setting in which the poet is writing a sonnet, or at least trying to write one. Such a dramatic setting informs the famous first sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney's influential Astrophel and Stella, which begins “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show” and ends with the muse's famous instructions to “look in thy heart and write!” Sidney's sonnet explains that the poet's purpose in writing is to obtain “pity” and “grace” from the beloved rather than to please a broader audience, though this avowed purpose is belied by the fact that the sonnet is not actually addressed to “she, dear she” but to a generalized reader. This reflexive paradigm, implying that the story in the sonnets is about their speaker's attempts to please his beloved by writing poems of praise, is part of the way sonnet sequences are read, and the paradigm is explicit in later sonnets in Shakespeare's sequence; however, I am assuming its presence before it is actually audible in the procreation sonnets themselves. In fact, in the light of the passionate, personal avowals of love that eventually follow, what is puzzling about the procreation sonnets is how long they take to get down to the main business of sonnet sequences.

Because they lack a narrative frame, an orderly exposition of who is writing to whom and why, the early sonnets have nothing I would call a plot. Yet to read them at all, the reader must supply some context, must begin to imagine the situation that might have given rise to them, for out of the context of some story, they are unintelligible. As arguments for procreation, they are dazzling and impressive but also redundant and wearying. One begins to wonder why the poet spends so much time covering and recovering the same unpromising ground, unless he has a motive ulterior to the writing of good poems. That motive, I have suggested, is the invention of a relationship. One of the chief pleasures that the procreation sonnets afford is the spectacle of the poet moving with glacial slowness, an imperceptible millimeter at a time, onto more intimate footing with the young man.

Overtly, the early sonnets seem to be part of a polite, distanced, and essentially impersonal persuasion to marry and beget children, with Shakespeare speaking for “the World,” a flattering hyperbole for the young man's family, but broadly true if we assume the young man is a great noble. Would Shakespeare's “private friends” who read his “sugred Sonnets” in manuscript have known to whom they were addressed? Would the circulated manuscript even have contained these first sonnets, which look so much like private communication? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do think that Shakespeare's first readers, like us, would have speculated on the identity of the poet's beloved and would have supplied from their imperfect knowledge, eked out with inference and if necessary with fantasy, a narrative context for these sonnets. Such has been the reading strategy of later readers; and though the results have not led to indisputable answers, they have supplied a plausible background to the sonnets. As long as we do not claim certainty for our speculations, they do no harm. In fact, it is my contention that we inevitably do speculate and that indeed we must.⁶

To most researchers into the historical background of the sonnets, it has seemed that the first 126 are addressed to one of two great nobles: Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton (1573-1624), or William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke (1580-1630). Both were patrons of Shakespeare, though at different times: Southampton in the 1590s, when sonnet sequences were in fashion; Pembroke in the next decade, closer to the sonnets' publication date of 1609. My guess is that the sonnets are addressed to Southampton, for whom Shakespeare had already written Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which contain fulsome, flattering dedications, signed with Shakespeare's name, that allege a friendship between poet and patron far in excess of what was customary in such dedications. Internal evidence from the procreation sonnets, and from the rest of the sequence, fits Southampton best—but this guess is a heuristic device, a “reading strategy,” not a demonstrated fact. If it is someday proved that the sonnets were addressed to Pembroke, or to someone else, the story the sonnets tell will be somewhat changed, but they will still tell a story.⁷

At the same time that Shakespeare is trying to argue this young noble—let us call him Southampton—into starting a family, he is, as I noted in sonnet 1, taking the covert liberty of generating a bawdy “subtext” appropriate to the topic of procreation but not to the polite distance of the manifest content. This hidden message may well be meant to give the young man the uncanny feeling that the poet reads his mind and sees into his darkest secrets. As Stephen Greenblatt writes: “[Shakespeare] possessed a limitless talent for entering into the consciousness of another, perceiving its deepest structures as a manipulable fiction, reinscribing it into his own narrative form.”⁸ The subtext proposes a secret bond of sympathy and understanding between the poet and the young man that may in time develop into intimacy, but it is at the moment utterly deadpan and deniable.

Finally, and of most immediate importance, is the story we begin to hear in sonnet 1 of a relationship between two people, which we can glimpse, at least faintly, if we pay attention to nuances of argument and tone. All of the sonnets that follow arise out of the concrete dramatic setting of that relationship, and even the most familiar are enhanced in meaning and beauty when read as part of the sequence and of the story that they tell. The relationship barely seems to preexist the sequence, however: what we are witnessing is not merely its evolution but its birth, its invention even, through the medium of poetry.

