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Kenneth J. Larsen Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Kenneth J. Larsen Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets Larsen: Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1 Kenneth J. Larsen Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets Larsen: Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 2 In memory of another “MR. W. H.,” my “onlie begetter.” Larsen: Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 3 Introduction Shake-speares Sonnets was entered in the Stationers’ Register on Saturday 20 May 1609; the record reads, 20 Maij Thomas Thorpe. Entred for his copie vnder thandes of master Wilson and master Lownes Warden a Booke called Shakespeares sonnettes vjd. The cost of sixpence would have been normal. The volume’s frontispiece bears the date, 1609, and the place, London, and declares forthrightly, “Neuer before Imprinted.” It was printed by George Eld for “T. T.,” evidently the publisher Thomas Thorpe. The volume appeared with two-title pages, one with the imprint of the book-seller, John Wright, and one with that of another, William Aspley. The subsequent dedicatory page is signed, “T. T.,” again Thomas Thorpe. The dedication is solecistic, a trait of Thorpe’s writing, and is addressed to “MR. W. H.,” whose identity has been the subject of debate and acrimony from Ben Jonson onwards. The publication of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence came late in the piece: by 1609 the vogue of sequences which had flourished in the 1590s and early 1600s in the wake of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sequence had passed. Yet some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written before 1599, because Francis Meres, when pairing a range of accomplished English writers with Latin precursors in 1598, coupled Shakespeare with Ovid and alluded to “his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends:” As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c. 1 As well, versions of Sonnets 138 and 144 had appeared in a rather tawdry, unauthorized volume published by William Jaggard in 1599 and entitled The Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare. (The majority of the volume’s poems are not by Shakespeare.) Larsen: Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 4 The sequence is divided between those generally directed to a youth (Sonnets 1-126) and those generally addressed to a ‘Dark Lady’ (Sonnets 127-152); there are two further sonnets, Sonnets 153-54, which are anacreontic sonnets. The sonnets as printed do not necessarily reflect the order of the composition as recent stylometric work advanced by Kent Hieatt and others and refined by MacD. Jackson has demonstrated. 2 By comparing early and late ‘rare’ words in sonnets and plays Hieatt and Jackson have concluded that statistical analysis and comparative ratios indicate that the final section of sonnets, those to the Dark Lady are of early composition, probably in the period 1595-96. The inclusion among them of Sonnets 138 and 144 and of the anomalous Sonnet 145, which, if Andrew Gurr is correct, was written early to Anne Hathaway, supports the conclusion. 3 The remainder of the sonnets were composed during the latter half of the 1590s, with the exception of Sonnets 104-26, which were written in the early years of the 17th century. Sonnet 107 and Sonnets 123-25 allude to events that occurred around 1603 and 1604, so must have been written after those events. Sonnet 107 refers to the death of Elizabeth and the “balmie time,” brought about by the accession of James I in 1603; Sonnet 125 alludes to the coronation of James in 1603, Sonnet 123 to the royal procession in 1604 (15 March 1603 o.d.), that celebrated the coronation, and Sonnet 124 to the “Bye” and “Main” plots, conspiracies against James that occurred in 1603, which culminated in trials and executions (staged and otherwise) in December 1603. The sonnets, then, were written over a span of years and there is no reason not to accept that Shakespeare followed the practice of his fellow sonneteers, who continually revised their sonnets and sequences: Samuel Daniel, the author of the sequence, Delia, was an habitual fiddler and Michael Drayton’s sequence, Ideas Mirrour. Amours in Quatorzains, underwent constant revision as new editions were issued, only 20 of the original 51 sonnets found in the 1594 edition surviving in the 1637 edition. In Shakespeare’s case earlier sonnets such as Sonnets 138 and 144 were reworked afterwards, while later sonnets themselves would have been revised, perhaps with printing in mind. Larsen: Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 5 Structure The shape of the volume as a whole, a sequence of 154 sonnets and a long sustained poem, A Louers complaint, reflects contemporary practice. As sonnet sequences developed during the 1590s some features became common: Samuel Daniel’s Delia, Contayning certayne Sonnets: with the complaint of Rosamond has a bipartite structure with a sonnet sequence and the longer complaint; Richard Linche’s 1596 sequence to Diella is combined with the extended, “amorous Poeme of Dom Diego and Gineura.” Other sequences formed part of a tripartite structure: Richard Barnfield’s volume of 1598, for example, has “Cynthia,” “Certaine Sonnets” and the “Legend of Cassandra.” But the structure of Shake-speares Sonnets and A Louers complaint is closest to that of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion of 1595. Spenser’s volume has a tripartite structure with a sonnet sequence of 89 sonnets, a small series of anacreontic verses and a longer epithalamium, which Shakespeare has imitated with his sequence of 152 sonnets, two anacreontic sonnets and a long complaint. 