THE
SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
Reader
in English,
But
it is almost inexplicable that his biographers should have written their
biographies of Shakespeare without taking account of his autobiography–except
that they were men of little imagination and I suppose they found the full
story too uncomfortable.
–A.
L. Rowse
If
Cleopatra be in some sense a portrait of the Dark Woman, I have often thought
that Shakespeare’s account of Antony’s rapid
fluctuations of mood between demanding passion and violent jealousy might be in
some sense a piece of self-portraiture. Was his love for the Friend again in
some sense, like Othello’s very different love for Desdemona….?
–
We
are all familiar with Shakespeare the playwright; we are not as familiar with Shakespeare the poet. We have to revise our elementary
notions that one who writes poems is a poet and one who writes plays is a
playwright. Shakespeare the playwright is a great poet. Some years ago Grenville Barker wrote: Let us stress the obvious but
half-forgotten fact that Shakespeare is a dramatist. But in recent years the
verse of Shakespeare has come to the centre of the
stage. One who deals with the extractable elements like plot and character is
sadly equipped, says Prof. Knights, to study Shakespeare; his linguistic
vitality is regarded as the chiefest clue to the
personal urgencies that shaped the plays. The play is in the poetry, not the
poetry in the play. King Lear is not the story of a king and his three daughters
but the poet’s attempt to answer Lear’s question: Is there anyone who can tell
me who I am?
The
sonnets are Shakespeare’s finest non-dramatic poetry. They are the goldenest in the golden age of Elizabethan Poetry. All the
plays in some embryonic form are in the sonnets. What The Prelude is to
an understanding of Wordsworth, the sonnets are for a study of Shakespeare. The
doyen of Shakespeare scholars today, Dover Wilson, suggests cautiously that
Wilt
thou whose will is large and spacious
Not
once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
The
sonnets deal with lust, adultery, pederasty or homosexuality and slips in
sensual mire. They are squalid with a cancerous taint according to the prudes;
to them they are like a case history of perversion in Havelock Ellis’ Studies
in the Psychology of Sex. Benson’s change of gender implies that they
shocked the contemporaries as Lolita shocks
us today. Seymour Smith states his conviction that Sonnets 30-36 can be
interpreted only as ‘a heterosexual’s homosexual experience’.
The truth of C. S. Lewis’ fine remark that in Shakespeare each experience of
the lover becomes a window through which we look on immense prospects–on
nature, the seasons, life and death, time and eternity whereas in Donne it is more like a burning-glass, is not realized by
these critics: the lotus of charity is born of the mud of sordid lust; sex
flowers into soul of self-allegation; ‘pankaja’ the Samskrit word for lotus, sums up this sea change in the
sonnets.
It
is convenient to deal with the sonnets under the following heads:
(i)
the sonnet form
(ii)
the story of the sonnets
(iii)
the problems of the sonnets
(iv)
the
personality of Shakespeare.
(i) The sonnet enjoyed a great vogue in the last quarter of
the 16th century from 1590 to 1600. Most of the sonnets deal with an impossible
She; Spenser’s are the only sonnets which are about
his own wife and hence are less exciting. But then Spenser’s main contribution
to the history of ideas is the replacing of the Romance of
Adultery by the Romance of Marriage. Petrarch
is the founder of sonneteering or sighing in poetry
Wyatt and Surrey transplanted it in
A
tempest, a redundant energy
Vexing
its own creation.
Assist
me, some extemporal god of rhyme, says Don Armado,
for I am sure I shall turn sonneteer. Devise, wit;
write, pen for I am for whole volumes in folio.
There
are two types of the sonnet in English: the Petrarchan
and the Shakesperian or, more correctly, the Surreyan. The sonnet is a poem of 14 lines; it has 16 lines
in Meredith’s Modern Love. In Shakespeare one sonnet has 15 lines;
another only 12 (perhaps imitating
the sonnet swelling loudly
Up
to its climax and then dying proudly
The
Shakesperian consists of three quatrains and a
couplet: 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 instead of 8 + 6. The structural weakness of this lies
in the perfunctory couplet which is like padding or appendage (ajaagalastana: nipples on the neck of a goat, as our
writers call). The emotion or thought comes to an end at the 12th line and the
couplet does not share the poetic power of the preceding lines. One critic has
even asserted that there is hardly one Sonnet which is perfect; another remarks that Shakespeare blundered into the sonnet
form. In the Shakesperian form the three quatrains
are usually three parallel statements clinched by the concluding couplet;
sometimes the thought is developed throughout; sometimes the sense breaks at
the end of the second quatrain; sometimes the final couplet repudiates what has
gone before. In No. 66 the couplet proclaims the poet’s love as compensation
for all the ills of life in the first 12 lines.