Sonnets 2 through 9 continue sonnet 1's argument for procreation, while the poet is implicitly establishing a relationship to which he as yet does not even dare refer. The young man is asked to husband his beauty wisely by investing in dynastic succession (sonnet 2); he is asked to “Look in [his] glass”—which he is likely to be doing already—and imagine how happy his existence makes his mother (sonnet 3). Sonnet 4 reproaches him for investing his beauty unwisely, in terms that strongly suggest masturbation (“having traffic with thyself alone”), but sonnet 5 is gentle and coaxing, as is sonnet 6. Sonnets 7 and 8 get so involved in their own elaborate conceits of eye and ear that they seem more like showcases for Shakespeare's developing mastery of the sonnet form than personal communication. In these eight sonnets Shakespeare comes at his overt task of persuasion to procreate from every point on the compass; and he doesn't move in an orderly fashion from one approach to the next but skips around, varying praise and blame, appeals to narcissism, guilt, self-interest, and obligation as though he had to explore every possible root of the young man's motivation. Similarly, the sexual subtext is sometimes by turns and sometimes simultaneously auto-, homo-, and heterosexual. On the level of argument, at least, these sonnets give the impression of miscellaneousness and improvisation.

Yet under cover of random arguing, they are preparing a couple of important changes in the nature of the relationship between the poet and the young man. First, the poet has gradually been sketching in a psychology for the young man, who is narcissistic and perverse and who has a complex but immature sexuality. And, sonnet 8 tells us, music makes him sad. This is small beer as psychological insight, but it is the first time that the poet has made an analysis of the young man's psychology his explicit topic, and it leads to a deeper analysis in sonnet 9, in which Shakespeare attributes Southampton's reluctance to marry to a “fear to wet a widow's eye”:

Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye
That thou consum'st thyself in single life?
Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow and still weep,
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep,
By children's eyes, her husband's shape in mind.
Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;
But beauty's waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused, the user so destroys it.
          No love toward others in that bosom sits
          That on himself such murd'rous shame commits.

In the context of Southampton's situation, this sonnet suggests that the young earl identifies with his mother's pain at the death of her husband, Southampton's father, and wishes to spare her the pain of losing him. This may seem like a loving stance toward his mother, but the poet insists that it is not. This sonnet continues the project of manipulating its receiver, but the poet is now stating rather than merely hinting at his insights into the young man's motivation.

Sonnet 10 picks up where its predecessor left off. Reproaching the young man for his unwillingness to love, Shakespeare escalates the passion of his reproaches until it seems that he sees the young man as unable to love. This is the deepest psychological claim the procreation sonnets will make, and it is at this point that something extraordinary happens: the poet offers himself as a love-object.

For shame deny that thou bear'st love to any,
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant if thou wilt, thou art belov'd of many,
But that thou none lov'st is most evident;
For thou art so possessed with murd'rous hate,
That 'gainst thyself thou stick'st not to conspire,
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate,
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O change thy thought, that I may change my mind.
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove.
          Make thee another self for love of me,
          That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

By admitting the young man's psychological makeup and mechanisms into the level of explicit meanings in sonnets 8 and 9, the poet has already advanced a step in the presumption of intimacy between himself and his young friend. Yet he has also reached a kind of nadir in his running argument in favor of procreation, as all of his marvelous arguments and analogies have degenerated in sonnets 9 and 10 into a scolding tirade against anyone so perverse as to turn a deaf ear to them. Men and women are not argued into love, as Shakespeare well knew, yet the poet has reached a point in these sonnets where he is furiously blaming the young man for not falling in with plans that the author of, say, Romeo and Juliet would probably have laughed at and opposed. My point is not merely that the historical Shakespeare did not believe in loveless arranged marriages, though there is plenty of evidence in the plays that he did not, but that sonnets 1-9 are not really persuasive. As arguments they are frequently dazzling and impressive, but they lack conviction.⁹

If this is the case, and if we may accordingly conclude that Shakespeare's advocacy of procreation is not entirely sincere, then we may also assume that the desperate anger of sonnet 10's opening octave, though directed at the young man's perversity, is fueled by the contradictions of the poet's own situation, forced to argue on behalf of a position that denies his own deeply held views on the importance of marrying for love. The poet writes as though he had lost all hope of persuading the young man and were now merely venting anger: “For shame,” “unprovident,” “thou none lov'st,” “murd'rous hate,” “conspire,” “ruinate.”

