Dramatic Techniques in “Sonnet 29”
It seems that a sonnet, by itself, is a paltry thing, hardly worth the attention of serious critics. Those who have read the current criticism on Shakespeare know that little is written about any one poem alone, that the group of them are often addressed together. There are good reasons for this. Shakespeare appears to have written them all in a close period of time (unlike the lifetime output of a more active poet), so that they can be studied as a group. Also, they are much more personal than sonnets of the sixteenth century, offering critics a clearer view of how writers thought of life’s relation to poetry at that time. Finally, they are the work of the greatest playwright who ever lived, and so critics use the sonnets as a tool to dig for information on the dramatist more often than they appreciate the sonnets for themselves.
Rather than face the difficulty in addressing oneself to a single sonnet by Shakespeare, many literary critics open up their field of inquiry to that broader unit we know as “the sonnet sequence”—looking for patterns. In the case of the Shakespearean sonnets, we know only that there is a finite quantity, 154. After that, the best form that they make when put together is open to debate. Some are addressed to a younger friend or patron; some to the Dark Lady who is referred to as the mistress of the poems’ speaker; some focus their attention on a rival poet. The identities of these people, their actual relationships to Shakespeare, and just what these relationships tell us about poetic inspiration are debated endlessly.
Looking at “Sonnet 29,” which begins “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,” a reader’s first response might be, “What was Shakespeare feeling so depressed about?” The question assumes, though, that he actually was feeling depressed and humiliated at the time of writing, even though that is specifically contrary to what the poem says. The first word, “when” is the qualifier, telling us that the emotions discussed in the following sixteen lines were not necessarily happening at the time of writing, but that they are emotions that came up every now and again. What Shakespeare is telling us is that he does know these feelings. The only thing we know regarding when he feels like this is that he experienced this hopelessness at some time during his relationship with the “thee” who is first mentioned in line 10. Historians place this sonnet within the series addressed to Shakespeare’s younger friend and patron, and that understanding could open the door to a good deal of intellectual labor about social relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But this sonnet seems to stand quite well without any knowledge of who Shakespeare meant by “thee.” “Thee” could be one’s girlfriend or boyfriend, spouse, or trusted confidant. For now, one can leave aside the question of what incidents Shakespeare was talking about and appreciate the poem on its own terms.
The players in Shakespeare’s small drama of “Sonnet 29” are long gone, but we still have the drama itself. A judgment that is pretty universally accepted is that Shakespeare was a better playwright than a poet. Saying it this way makes it sound as if there was something wrong with his poetry, but the actual sum and substance is that he was such an astounding dramatist that there would be little he, or anyone, could do that would meet the level of skill in his plays. It seems plausible to suggest that it is Shakespeare’s dramatic talent, not necessarily his poetic...
(This entire section contains 1668 words.)
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talent, that must shine through from the center of everything he did. “Sonnet 29,” at first look, does not seem to be any more dramatic than it is autobiographical, but even in the tightly controlled sonnet form, Shakespeare’s dramatic talent shows itself clearly.
One of the most important elements in creating the “soul” of a drama is dramatic tension. The most telling way to show that this poem is a drama at heart is to examine the tension of its central question. In recent times, the word “tension” is most often used to indicate having too much to do at once, and being exhausted and beleaguered by the constant demands that pull at you. We think of being tense as a nervous condition that shows itself, often, through anger. This is one meaning, but one that has drifted away from the word’s core. “Tension” essentially means that something or someone is being pulled in opposite directions with fairly equal force (if one side pulled with much greater strength, the tension wouldn’t last long).
In drama, tension is used to keep the audience engaged in the story that is unfolding. The audience keeps up with what is being presented, wondering which side will eventually pull with greater force: good or evil? hope or despair? jealousy or faith? A tense dramatic situation could entail someone trying to snip the right wire to disable a bomb with a few seconds left, but often the powers pulling against each other are more subtle than that. In “Sonnet 29,” the dramatic tension lies between the speaker of the poem and his society; between self-worth and low-esteem; between the present and the world that one can access through memory. This all adds up to a dispute between humanity and Fortune. Fortune may be luck, it may be earned by talent, it may be the will of God (as indicated by deaf heaven ignoring the speaker’s plight), but whatever it is, it is telling this person that he is not worth much. The force pulling away from Fortune throughout the sonnet is implied rather than stated—that the poem’s speaker is trying to believe in the value of his own life.
