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Early Modern England Encyclopedia
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Sonnet is a poetic form commonly used for love poems, starting in 13th century Italy with the poems of Petrarch. Sonnets are always 14 lines long and are formed in various patterns of rhyme and meter, usually composed in iambic pentameter with one stanza of eight lines called an octave and another one of six called a sestet. Petrarch’s poems feature a fascination with contrasts and paradoxes and a speaker suffering from unrequited love for a distant beloved, a pattern which reappears in many English sonnets of the early modern period.
Sir Thomas Wyatt adapted the sonnet into English in the 1520s. The form reached peak popularity in the 1590s, when scholars presume Shakespeare composed his set of 154 poems, which were not published until 1609. The Elizabethan sonnet also uses iambic pentameter, but usually features three sets of four lines called quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet of two lines.
Just as Shakespeare created characters for his plays, he also did so in his sonnets. It remains tempting to read these intensely intimate poems as biographical, however no clear evidence exists to support this interpretation. Much about Shakespeare’s sonnets, from the precise time they were composed to the subject of the dedication to the identity of the characters, has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate.
However personal some of the sonnets seem, Shakespeare creates a speaker for them, a poetic persona. The I
of the poems is older than the Young Man. He loves the Young Man, but there is a quarrel (see sonnets 33-35) and at times the Poet despairs of the Young Man’s love (see sonnets 94, 67, 69). The poet is both attracted and repelled by another character, the Dark Lady.
Many of the sonnets become meditations on the Poet’s fascination with the destruction of beauty and the passage of time (see Sonnet 65, also 5, 7, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 60, 63-65, 73, 100, 115-116, 123, 126). In one of the most famous of those on the passage of time, the Poet speaks as one on the very brink of death:
(Sonnet 73)
The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are written to a Young Man. The first 20 urge him to marry, while later ones meditate on time, love, and beauty. The Young Man is a very dear friend of the Poet, and the Poet admires his beauty and urges him to have children.
Later, the Young Man has an affair a woman whom scholars call the Dark Lady. Some sonnets describe the Poet’s feelings during their separation and the Young Man’s often irresponsible behavior.
Despite extensive efforts to identify the Young Man and what was Shakespeare’s personal relationship to him, no clear answers have been found. Some scholars suggest it was Henry Wriothesly, the Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare dedicated his narrative poems. Shakespeare’s Poet and Young Man operate within the accepted Renaissance tradition of male friendship, which was one that featured intense emotional bonds but was not necessarily sexual. Sonnet 20 indicates the relationship is not a physical one, although readers cannot escape the positive and negative passions in the friendship the poems portray. Many scholars have asserted that the sonnets are expressions of male-male love and desire, and so an extensive body of criticism exists that discusses this assertion.
Sonnets 33-35 and 40-42 introduce the Dark Lady, who appears again in 127-130 and 146-147. The Dark Lady becomes the object of desire and despair. Her dark hair and possibly dark eyes both attract and repel the Poet. The best known of these poems is Sonnet 130, which operates as a famous inversion of the Petrarchan concept of beauty. In one famous couplet, he comments that,For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright./Who art has black as hell, as dark as night.
(Sonnet 147)
As with the Young Man, the identity of the Dark Lady has inspired extensive speculation. The poet Aemilia Lanyer, a woman who was the mistress of Lord Henry Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who served as the patron of the playing company to which Shakespeare belonged and who may have had dark hair and eyes since her father was an Italian court musician, has been suggested as a potential candidate. No reliable evidence to confirm this theory exists, and Lanyer never mentions Shakespeare in her published book of poetry.
A Rival Poet, with proud full sail of his great verse
(Sonnet 86) competes for the attention of the Young Man (see sonnets 78-86). The poet envies the situation due to his worthier pen
(Sonnet 79). Various candidates have been suggested, including published authors Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Samuel Daniel, John Lyly, and Michael Drayton. No conclusive evidence exists for any firm identification of who The Poet envied so much that it became subject matter for the sonnets. As with the rest of the characters in the sonnets, speculation based on hints and suggestion is all that remains for readers to consider.