How, we wonder, is the poet to go on with the sonnets after so thorough a tirade against its inscribed reader, how even to finish his poem, except by turning and walking away from the young man? If the latter has no love for his worldly position nor for his family, none for his posterity and none for his ancestors, none even for his distressed mother nor for his own image in the mirror, then he hates everyone, hates himself, and is bent on self-destruction. Or, if the poet's wish to see the young man marry is more rhetorical than real, then it is he rather than the young man who is beginning to seem perverse, motivated either by bad judgment or bad faith.

Now, when there seems nowhere to go, the poet suddenly reinvents the terms of the entire sequence, confessing that what has already been written is not the distilled wisdom of the ages or a truth universally acknowledged but instead the subjective vision of a not-impartial observer: “O change thy thought, that I may change my mind.” The tirade that he started in sonnet 9 and escalated so alarmingly here he now presents as virtually a fit of lover's pique, caused by the fear that his young reader, if he does not love anyone, must also not love the poet either. It is possible that Shakespeare planned from the start to insinuate himself into the sequence in this way, but whether by accident or by design, 134 lines is a lot of verse to write on so intimate a topic as one's friend's duty to procreate without once alluding to oneself.¹⁰

The manipulativeness of the earlier sonnets counts against his sincerity here, and the nature of his “love” is still unclear—perhaps Shakespeare is offering himself as a surrogate for the missing father—but what does seem undeniable is that the sonnets are not the record of a preexisting friendship but rather the place where that friendship was invented, in minute and deniable stages, as in a dark movie theatre a girl may find a boy's arm encircling her shoulders and at the same time be unable to shrug it off, if she should wish to, because it is not actually touching her. In the same way the relationship between the poet and the young man was for nine sonnets ectoplasmic—not fully present, but faintly implied as the only honorable answer to the question of why the poet was bothering to write at all.

IV

Sonnet 10, which can never be an anthology piece because it makes sense only in the context of the story that the procreation sonnets tell, is nonetheless the most important and interesting poem in the whole group, because in it the implications of the first nine sonnets are made explicit: the poet refers to himself and to love for the first time, and hence a relationship between poet and inscribed reader can for the first time be alleged: “Make thee another self for love of me.”

Love is virtually not an issue in the first nine sonnets, except in the narcissistic pleasure that the young man's mother is at one point said to take in him, and of course in the young man's own self-love, which Shakespeare redefines as self-hate. The subtext sets up an erotic undercurrent that includes both the poet and the young man, but these hints of sexual attraction are scarcely worthy of the name of “love.” And while the passionate admiration that “the World” has for the young man could, I suppose, be defined as the loving motive behind these sonnets, the poet's cold-blooded advice, couched frequently in terms of profit and loss, to “bless” some anonymous young woman with the young man's issue sounds less like passion than calculation. Instead of a persuasion to love a woman, we get advice to invest in personal and dynastic posterity. This, sadly, is the way many wealthy and powerful families think, but it is the antithesis of the reckless emotionality of love poetry.

So when Shakespeare proposes that the young man love him, he solves one problem—that sonnets ought to be about love—but creates another: what kind of love is he talking about? Over the centuries no aspect of the sonnets has been more worried about than their homoeroticism. True, the Elizabethans used the word “love” more broadly than we, recognizing that feelings of what we would call friendship could be as deep, as absolute, and as permanent as feelings for a sweetheart or spouse. But they were as horrified as any Victorian lady or gentleman by the notion of sexual relations between same-sex partners and enforced their taboos with punishments that by our standards were harsh. This is not to say that homosexuality did not exist, but merely that it was disreputable and clandestine.

The specter of homosexuality already hung over the sonnets in 1640 when John Benson republished them in a mutilated form, altering some of the more loving sonnets to make them seem to address a woman. Subsequent readers have struggled greatly with the homosexual implications of the sonnets; such implications undoubtedly account for much of the distaste eighteenth-century readers felt for them, as they partly account for the more recent vogue of reading the sonnets as entirely fictional.

Interestingly, were it not for the sonnets, I doubt that any reader would suspect Shakespeare of homosexual leanings. His plays, full of robust heterosexuality, routinely make fun of effeminate men like Osric and the Dauphin—though it is possible that he was here playing to his audience's prejudices, and in any case homosexuality and effeminacy are not synonymous. Shakespeare was also a married man with children, but that does not preclude his having been bisexual. Nor is it easy to imagine why he would have invented homoerotic sentiments to express to a fictional young man. As C. S. Lewis observed, it is so odd a story that it must have some truth in it.

In Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets Joseph Pequigney makes a number of forceful arguments for the bisexuality of the persona of the sonnets—studiously avoiding any biographical inferences, however—and for the explicitly sexual nature of the relationship between the poet and the young man.¹¹ In sonnets 52, 75, and 87 Pequigney sees explicit references to sexual acts between the two men (“Thyself thou gav'st,” “Thus have I had thee” [87:9, 13]), and he cites wordplay in numerous other sonnets that reinforces the implication that the poet's feelings for the young man are homosexual.

Pequigney, who makes merry with the supposed “Renaissance cult of male friendship,” has helped me see that when Shakespeare declares “love” for the young man, he means not merely some platonic friendship but what we today understand by the word. The poet is smitten by his lover's beauty, he dwells on his sexual parts, he dreams of him, is thrilled by tokens of his regard, sings lustily when his love is reciprocated, feels jealous and angry when his lover's regard is withdrawn or directed elsewhere, mopes in his absence, and mourns when love dies. That this love is erotic I have no doubt—Shakespeare says as much in sonnet 20, where he laments that someone so beautiful should be male, not female—but this very lament implies that the poet is not ready to act out his homoerotic urges. Pequigney argues that the poet subsequently overcomes his reluctance: by sonnet 87, he believes, the poet has “had” his lover. But there are many ways of “giving” oneself and of “having” someone else outside of sexual intercourse.

In any case, sonnet 87 lies far ahead, and not even Pequigney believes that the procreation sonnets depict an actively homosexual relationship. Instead he sees these sonnets as recording a gradual evolution of the poet's feelings for the young man. Since Pequigney does not believe that the sonnets are addressed to a nobleman or patron, however, he has no explanation for why the sonnets begin before love does, except that the poet truly admires the young man and genuinely wishes to see him become a father. A close reading of the first nine sonnets has convinced me that no such simple explanation can account for their methodical manipulativeness. Pequigney and I do not agree on the story the sonnets tell—his poet is a simpler and more straightforward person than mine—but his book makes it possible to read the story of the sonnets as a love story without ignoring or apologizing for the sexual implications of the word “love.”

We might say, then, that what is going on in sonnets 10 to 18 is (a presentation of) Shakespeare's gradual discovery that a man not only can love another man but that he can fall in love in virtually the same way as a man and woman fall in love. That discovery is expressed in sonnet 20, but it is enacted in the sonnets that precede it and enacted as a rhetorical strategy of a poet engaged in a difficult campaign of persuading someone to procreate. That is, the sonnets show us the poet falling in love in the process of pretending to fall in love. What in sonnet 10 looks like a last desperate stab at persuading the young man to procreate—“Make thee another self for love of me”—adds a new dimension to the entire enterprise. And yet, because we were prepared by the subtext, this proposal seems uncannily familiar: the poet has been sending hints of it from the beginning.

The turn toward the topic of love in sonnet 10 is not decisive. Sonnet 11 makes no mention of it or of the newly discovered “I” of the poet; and sonnet 12, though it returns to the first-person, still does not mention love, as though the poet fears he has gone too far in sonnet 10 and is waiting for some reaction before continuing to press his suit. Sonnet 13 resumes both the loving and the personal notes but still subordinates them to a plea to procreate: “dear my love you know, / You had a father, let your son say so” (ll. 13-14). This is the characteristic movement of story in the sonnets: two steps forward and one step back, with new developments suggested in nuances of imagery or rhetorical stance before they emerge into full thematic presence, so that every new development seems already familiar.

If procreation were not so soon to be a forgotten issue, we could easily suppose that the love the poet suddenly alleges for the young man is merely another persuasive tactic. This love, first mentioned when the poet has run out of other rhetorical ploys and is facing the failure of his campaign, emerges in a context of manipulation that makes its sudden revelation seem manipulative too. Yet the personal note, the effect of sincerity that the poet adds to his hyperbole by confessing that he is not an impartial witness, makes the poems after sonnet 10's impassioned outburst seem better than those that precede it.

Sonnets 12 through 15 stage little dramas in which the poet worries about the impact on himself of the young man's dying without making a copy of himself; the last of these, sonnet 15, develops a strategy for dealing with this worry—the poet will make copies of his beloved in verse: “And all in war with Time for love of you, / As he takes from you, I engraft you new” (ll. 13-14).