The drama builds throughout the poem. The first stanza shows the speaker’s self-worth under attack. The second has him floundering around, trying to regain his self-esteem with wishes and anger, doing whatever it takes to consider himself a worthy human. The poem reaches a climax with the ninth line, with the speaker almost despising himself— this is the high point of the poem’s tension, where the forces pulling in opposite directions have stretched him as far as they can. Something has to give. In the tenth line, there is relief: the thought of that special other person comes flooding into the speaker’s mind. The struggle between two conflicting ideas had been closely balanced up to this point, but once he has added the influx of self-worth that comes from this “sweet love remembered,” the competition is not even close.
If “Sonnet 29” is a drama, then who are the characters involved? This is where the biographical approach to the entire sonnet sequence would make the most sense, as literary analysts try to piece together the personalities of the speaker and “thee.” Theories abound about the financial difficulties that Shakespeare faced, about the Dark Lady who was his mistress, about who his patron was. As Rosalie L. Colie explained it in an essay called “Criticism and Analysis of Craft: The Sonnets,” critics tend to read the entire sonnet sequence as one continuing drama. Reading the sonnet as part of the sonnet sequence may yield a richer interpretation than can be derived from a single poem, but it is likely to raise discrepancies that confuse issues further. For instance, most readers of “Sonnet 29” assume that its speaker is addressing the object of his romantic affection. Most critics, on the other hand, identify the subject of the poem as a man younger than Shakespeare with whom the poet had a financial relationship and a close friendship, but no romance. Which view is correct? Perhaps it is sufficient to know, just as the sonnet says, that the memory of this love (whatever the personal relationship) has the power to affect the outcome of the speaker’s inner turmoil.
Finally, one should be able to find a dramatic situation, if this poem actually is a drama. Dramas have scenes: they involve characters in a place where they can voice their emotions. It is not enough to have an inner life. That inner life must be put in a place where it can be played out for the entire audience to understand and appreciate. This is where the sonnet form does the least service to Shakespeare’s talent as a dramatist. In “Sonnet 29,” one person is talking and the other is silent. Readers are not given a setting—there is no particular place where we could best imagine this person speaking his mind. In modern theater, innovative companies mount productions that are unspecific about where they take place, giving only a vacant stage representing some unreal terrain. Silent characters also are not that uncommon, but, on stage, there is interaction between the characters. But in this sonnet that interaction can be claimed only with a great deal of imagination. Perhaps one could say that the act of remembering is a form of interaction between the poem’s speaker and “thee,” but actually the memory is self-contained: the other person could be long gone from this world, and the speaker could still conjure him or her up in memory. One character goes through changes before our eyes, but the dramatic qualities of this sonnet collapse when we start to look for interaction between two characters.
William Shakespeare is often recognized as the greatest dramatist who ever lived. This talent for drama can be seen in the dramatic qualities of the sonnet: its dramatic tension and the characters of Shakespeare and of his former love. However, the drama of the sonnet falters in regard to dramatic situation and interaction between characters because one character appears only in the memory of the other.
Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000. David Kelly teaches courses in poetry and drama at College of Lake County and Oakton Community College, in Illinois.
Overview of “Sonnet 29”
In the narrative of Shakespeare’s sonnets, “Sonnet 29” falls among the phase (sonnets 1-129) where the voice of the older poet, the voice of experience and good counsel, fights off challenges for a young man’s affections from another poet and from a dark lady. In this schema, “Sonnet 29” falls at a low, melancholy point in the apparent narrative. It is a complaint, in the true Renaissance style, where the persona dwells on a sense of loss—in this context, the possible loss of favor in the eyes of the young man. The poem begins with the famous line, “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,” as if the voice is reconnoitering his situation and finding that his stock is at an all-time low. What seems to pervade “Sonnet 29” is, however, a comic structure, a fall from and a return to favor and hope, and a sense of how one recovers from a type of “fall” from grace.