4 He has further imitated Spenser’s placement of a mirror sonnet at the mid-point of his sequence, Amoretti 45 of 89 (“Leaue lady in your glasse of christall clene, / Your goodly selfe for euermore to vew”). 5 Shakespeare has a like sonnet at Sonnet 77, the middle sonnet of 154 (“Thy glasse will shew thee how thy beauties were”), and has positioned at the end of the sequence’s first half Sonnet 76, a sonnet that takes stock of the past and looks forward to a new beginning. 6 The placement of other sonnets provides tantalizing glimpses of possible structures which are, however, never sufficiently cogent to allow for conclusions to be drawn. Sonnet 12, beginning, “When I doe count the clock that tels the time,” suggests the hours on a clock face or sundial. Sonnet 60 hints at the number of minutes in the hour in, “So do our minuites hasten to their end.” Sonnet 52 celebrates “feasts so solemne . in the long yeare set;” the first rank of Solemn Feasts in the Book of Common Prayer’s calendar are “All Sundayes in the yeare,” normally numbering 52. Sonnet 8, a musical sonnet, is appropriately placed, because an “eight” is a “true concord.” Sonnet 19 brings to a conclusion the cycle of sonnets which exhort the youth to procreate while still in his Larsen: Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 6 prime. The number 19 was the cycle of years beyond which the Prime could not extend in the metonic calendar (see Sonnet 19). The sequence’s first 152 sonnets could thus be seen as comprising 8 courses of 19 sonnets. The placement of the epicedial Sonnets 71 and 72 after Sonnet 70, when the poet has completed his climacteric three-score-and-ten, seems more than a coincidence and invites some observations about climacterics. It has often been noticed that Sonnet 63, which begins “Against my loue shall be as I am now” and which acknowledges that “Ages cruell knife” will “cut from memory . my louers life,” celebrates the grand climacteric, the number 63, a year in one’s life fraught with danger and often marked by death. Sonnet 63 is also the half-way sonnet of 126, the number of sonnets directed to the youth, the span of which might be construed as a double climacteric. But climacterics were not confined to 63, the most pertinent and discussed in Shakespeare’s time being 70, the year of her life, in which Elizabeth I died and which prompted Thomas Wright’s A Succinct Philosophicall declaration of the nature of Clymactericall yeeres, occasioned by the death of Queene Elizabeth of 1604. (Thomas Thorpe was the publisher.) The occasion for his treatise, Wright claims, was “the death of Queene Elizabeth, who died in the 70. yeere of her age, which was the Clymactericall period of her life.” He argues that it is “good to examine and search out the cause of these notable alterations and daungers of death in the Clymactericall yeeres, for those humors which alter the bodie, and dispose it to sicknesse, and death,” because “God hath appointed these Septuarie, and Nonarie yeeres as best seeming his wisdome and prouidence.” He explains that “the first Clymactericall yeeres” are multiples of nine and the “seconds” multiples of seven, concluding with the climacteric of “seauenty,” of which age “spake Dauid when hee sayde . The dayes of our yeeres are seauentie yeeres, and if in Potentates they be eightie, the labour and griefe is greater.” Wright then lists the most notorious climacterics: The most daungerous of all these passages or steps, are the forty nine, compounded vpon seuen time seauen: and sixty three standing vppon nine times seauen, and next to these is seauenty, which containeth tenne times seauen; they number them also by nine, and so make eighty one, the most perillous as comprehending nine times nine. 7 Larsen: Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 7 Sonnet 49 shares a like beginning with Sonnet 63, “Against that time,” and develops the conceit of reckoning up and being summoned to a final accounting (“vtmost summe” and “audite”) as does Sonnet 126, which concludes with Nature making “Her Audite.” Sonnet 81, which coincides with the “most perillous” of climacterics, is the final epitaphial sonnet, beginning “Or I shall liue your Epitaph to make, / Or you suruiue when I in earth am rotten.” Yet, although it is tempting to read more into the placement of these sonnets, no further structure is readily discernible.
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