This is the final corner the sonnets have to turn, and readers feel the swerve: W. H. Auden, in his preface to the Signet edition, cites sonnet 15 as proof that the sonnets are not in chronological order: “15 seems not to belong, for marriage is not mentioned in it.”¹² Yet sonnet 15 echoes the imagery of its predecessor in its astrological references to “the stars” and “the selfsame sky,” and it has an even clearer relationship to sonnet 16, with which it is paired in an antithetical relationship—two means of cheating time: poetry and progeny. And the position of sonnet 15 is even more thoroughly organic than its links to sonnets 14 and 16 suggest, for it is in fact a recombination of all the earlier themes of the procreation sonnets into what will come to be the master-theme of the entire sonnet sequence. The problem of how to preserve the young man's youth and beauty is now answered not by the recommendation that he practice prudent self-love by making a baby but by the triumphant assertion that there no longer is a problem: the love the poet has revealed in sonnet 10, combined with the poetic power he has gradually developed in writing about the young man's beauty, will enable the poet to immortalize his beloved in verse, whatever the latter decides to do about procreating. Thus beauty, truth, immortality, art, even an idealized version of procreation (beget poems, not babies) are grafted together to create a new thing: a sequence of love poems written by a male poet to and about another man.

Once again, however, sonnet 15 is a trial balloon, for in sonnet 16 Shakespeare retreats to more familiar ground while he seems to await reaction to his offer of literary immortality: “But wherefore do not you a mightier way / Make war upon this bloody tyrant time?” (ll. 1-2). In the comparison that he proceeds to draw between his art and procreation, Shakespeare describes his rhyme as “barren” and its images as “counterfeit,” yet the tone is not really apologetic. Renaissance poets loved to debate the powers and limits of art, and by citing one side of this controversy, Shakespeare causes us to remember the other side, which he will soon spell out in subsequent sonnets: life is short but art is long. Besides, the young man does not need to choose—he can have both the immortality of art and the immortality of progeny, as sonnet 17 proceeds to discover: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice in it and in my rhyme” (ll. 13-14).

Sonnets 15 through 17 provide a transition through almost insensible gradations of mood and argument from the theme of eternity through progeny to that of eternity through art. Under the guise of apology, they actually suggest that the poet is capable of more than he has yet achieved, a prophecy that is magnificently fulfilled in the very next sonnet, the great one that begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” Thus the sonnets turn a final corner, and Shakespeare is ready to embark upon an astounding project: the depiction of an unusual if not an illicit love relationship in what will frequently be immortal verse.

Looking back on the procreation sonnets, we are left to wonder why it took him so long to find his theme, and perhaps even why, having found it, he did not cancel the explorations that preceded its discovery. For, interesting as they are from a narrative point of view, none of the procreation sonnets is an anthology piece, nor does any show the obsequious, manipulative poet in a flattering light. And seventeen puzzling, morally ambiguous sonnets make an unappealing preamble to a sequence that the poet claims to believe will be read for ages to come. It remains, then, to explain why the procreation sonnets, written to invent a relationship between the poet and the young man, were published as written. Or, to put it more semiotically, what do the procreation sonnets contribute to the meaning and impact of the entire sequence of 154 sonnets?

V

The project of reading the sonnets as a connected sequence that tells a story is based upon the premise that it is as legitimate to contextualize them in an account of what we know of Shakespeare's life and mind as it is to put them in any other context. Earlier generations mistook such a reading as self-evidently “true,” a naiveté that we quite legitimately refuse to share. As S. Schoenbaum has observed in Shakespeare's Lives, Shakespeare has had as many “lives” as he has had biographers, and certain knowledge about him is very hard to come by.¹³ Yet the persona of the sonnets is a poet and actor named “Will,” which is a giant step closer to autobiographical intention than is Sidney's persona, and yet “Astro-Philip” lives through a relationship that we know was based on Sidney's own passion for Penelope Rich. If the poet in Shakespeare's sonnets may not be taken as a self-portrait, then it is hard to know who he can be. It would be a kind of blindness or ideological rigidity on our part to deny him that identity, even as it would be naive to insist that the insight the sonnets give us into its speaker is a complete and accurate historical record. The sonnets are too rich and ambiguous to count as history, but they are something as good or better—a portrait of the artist as lover, painted by his own hand.

It seems to me legitimate, then, to read the sonnets as though they were a self-portrait and to read them in the context of what we know or think we know about their author. Shakespeare's name on the title page and in the sonnets themselves links them as closely to that context as their generic form links them to the history of the sonnet. All contextualizing involves an element of choice on the critic's part; thus, the ultimate criterion for judging the success of a particular choice is whether it “works”—whether it stimulates interest, brings a familiar text to life for other readers, or makes a difficult text clearer. What then do we learn about the procreation sonnets when we read them for story in the context of Shakespeare's own life?