The word “Fortune,” capitalized in the first line of the poem is set in the line as a personification. This “Fortune” is the classical “fortuna”—the idea of a force in the universe that controls the destiny of an individual. In classical literature, particularly Boethius’s A Consolation of Philosophy, ‘Fortune’ is the antagonist who acts against reason and ‘Philosophy.’ Fortune, in the Sophoclean sense, is the predetermined pattern of an individual’s life that cannot be avoided—it is the destiny of an individual, the narrative of a life, that must inevitably come to pass. In the Renaissance sense of the word as explained by Niccolo Machiavelli, fortune is the raw material of ability and circumstance that life presents to an individual. Machiavelli suggests, in his treatise on the nature of political leadership, The Prince, that an individual can overcome the negative powers of fortune or destiny by exercising what he calls “virtu” or the power of intelligence over circumstance. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29” is a poem about how one reasons one’s way around circumstance. The poem is not only a matter of counting one’s blessings but of finding them. Like Boethius in the opening of A Consolation of Philosophy, the persona of “Sonnet 29” is woeful and announces that when he is “in disgrace” “I all alone beweep my outcast state.” His plaintive cries fall on “deaf Heaven.” God, as the poem suggests, does not tolerate complaints. The persona’s cries are “bootless,” or useless. The word “bootless,” however, also suggests that the persona is thinking out loud without really having a firm foundation for his musings—a no-no in the world of Renaissance thought, where the Virgilian precept of approaching life with strong, emotionally detached, and objective reasoning was still the order of the day. Like Boethius in A Consolation of Philosophy, the persona of this poem must find his way to solace through the power of thought and through the banishment of emotions where he might feel sorry for himself. In the Renaissance perspective, feeling sorry for oneself and reason are incompatible. Suffice to say, cursing one’s “fate” and “Wishing me like to one more rich in hope” or envying “this man’s art, and that man’s scope” may serve the need to air one’s complaints but can do little to see one toward the kind of resolution that a sonnet must afford: the solution to the problem at hand.
Shakespeare’s use of the sonnet form, especially in “Sonnet 29,” allows him to air a complaint in poetry (in Boethius, Dame Philosophy sends the Muses packing in the first several pages because, as she reasons, poetry does nothing but lock one into one’s problems) while at the same time reasoning the poet to demonstrate the possibilities and the complexities in the process of reason. The sonnet, unlike the lyric, cannot stand still either emotionally or rhetorically. It presents a problem in the opening octave and then determines to answer it in the sestet by what is often a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn of reasoning between lines 8 and 9. This turn of reasoning, the volta, especially in “Sonnet 29,” shifts the poem from being simply a litany of woes and self-indulgent “bemoaning” and into an examination of the cause and effect relationship behind the poem, to the point where the sonnet can almost be considered an early form of psychotherapy. The voice asks, “what is wrong” and then probes for the answer.
For the persona of “Sonnet 29,” all is not lost. He realizes that even in his deepest moment of self loathing, “in these thoughts myself almost despising,” there is a glimmer of hope. The shift from woe to consolation demands that every issue under consideration be examined from the opposite perspective—a trait that Boethius spells out quite clearly. The emotions rarely allow one the privilege of seeing the other side of an argument; yet the persona of “Sonnet 29” rises out of his emotional distress in line 9, a tall order in that the volta demands considerable strength of intellect and a kind of hopeful dispassion that sees light in darkness and possibility in despair.
He announces in line 10, “Haply I think on thee,” which suggests that the persona’s lot is not as bad as he had thought because he has the young man’s friendship. This is more than just a matter of considering the opposite idea as a matter of “thinking” one’s way through the argumentative process of the sonnet: it is a miracle of images. “Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate,” the poet likens his friendship with the young man. The Platonic idea of friendship, what Jonathan Swift perceives as the great virtue in the Houyhnmms in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, is, perhaps the highest possible ideal one can seek to attain. Friendship, in the classical sense, is something that is more continuous than love. It survives the momentary passage of passions, it advises and counsels, and it stands the test of time. It is more than power and more than wealth. Friendship, for the persona of “Sonnet 29,” is “wealth” that is counted only in the spirit, and the memory of it brings him to the recognition that it is worth more than any amount of momentary recompense. “I scorn to change my state with kings,” he notes. What should be remembered is that in the center of Dante’s Hell are those who betrayed friendship, Brutus and Judas.
What “Sonnet 29” proves is not only the value of friendship but the undeniable worth of reason. The form itself, the sonnet, is a rhetorical rather than a lyrical structure, and although it offers lyric elements such as the rhyming couplet at the conclusion or the balanced meter, its chief value is as an argumentative structure, a means of working one’s way toward reason in any situation. The Renaissance mind pursued balance and proportion in all things, and the sonnet is a balanced way of looking not only at emotional problems but through them. In this process of pursuing balance, the tools are not only reason but imagination and memory.
The image of the lark ascending at daybreak to sing “hymns at heaven’s gate,” is not merely a flight of fancy but the realization that memory and the imagination are the repositories of hope, wherein the true value of the more lasting aspects of one’s existence—friendship, truth, faith—are there to shore up one’s defenses against a world bound up in entropy and emotional tides, if only one is able to reason his or her way to it.
Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000. Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry.
The Fusion of Content and Form in “Sonnet 29”
One of the most popular of the fixed poetic forms in English literature is the sonnet. Attributed to the Italian poet Petrarch in the fourteenth century, the sonnet is still used by many contemporary writers. The appeal of the sonnet lies in its two-part structure, which easily lends itself to the dynamics of much human emotional experience and to the intellectual mode of human sensibility for argument based on complication and resolution.
In the last decade of the sixteenth century, sonnet writing became highly fashionable following the publication of Sir Philip Sydney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, published in 1591. Sonnet sequences were widely read and admired at this time, circulated about the court, and read among friends and writers. Shakespeare took up this trend, adapting his considerable talent to the prevailing literary mode while writing for the theater. He specifically followed the form of the sonnet as adopted from the Italian into English by the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt.
Bound by the conventions of the sonnet, Shakespeare used the form to explore the same themes as early Latin, Italian, and French verse. He treated the themes of the transient nature of youth and physical beauty, the fallibility of love, and the nature of friendship. Even the dominating conceit of Shakespeare’s sequence—the poet’s claim that his poems will confer immortality on his subject—is one that goes back to Ovid and Petrarch. In Shakespeare’s hands, however, the full potentiality of the sonnet form emerged, earning for it the poet’s name.
The Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet are similar in that they both present and then solve a problem. The Petrarchan sonnet does it through an octave which presents a problem and a sestet which provides the resolution. A different rhyme scheme and thus a different convention of logical and rhetorical organization determines the differences between the two sonnet forms. In the Petrarchian sonnet the problem is solved by reasoned perception or a meditative process. The Shakespearean sonnet maintains the basic two-part structure of conflict and resolution, now presented in fourteen lines of three quatrains and a concluding rhyming couplet. Each quatrain presents a further aspect of a problem, conflict, or idea. The resolution occurs in the last two of a rhyming couplet, achieved through logical cleverness that summarizes or ties together what has been expressed in the three quatrains. The rhyme scheme, subject to variation, is abab, cdcd, efef, gg in iambic pentameter.
The sonnet sequence is a gathering together of a number of sonnets to present a narrative or examine a larger theme. Shakespeare’s sequence, like Sydney’s, was intended as a series of love poems to celebrate the poet’s affections for a young male friend. The poems were collected and published as a sequence in 1609, though initially they were private poems meant for a small circle of writers and friends, not for publication.
There are 154 sonnets in the sequence. Some scholars speculate these are ones that remain from a longer work, thus accounting for the sonnet’s problems in chronology, thematic development, and connections between individual poems. Other scholars speculate that not all the poems in the sequence were written by Shakespeare himself, thus accounting for the uneven nature of the sequence. In fact, many puzzles surrounding the sequence still exist. Particularly intriguing is the ongoing attempt to identify the young man with the initials W. H., to whom the sequence is addressed and dedicated, along with the mysterious so-called dark woman who intrudes into the relationship between the younger man and the poet.
The story that unfolds within the sequence is that of a love triangle. It begins with the relationship between the speaker of the poems and a young man he admires and comes to love. Their relationship, however, is impeded by their differences in age, wealth, and rank. The poet is older and more established than his friend, while the young man is from an influential and wealthy family. The relationship is also threatened by the shadow of a dark and sensual woman, referred to by critics as “the dark lady” and presumed to be the poet’s mistress.
Whoever the young man was, his image dominates the sequence, and whoever the mysterious woman may have been, we can see from the details in the sequence that she created a conflict for the poet between his profound affection for his friend and the sexual attraction that drew him to this woman. In the later sonnets of the sequence, the poet is thrown into misery and anguish when this woman betrays him by seducing the young man.
Aside from these few details about the circumstances of the complicated triangle within the poems, the sequence tells us little about the personal life of the poet. What it does show, however, is something of the nature of the man behind the words, a man who occasionally seems to be on the edge of emotional and physical exhaustion, even disillusionment, a man who is not always happy with his craft or the theater, and a man who sometimes distrusts the very gift he believes will confer immortality on his subject. Yet it also shows a man who perseveres because he remains engaged in the world and fascinated by the people and events around him, an involvement that enables him to rise above any personal setback and pain.
