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Towards a New Approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Towards a New Approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets TOWARDS A NE'ii APPROACH TO SHAKESPEARE I S SOlHmrS TOVIARDS A NEW APPROACH TO SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS BY JENNIFER HARY SHEPPARD, B.A. A Thesis Submi tted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts McMaster University September, 1976 MASTER OF ARTS (1976) Hct4AS'I'ER UNIVERSITY (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Towards a New Approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets AUTHOR: Jennifer Hary Sheppard, B.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: B. A. W. Jackson Nut1BER m'" PAGES: i v t 127 11 . - .~, .. ~'.-~ 5 NOTES (INTRODUCTION) 1 Douglas Bush and Alfred Harbage, eds e Shakespeare's S~~ets, (1967), 7. 2 Hotson's article "Hore Light on Shakespeare's Sonnets" appeared in the ~espeare Qu~rterl~ II (1951), and Bateson's reply in Essays in ~Cr~tici8m I (1971). 3 I used two bibliographies: 1) Shakes eare (Select Bibliographical Guides), ed. Stanley Wells Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973): "Sonnets and Other Poems", J.Jv1.Nosworthy, 50-51; 2) The New Cambridge Bibliograph;t: of E~~lish Litera~ I, ed. George Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 1560-1564. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 6 CHAPTER TWO 16 CHAPTER THREE 31 CHAPTER FOUR 49 CHAPTER FIV'£ 58 CHAPTER SIX 68 CHAPTEH SEVF.:N 84 CHAPTER EIGHT 101 CHAPTER NINE 111 BIBLIOGRAPHY 123 iv INTRODUCTION There are few works of criticism about Shakespeare's sonnets that are not prefaced by the observation that, to quote Douglas Bush's appropriately metaphoric version, "Shakespeare's sonnets are an island ll 1 of poetry surrounded by a barrier of icebergs and dense fog • Such remarks generally pave the way for the writer to add to the annals of sonnet criticism the fruits of his own research which, whether merited or not, will eventually be subsumed in the next general indictment. Insofar as such remarks are so VCI7 common, they are amusing; insofar as they are true, they meL-it attention. They imply both that the writer is fully aware of t.he copious efforts, and the shortcomings, of his critical predecessors, and that he feels his own contr:i.bution to be, at last, unassailable. It is not, of course. And so it goes on. In this particular field of Shakespearean criticism, the driving force is as much competition as curiosity. If the desire among scholars is great to know all the I<tnSVlers, it is even greater to be the one who d:i.scovers 'them. The reason why Shakcnpearets sonnets ha.ve generated so much, and such mixed, critical attention is fundamentally tha.t so little is known about Shakespeare himself and his life. A few dates, several facts, two or three signa.tures and a portrait constitute the entire extant, factual evidence of his existence. l"'he insatiabl6 longing to know more has, undel'standably, led many scholars and commentators to scour the 1 2 plays for characters which seem to speak with a voice that could be Shakespeare's own. But the dangers inherent in such ventures are widely recognized and such approaches are treated for the most part with caution. A collection of love sonnets, however, which seems to provide evidence of a series of real events, presents too great a temptation for Shakespeare's would-be biographers to resist. It was, and for many still is, impossible to approach the sonnets without the hope of discovering something which is translatable into evidence. The fact that the only original text was apparently unauthorized by Shakespeare and carries an enigmatic dedication, only complicates the situation. Modern criticism was launched (unwittingly) by Edmond Malone's 1790 edition of Shakespeare's poems in which he suggested that some of the sonnets were autobiographical. It Vias an idea which instantly captured the critical imagination. The intellectual challenge of such detective work is immensely appealing, and when the clues are so slight, the diversity of opinion, and hence the degree of competitiveness, is enormous. It is instructive to notice the titles gj. ven to cd tical works by their sleuth-authors: The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets ~£!dJ With The Characters Identified (Gerald Massey, 1872); The ~~~~d Masterpiece: Shakespeare's Sonnets Restored After 350 Yeat2 of~~e2ti~n; A Study in Literary Detection (Jo~ North North, 1968); ~~~_=of Shakespe~' s Sonnets and The Problem of Shakespeare's ~nne~ are common, and sometimes even Shakespeare~s £onnets Solved. Here, 'the sonnets' have become synonymous with 'problem'. Host telling of all, however, is F.W.Bateson's memorable rebuttal to Leslie Hotson's theory about Sonnet 107 (the 'Mortal Moon'), which he called Elementary By 2 Dear Hotsonl A Caveat for Literary Detectives. There has been no Variorum edition of the sonnets since Hyder Edward Rollins' massive volumes which were published in 1944, and although there have been many significant contributions to sonnet criticism