Shakespeare was a man of no particular social standing, an actor and playwright who confesses in a later sonnet (110) to being ashamed of his profession, and who in the 1590s made what looks like a bid to free himself from dependence upon the playgoing public by writing narrative poems for a wealthy patron, the earl of Southampton.¹⁴ If the sonnets are not addressed to Southampton, then they are addressed to someone very much like him: a vain young aristocrat with a beautiful mother and a dead father, whose family was eager to see him marry and beget an heir, but who was not himself eager to put aside self-admiration, casual sex, and perhaps crushes on older men.¹⁵

Shakespeare's approach to such a person is to find a way of being serviceable to the young man's family and yet appealing to the young man himself—an almost impossible trick, since it involves walking a tightrope between adversaries. Beginning with a friendly but impersonal tone, the poet edges gradually toward intimacy, mingling praise and reproach in what he hopes are sonnets good enough to please by their artistry even if their project is unwelcome. Finally, in sonnet 10 he justifies the impertinence of his advice by revealing intimate feelings for the young man and then gradually shifts attention away from procreation toward the themes of love and poetry. Self-consciousness gradually takes over the sequence from sonnets 10 through 17, until their true subject emerges as the relationship between poet and beloved, a relationship that consists largely of writing and reading poems.

Shakespeare has gradually maneuvered himself into the kind of relationship out of which sonnet sequences are made, though his choice of a male lover is an audacious innovation, especially in a poet not otherwise known as homosexual. But the sonnets pay a price for such a slow and tortuous buildup, and one may wonder why they don't just begin with sonnet 18.

The usual assumption is that Shakespeare had no hand in the publication of the sonnets in 1609, and there is some evidence to support this assumption, including the lack of a dedication by the poet himself along with the numerous printer's errors. If Shakespeare had meant them for publication, it is usually assumed, he would have done a better job of proofreading them and—assuming they were written in the 1590s, when sonnet sequences were in fashion—would have published them sooner. The sonnets' single, sloppy quarto edition suggests pirated publication.

And yet it is entirely possible that Shakespeare did release his manuscript for publication, perhaps after waiting a decade or more for their gossip value to die down, and that their pirated appearance, complete with riddling dedication to “Mr. W. H.”—who could be William Herbert, Henry Wriothsley with initials transposed, William Harvey, William Himself, a misprint for “W. S.” (as Foster suggests), or nobody at all—was meant to deflect criticism from Shakespeare should Southampton, Pembroke, or others object to their publication.

Shakespeare was too well-off by 1609 to need whatever small sum Thomas Thorpe could have paid for the by-now-unfashionable and little-noticed sonnets. If indeed he did publish them, Shakespeare could have done so for only one reason: simply because he knew that they constituted a great work of art, full of sublime and bitter truths, and he wanted them to live for posterity. And if Shakespeare did in fact decide to publish the sonnets in 1609, when they could do nothing for his reputation or for his pocketbook, it was a brave decision to print them as written, with no attempt to disguise their masculine love-object. It was also brave to keep the seventeen procreation sonnets.

As the preamble to love poetry, the procreation sonnets are a curious choice: impersonal, manipulative, obscure. Only gradually and reluctantly do they sketch in the outlines of a relationship between two shadowy people, who are so oddly paired that on any terms a loving relationship between them seems improbable, the likely subject of a modern anti-novel, not of a Renaissance sonnet sequence. Of course critics must grant the poet his choice of subject, especially when the poet is Shakespeare, and not complain that the procreation sonnets are off-putting. But it is also true that poets often have to work hard to discover their true subject, and may want to discard their first exploratory fumblings.

But if, as I have argued, Shakespeare begins the sonnets not as a lover but as a serviceable Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, trying to curry favor with the rich and powerful by manipulating the young man with insincere advice, then that fact makes the subsequent passion of the love he comes to feel more astounding and sublime; further—and more important—his earlier cold-hearted calculation frames the whole relationship in black, and prefigures its unhappy outcome. For it is the insincerity with which the poet began the relationship that will haunt the love he subsequently feels for the young man; after such a start, he will never be able entirely to persuade his beloved of the genuineness of his feelings.

We do not now know, and perhaps will never know, who supplied Thomas Thorpe with the manuscript he printed in 1609, though if it was not Shakespeare's copy, we must wonder whose copy it was. If it was the young man's, then there must have been a young man, whoever he was; but why would he, or his relatives, have wanted to see them published? And why would the young man have had in his possession the “dark lady” sequence, which is not addressed to him? On the whole it seems likelier that the quarto was based either on a copy that Shakespeare owned or on a copy made for circulation among his private friends, which is itself a form of “publication.” Even if he did not fully intend to share them with the world, then, it seems likely that Shakespeare is the one who made his sonnets public.