The sonnets in the sequence up to “Sonnet 127” (when the dark lady makes her appearance) celebrate the poet’s love and affection for the young man. “Sonnet 29” specifically shows the importance of this friendship to the older man during a particularly low point in the poet’s life. The poet is at odds with himself and the world around him, almost on the point of despair, and disliking himself for his self-pity. In the first quatrain the poet expresses his sense of personal failure. In the second he adds to this sense of failure by comparing himself to the young man he loves and the young man’s friends. Beside their accomplishments his own bring him little contentment. In the third quatrain the thought of his friend reminds him of his friend and the love the young man gives to the poet’s life. Immediately the nature of his thoughts changes and his spirits rise. In the final couplet, the poet concludes his reflection by acknowledging that the very existence of the young man’s love makes all other accomplishments unimportant and his life far richer than any others—so rich, in fact, he would not change it for any other.
A surface paraphrase of the poem ignores the complexity of the intellectual process within the poem, particularly the quick turns of thought expressed in the poem’s progression of logic and in the meaning of its diction. Each of the poem’s quatrains advances the poet’s complaint. In the first line of the first quatrain the poet expresses his sense of failure as “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” He feels he has failed in the eyes of others and therefore believes himself to be an outcast. The word “fortune” suggests both material wealth and the events or circumstances of the poet’s life. He curses his “outcast state”: “And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, and look upon myself, and curse my fate.” Fate in this sense is the situation into which the circumstances of his life have placed him.
In the second quatrain he further adds to his sense of failure by comparing himself to others “more rich in hope.” Hope suggests a more optimistic nature and possibility in the future, both of which the poet feels he lacks. He wishes he were “featured like him,” or as handsome as some others, and also like others “with friends possessed.” “Him” is possibly the young man himself who is surrounded by friends. The poet further wishes he had what some others have by “desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” “Art” suggests both specific talent and objects of art such as paintings and fine artifacts, while “scope” points to opportunity and intelligence or the extent or range of one’s understanding. In the final line he compares what others have to what he “most enjoys,” which presumably is his talent with words but with which, paradoxically, he says he is “contented least.” Though the poet writes because he wants to, it does not bring him the kind of satisfaction he believes the other qualities bring others.
In the final quatrain the poet acknowledges the self-pitying nature of his complaints and admits to disliking himself for them with his admission “in these thoughts myself almost despising.” Fortunately, by recalling the presence of the young man in his life (“Haply I think on thee), the very nature of his thoughts changes. The poet expresses his turn of thought in the sweeping image of “the lark” who at break of day arises from “sullen earth” to sing hymns “at heaven’s gate.” Though the poet does not define the love between the young man and himself as spiritual, the very thought of his friend’s love elevates the poet’s “state,” a state he compares to the lark. With the thought of his friend, the poet’s spirits soar beyond his gloomy thoughts.
The shift in the poem from the conflict presented in the first two quatrains begins in the third quatrain, pivoting in the first line of the third quatrain with the conjunctive adverb “yet.” Although the poet has almost given in to despising himself, the thought of the young man turns his thoughts in another direction and brings the poem to its final shift—the resolution of the concluding couplet: “For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
The resolution turns on the first word of the couplet “for” and exploits the double meaning of “wealth” and “state.” In the first line of the sonnet the poet finds himself “in disgrace with fortune.” Here “fortune” is associated with the material wealth and success of the material world, a “state” the poet has not achieved and because of which he believes himself to be a failure and an outcast. Yet the recollection of the young man’s love reminds the poet of a different kind of richness, a wealth that has nothing to do with what a person owns, or how a person looks, or the way a person thinks, but with the special qualities of their relationship. Because of the poet’s recollection of “thy sweet love,” he now “scorns” to change his state with the “state of kings.”
“State” is both a condition in the outer world and an inner state. The young man’s love gives the poet something far more meaningful than anything in the material world. Like the image of the lark rising above “sullen earth” to sing at “heaven’s gate,” the poet now makes his own wealth known to the world in his poem. The poem will immortalize this love by lasting long after anything in the mutable material world. With this knowledge the poet is able to resolve his previous complaints, and he now scorns “to change my state with kings.” In the logical progression of the poet’s thoughts, the poet realizes he is far wealthier than any king.
The expression of the poet’s affection for the younger man perfectly fulfills the logical and rhetorical structure. It presents its conflict in the twelve lines of the three qutrains and resolves it in the rhyming couplet. The enduring value of this sonnet rests, however, not so much in the argument it presents, which is merely a play in logic, but in the integrity of the rhetorical strategy and its perfect fusion of content and form.
Source: Alice Van Wart, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000. Alice Van Wart teaches literature and writing in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Toronto. She has published two books of poetry and has written articles on modern and contemporary literature.