The
sonnet is extremely difficult to achieve. Only a tremendous poet or a cold
mathematician, says one, can compose a sonnet. In politics we say: The smaller
the country, the better governed it is; in literature the smaller the country
the worse governed it is. Even a single bad line like a dash of vinegar spoils
the poem; the sonnet has to be perfect chrysolite. In
a sonnet, according to a critic, one line comes from the ceiling and the other
thirteen have to be adjusted round it. To compose a love sonnet it is not
enough to fall in love with a cruel fair; one has to fall out of it.
(ii) The following is the story: The poet urges a young man to get married and beget children and pass on his marvellous beauty to posterity (as if it lies in him!). There is the well-known story of Shaw’s retort to a Hollywood Star who proposed to Shaw to be the father of her child who would then combine her beauty and his brains: he said that the child might inherit her brains and his beauty. As our saying goes, the Son of a pandit is a dud (suntha). Of course, a lion does not beget a lamb; in Samskrit a wife is called jaaya because the husband is reborn in her or remade as a child; that is immortality. What man is interested in urging another to get married and found a family except a father or a ‘many-daughtered’ father-in-law or a non-homosexualist? The young man’s reluctance goes against the Doctrine of Increase as it is termed.
If the young man is obstinate, he shall be
immortalized in the poet’s verse more lasting than marble or gilded monuments. But
a Rival Poet has mesmerized the young man with strained touches of rhetoric and
the proudful sail of his verse. Shakespeare is
worried not about the Rival’s scholarship or skill but about his verse becoming
anaemic with the abduction or the young man. A Dark
Lady poses a similar threat. ‘That thou hast her, it is not all my grief.…; That she hath thee is of my wailing chief.’ Dark
means brunette, not dark like a negress;
a kind of ‘mystique’ about a dark beauty
seems to be developed. A sonnet says that
she is dark in deeds and hence
the slander. She will do the deed even if Argus were her watch: every woman has
her will. She was faithless to her husband, was mistress to Shakespeare and
then went over to the young man. Shakespeare’s reason is against her but his
heart runs after her as
The
expense of spirit a waste of sheme
Is
lust in action and till action,
Lust
is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage,
extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust…..
The
words snarl like a vicious beast and disturb even the structure of the sonnet.
The most powerful and disgustingly vivid expression of the sexual act occurs in
Othello: Making the beast with two backs. An excellent parallel to this
infatuation in modern literature is that of Philip for Mildred ill Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Hubler writes that there is nothing like the woman of
Shakespeare’s sonnets in all the sonnet literature of the Renaissance.
Similarly
there is no parallel to the language of friendship the poet uses towards the
young man in 16th century literature, in the opinion of C. S. Lewis. The man
right fair is not at all censured. The poet writes: To thy sensual fault I
bring in sense, thy adverse party has become thy advocate and in what sounds
like spinelessness he says: My friend and I are one, even when the friend has
stolen his Mistress. The poet is prepared to surrender
everything for the young man–his mistress and even his good name: Do not thou
with public kindness honour me. The gesture of
sublimely incredible friendship jars on modern ears. But this is in tune with
the other characters in Shakespeare’s plays or in classical literatures. The
friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, Proteus and
Valentine, Antonio and Sebastian, Hamlet and Horatio, David and Jonathan, Gray
and Bonstetten, Tennyson and Hallaam,
Byron and Edleston illustrates abundantly the Sonnet
story. Damon and Pythias vie with each other for
death so lovingly that a tyrant craves for their friendship. The gambler in Kathasaritsagara shouts that the king’s head
is doomed, if his friend’s life is in danger. Pater
relates in his book on the Renaissance the story of Amis
and Amile. Amis kills his
own children to cure Amile of leprosy and, though
buried separately, their dead bodies are found together. When a friend says: I
like your wife, you do not surrender her to him. That is what precisely happens
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Valentine says: All that was mine in
Silvia I give thee; so much so Quillercouch questions
the propriety of Gentlemen in the title. Sebastian speaks out in The Twelfth
Night:
I
have many enemies in Orsino’s court
But
come what may, I do adore thee so
That
danger shall seem sport and I will go
The
story of the sonnets, applying the aesthetic test as Bradley calls it, is too
odd to be fictitious, too painful to be mere rhetoric, too dim to be dramatic.