If so, it was an extraordinarily courageous act, both morally and aesthetically, since the procreation sonnets show the poet himself to be the sort of complaisant courtier that he elsewhere so scorned and reviled; yet these poems also begin the sequence on the note of moral and psychological realism that most distinguishes it from other Renaissance sonnet sequences and makes Shakespeare's sonnets most resemble the great tragedies in bitterness and truth.

The moments in Shakespeare's plays that are the most thrilling, at least to me, occur when some awkward or absurd piece of business calls attention to the fact that they are staged. When Gloucester, for example, throws himself down in a meadow that he thinks is the edge of a cliff, the thump of a body hitting boards and the resulting cloud of dust tells us that this is no more a meadow than it is a cliff—it is a stage, rather, and we are laughing (or are we crying?) not really at Gloucester but at ourselves for having been fooled and for taking these phony sufferings so seriously. And yet we persist in taking them seriously. The awkwardness of the procreation sonnets is moving in a similar way: it shows the way love poems and perhaps even love itself come into being—not as a trip to the moon on gossamer wings but as a decision to play a role, often for motives that do not bear close examination, with reckless disregard of the harm we may do to ourselves or others.

In part the sonnets achieve greatness as art by debunking art. Their deformity is ultimately their greatest beauty, which makes me think that the procreation sonnets are the best possible way for the entire sequence to begin. By writing them—and publishing them, too, perhaps—Shakespeare admitted that this sublime and unhappy relationship had its beginnings in unworthy ulterior motives that sullied its nature from the start. First he pretended to fall in love, and then discovered he was no longer pretending: he made love out of nothing at all.

Notes

1. The Stauffer, Lewis, Booth, and Fineman passages appear in “Critical Principles and a Sonnet,” The American Scholar, 12 (1942-43), 52-62, esp. p. 59; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 503; Shakespeare's Sonnets: Edited with analytic commentary (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 546-47, 549 (quotations from the sonnets in the present essay are taken from this edition); and Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1986), p. 171.

2. “Master W. H., R.I.P.” in PMLA, 102 (1987), 42-54, esp. pp. 50-51. Foster engages in some keen textual detective work to unriddle the publisher Thomas Thorpe's epigraph (he insists that it “is not …, as it is usually called, a ‘dedication’” [p. 42]), finally reading “Mr. W. H.” as a simple misprint for “Mr. W. S.” or perhaps “Mr. W. SH.”. It may seem strange that Thorpe would bother to inscribe a book to its own author, whose full name appears on the title page, but Foster argues that “initials were rarely used in Renaissance dedications unless it was perfectly clear to whom they referred (even if only to the anonymous author)” (p. 50). Thus the purpose of the epigraph, far from being a riddle, was “to congratulate the author while advising potential readers of the ensuing poems' authenticity” (p. 50).

   Foster's solution to the enigma of “Mr. W. H.” is appealingly commonsensical, but he acknowledges that it is only the tip of an interpretive iceberg. The young man's presence in the sonnets, and the question of his status—real or fictive?—are matters that are not affected by Foster's demonstration that his initials are probably not “W. H.”

3. “The Unobserved and All Observers: The Gettysburg Address,” unpublished manuscript, p. 17.

4. p. 503.

5. The presence of sexual double entendres in Shakespeare's plays is too massive ever to have been denied, though politer ages than his or ours have turned as blind an eye to it as they could and have bowdlerized what they couldn't ignore. The presence of bawdiness in the sonnets can seem in some ways even more distressing, since sonnets are highbrow literature that need not pander to “the base,” and since sonnets are not spoken by dramatic characters but by the poet himself or at least by a fictional alter ego. But the fact that the sonnets too are sexual has long been conceded, not merely in the “dark lady” sonnets, where at least the eroticism can be attributed to the author's robust heterosexuality, but also in the first 126, addressed to the young man. Sonnet 20 is especially notorious in this regard because of the poet's insistence on calling attention to the young man's genitals: “Nature … pricked thee out for women's pleasure” (20:10, 13). Stephen Booth also finds mention of masturbation in sonnets 4 and 6, and Douglas Bush wonders in the footnotes to the Pelican edition if sonnet 1 does not contain a “play on ‘self-satisfaction’” at line 11: “Within thine own bud buriest thy content” (Shakespeare's Sonnets [1961; rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin, 1970]).