during the past thirty years, there is no assessment of the critical literature as a whole from a modern viewpoint. It is perhaps for this reason that a significant aspect of what is by now a vast body of critical literature has, to my knowledge, received scant remark, if any. It is this: the 'riddle' of the sonnets, the problems which for decades -­ one can almost say centuries -- have taxed the scholarship and ingenuity of some of the finest literary minds, are all artificially created. The 'problems' emerge only when the reader makes assumptions about Shakespeare's sonnets which, even if to some extent justifiable on the grounds of probability, serVe only to create problems which need not exist and which, even if finally and indisputably resolved, would not even fractionally advance the reader's grasp of the sonnets. The nature of criticism is governed by the assumptions on which it is based. In the case of Shakespeare's sonnets, untested assumptions have shackled critical thought for almost two centuries, and, even today, the possibility of uncovering the definitive solution to what must be one of the most tantalizing of all historical riddles, still lures many commentators away from more constructive studies. As a result the accrued mass of scholarly studies of Shakespeare's sonnets constitutes a unique critical phenomenon. It originated when scholars began t·o erect 'barriers of ice and dense fog' against themselves by allowing biographical curiosity about the poet to overrule literary curiosity about the poetry. Since then, during the course of almost two hundred years, it has developed in a way peculiar to itself as 4 generations of scholars have chipped away at these critical barriers in the agonizingly slow process of rediscovering the poetry which lay beyond. A curious process indeed, but one which need not be considered entirely in vain, as I hope my study will demonstrate. In the last seventy or so years, sonnet criticism has been marked by a gradual broadening of vision as one by one, obstructive critical assumptions have been challenged and undermined. It would, of course, be foolish to argue that the progress has been universal or even systematic. No clear path of enlightenment is discernible amidst the scores of critical studies which, by 1944, numbered well over sixteen hundred. The picture is rather of a mor~ss of theories, marked here and there by works significant for their wisdom, their influence, and sometimes both. This study, then, is not about Shakespeare's sonnets, but about what I have called the unique phenomenon of the criticism they have generated. It is based on a select reading of this critical literature, with the stress on the work of this century.3 It is structured so as to emphasize the initial, successive demolition-of questionable critical assumptions, and the consequent diversification of approach and progress towards a direct confrontation with the sonnets as literature. 5 NOTES (INTRODUCTION) 1 . Douglas Bush and Alfred Harbage, eds. Shakespeare's So~ets, (1967), 7. 2 Hotson's article "Hore L;_ght on Shakespeare's Sonnets" appeared in the ShakesEeare Quarterlr II (1951), and Bateson's reply in Ess~~s in C.E~~ I (1951). 3 I used two bibliographies: 1) Shakes eare (Select Bibliographical Guides), ed. Stanley Wells Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973): "Sonnets and Other Poems". J.M.Nosworthy, 50-51; 2) The New Qambridge Bibliogra£~ of Engli§.!l~ratu!..£. I, ed. George Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 1560-1564. CHAPTER ONE It is all too easy, looking back over the body of Shakespearean sonnet criticism which accumulated during the nineteenth century, to take an amused, even patronizing view of it. From our modern standpoint, one we like to think of as detached and objective, the earnest debate between those who saw Shakespeare revealed in his sonnets, and those who could not, does seem absurd. It is therefore salutarJ, at the outset of a study such as this, to be reminded of two things. One is that there were not a few nineteenth century critics who held opinions which are very close to our modern ones, and who expressed them clearly enough, even though their thoughts went largely . d 1 unnot~ce • The second is that the kind of'literary detective work which so intrigued and engrossed James Boaden and others still holds irresistible fascination for modern writers, and the autobiographical v~ew~point is by no means abandoned. Bearing in mind the warning that critics of a later age may well look back to·the sonnet criticism of the 1970's, and make similar sweeping accusations of bias or narrow-mindedness, it is perhaps wise to approach nineteenth century criticism with rather more sympathy than seems usual. Edward Hubler, in ~e Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1962), adds to the standard account of the general neglect of Shakespeare's sonnets from their first publication until that last decade of the eighteenth century the observation that such comment as they did attract was "judicial", concerned to evaluate them as poetry (p.ll).
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