The sonnets are astonishingly original. In all sonnet cycles it is a mistress that queens it over her lover. The code of medieval love laid down that the lover should even address his lady as My Lord (midons) as if a husband is asked to praise his wife: O wife, you are my husband. He has to obey her in every respect except when she commands him not to love her. Shakespeare laughs at this. The most remarkable thing about his sonnets is the thematic revolution or topsyturvification: here a young man is the master-mistress of the poet’s passion and the lady is laughed to scorn: she is the bay where all men ride. Still the poet is caught in the gluepot of her sexiness; he lives like a deceived husband, even when she lies with him. It is just like a lover telling his love: You have a snub nose but I love thee nonetheless. The lady in her anger may make the lover snub-nosed.
It
is surprising that at a time when sonneteering was
the fashion, the sonnets of a popular dramatist like Shakespeare should have
gone through just two editions in a century and that all the editions of his
works up to Dr. Johnson did not include the sonnets. Steevens
wrote in 1793 that not even an act of Parliament would ‘shoehorn’ readers into
the study of the sonnets. The Romantic poets began to worship everything Shakesperian and all the dark heroines from Rosaline to Cleopatra are said to be the daughters of the
Dark Lady. The inference is that the sonnets were regarded at one time as ‘chronique scandaleuse’ and hence
suppressed. Now we agree with Meres that Shakespeare
is ‘the most passionate, among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of
love’.
(iii)
There are three important problems connected with the sonnets: the historical, the
literary, the autobiographical. The historical means the identification of the
lovely Boy, the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet. The critic does not care a farthing
if the man right fair is Southampton or Herbert, if the rival poet is Marlowe or Chapman; by pursuing the will-o’-wisp of rival
young men, rival ladies, rival poets the reader becomes a rival of poetic
appreciation. The literary implies the date and order of the sonnets. The date
is the key to the arch. If we resolve this, everything else resolves itself. To
discuss other problems without fixing the date is to baptise
your child when you are not even married. The sonnets have been ‘rearranged,
disarranged, deranged’ according to the passing whim of every critic. By and
large 1-126 form a unit and deal with the lovely boy; it is relevent
to note that TIME occurs 78 times in this group. Nos. 127-152 are the
disordered appendix sucking us into the maelstrom of passion for the dark lady.
Nos. 153 and 154 point out, perhaps, the resigned awareness that the dateless
lively heat of the king of plackets and codpieces can never be quenched. About
the Autobiographical there is acute difference of opinion. Wordsworth declared
that Shakespeare unlocked his heart through the sonnets; if so the less
Shakespeare he, asserted Browning. Schlegel wrote in 1796 that the poet bared
his soul; a recent editor of the sonnets says that Shakespeare’s poems say,
‘Look at you!’ Sir Sidney regarded; them as literary exercises; the experience
is more imagined than; suffered; there is thematic similarity among Venus
and Adonis, Hero and Leander, Willobie His Apisa and even Euphues. But none walks abroad
save on his own shadow. Most of the sonnet cycles were used for the expression
of personal feelings and Shakespeare asks his friend to read his
sonnets for their sincerity. Sincerity can be regarded as the theme of the
sonnets. As opposed to the autobiographical is the theory of the sonnets as a
public prayer; the test is if the congregation can join. Love poetry is
transferable. We may not be saints or scoundrels but we are all lovers. A
reader ought to see in a sonnet not what the poet felt but what he himself
felt, what all men felt.
Regarding
these problems, agnosticism is safe. In the sonnets we cannot be sure of the
date or the order, the identity or autobiography; we are sure of only one
thing–poetic robustness.
(iv)
The personality of the poet that emerges from the sonnets is an incredibly
noble one. The young man does not love the poet as much as the poet loves the
young man. In love, said a cynic, there is one who loves and another who is
loved. The poet’s utter self-abnegation is like Christian charity; his is not
an ‘asking’ love but a ‘giving’ love. He would commence a lawful plea against
himself. Speak of my lameness and I shall halt, he says he would rather censure
himself than the young man or even the dark Lady:
But
why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,
When
I break twenty?