   To my eye, at least, sonnet 1 is so full of bawdy subtext as to be virtually one long double entendre. Readers eager to get on with subsequent sonnets and distracted by the formality of the sonnet's surface will probably not notice this fact, but the phallic images from “beauty's rose” in line 2 to “fresh ornament” and “gaudy spring” in lines 9 and 10, along with the self-absorbed and self-consuming imagery of the second quatrain and the couplet, sketch out a pattern of sexual response starting with desire and tumescence and ending in a self-thwarting and sterile self-satisfaction that is too elaborate for me, at least, to doubt. Like the target of subliminal advertising—the techniques of which were borrowed from New Critical college classrooms where Shakespeare's double entendres were frequently on display—the reader need not consciously notice this subtext but should feel it merely, as though he or she, rather than Shakespeare, put it there. To confirm that I did not put it there I have, besides the evidence of my eyes, the testimony of Douglas Bush, who was not given to imagining smutty subtexts where they did not exist.

6. The importance of the narrative frame of the sonnets appears in the fact, first, that although most of the anthology pieces are addressed to the world at large, making them relatively independent of their context, reading them out of context is like culling soliloquies out of Hamlet—they are even greater when read in context; and, second, that there are many other fascinating, moving sonnets never anthologized because they are simply not intelligible when they stand alone, or because, when they are detached from their narrative setting, they seem to make Shakespeare say things that are silly, untrue, or downright wicked. For them, the narrative frame is essential.

7. It is impossible to exclude biographical contextualizing from the ways in which the sonnets are read and foolish to try, though many have. In fact, most editions of the sonnets are downright schizophrenic on the subject: first they give us the biographical background of the sonnets, then they warn us not to use it. What is at issue is the status of biographical contextualizing as a legitimate interpretive process. Short of taking all biographical researches out and burning them, it is hard to know what to do with them if their relevance to Shakespeare's writings is denied on grounds that the information they provide is not reliable or on the more radical grounds that life is irrelevant to art. In fact, as the evidence of Dante's and Sidney's self-inscriptions in their sonnet sequences argues, the fashioning of a “self,” and of a personal history that both mirrors and perfects the actual life, is one of the important generic resources of the Renaissance sonnet sequence. The form itself is proto-autobiographical. On “reading strategies,” see Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum” in Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 147-73. The few historical facts that we have about the publication of the sonnets and about its riddling dedication may be found in S. Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 170-75, 268-71.

8. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 252.

9. Venus and Adonis, which was dedicated to the earl of Southampton, is an explicit warning against precocious sexuality between a young man and an older, more experienced woman. Even The Rape of Lucrece, also dedicated to Southampton, can be seen as a warning against coveting other men's wives. If related to that young noble's situation, these poems warn against illicit sexual relationships even while they take a certain pleasure from these same sexual situations. We may sense in these poems a parental commission to channel the young man's erotic drives toward acceptable expression—i.e., marriage to a dynastically suitable woman.

   However, Shakespeare elsewhere took a dim view of loveless arranged marriages. (He himself apparently married for love at age eighteen when he wed Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior and probably pregnant as well.) Over and over again his plays argue both the essential spontaneity of true love and its importance as a precondition to a happy marriage. “Whoever lov'd, who lov'd not at first sight?” is Marlowe's line, but Shakespeare quotes it in As You Like It (3.5.82). Marriage for love was obviously a doctrine that Shakespeare's audience approved of, but it was not merely a convention that Shakespeare obeyed: he shows every sign of passionate commitment to it. Even in The Tempest, written near the end of his playwriting career, we find Miranda and Ferdinand falling in love first, and then discovering that the match is a dynastically desirable one.

   For more on arranged marriages in the plays, see Andrew Gurr's “Intertextuality at Windsor,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 201-8. Gurr draws no inference about Shakespeare's personal beliefs, but (I think) implies that they were less important than, or perhaps were shaped by, the need to please audiences and to distinguish his company of players from their rivals. I find it hard to believe that a structure of commercial competition, rather than a human being, wrote Shakespeare's plays, if that is what Gurr is arguing, but perhaps I am overreading his learned and entertaining outline of a particular dramatic theme against a backdrop of the history of theatrical troupes in London in the 1590s.

10. Anton M. Pinkhofer notes the absence of “I” from sonnets 1-9 in “The Dramatic Character of Shakespeare's Sonnets” in New Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets, Hilton Landry, ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1976), pp. 109-29, esp. p. 121.

11. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985.

12. William Shakespeare: The Sonnets, William Burto, ed. (New York: Signet-NAL, 1964), p. xxi.

13. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.

14. An excellent discussion of the theme of patronage in Shakespeare's sonnets is Alvin B. Kernan's “From the Great House to the Public Theater: Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Failure of Patronage” in The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare's Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 23-48.

15. That the young man's father is dead is inferable from his absence from the sonnets, except in one past-tense mention: “You had a father” (13:14, my emphasis). Southampton's admiration for the dashing, somewhat older earl of Essex is a matter of historical record.