This
is like the invincible forgiveness of heroines in Samskrit
plays, nobly unaware of wrong done. For instance, Sakuntala
has not the heart to blame Dushyanta but blames
herself: mama sucharita pratibandhakam
puraakrutam tesu divaseshu parinaama abhimukham aasit. All men
make faults and even I in this…Upon thy side against myself I will fight. Dover
Wilson stated persuasively that Shakespeare conceals nothing, condemns nothing.
It is rather misleading to say that he condemns nothing. There are flaws in
human nature at which his voice vibrates with passion and his lines become
lurid with irony. Hence the remark that with reference to Shakespeare the
expression ‘holding up the mirror to nature’ is silly and meaningless; only
Nature’s natural holds up the mirror to nature. Marx seems to have said: Poets
have so far interpreted the world; we shall change it. Poets do what Marx
denied them; they change the world–spiritually.
Judge
not lest ye be judged; we are not here to judge and condemn but understand and
interpret. Shaw remarked that he had not become that great nuisance to the
world–a man of principles. Shakespeare too is not a man of principles who would
stretch frail man on a procrustean bed. Our philosophies have to be adjusted to
human beings and not human beings to philosophies. Sabbath is made for man, not
man for sabbath.
There
are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than
are dreamt of in our philosophies.
We
have to suspend our judgement. It is most mischievous
foul sin in chiding sin. In the unending diversity of God’s creation what can
we condemn? Perhaps there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. This
refusal to judge is interpreted as a morality or divinity; his humanity is so
wide and warm that, like a barber’s chair, it fits all buttocks. In the Vibhutiyoga chapter of the Gita the Lord describes Himself as dyutam chalayataam asmi; I wonder if in any other religion God has the
courage to describe himself as the skill of the gambler. Shakespeare has
immense tolerance to the moral molluscs sinning their
way to sanctity. He would have approved of Omar Khayyam’s:
Oh
Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And
who with Eden didst devise the Snake,
For
all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is
blackened, Man’s Forgiveness give–and take!
He is not a
moral Grandison flaunting the sickly flower of purity
in the buttonhole. He does not belong to the terrible army of cripples,
self-abased, miserable, retrospective. There is ingrained humility and lovableness in those not righteous over much. Too much of
pedantry is a vice and deserves the retort of the criminal. A certain judge
pointing to a criminal said: There stands the criminal at the end of my cane.
The thief retorted: At which end of the cane, my Lord? Handy dandy, who is the
thief? Who is the judge? The beadle lusts after the whore’s flesh and how is he
less culpable than the whore? None offends, as Lear says. Persons may pretend
to be moral Olympians. But they are worse than moral invertebrates when they
fall: Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
There
was never yet Philosopher
That
endured tooth ache patiently
However
they writ the style of gods.
The poet’s gospel is that of the three Monkeys: See not evil, bear not evil, speak not evil. In this world it is invariably a question of the pot calling the kettle black. Hence he shouts at the pitch of his voice:
Or
on my frailties why are frailer spies
Which
in their wills count bad what I think good?
No,
I am that I am….
Shakespeare
is one who gives himself away unreservedly. The motto on the casket, which Bassanio chooses, sums up his character: He who chooseth me must hazard all. He is not a cold calculating
selfish type but a prodigal of his affections; the Elizabethans never did
anything by halves; it is the baroque impulse. There is beggary in love that
reckons. Prudence is a deadly virtue that curdles, like eager droppings into
milk, the thin and wholesome blood. In Shakespeare’s world there is no single
blessedness: there is only multiple blessedness. The Economy of the Closed
Heart sins against the Doctrine of Increase. His world is not dichotomized into
the sacred and profane: flesh may flower into soul and soul may putrefy into
pedantry which invites his deep hatred. The greatest mark of Shakespeare is his
ability to give us contrasting things without the slightest diminution of
either. As Raleigh says, he is that rarest of all human beings, a complete man.
The story of William the Conqueror coming before Richard III does not condemn
Shakespeare; it seats him on the throne of humanity. His laughter is as broad
as that of ten thousand beeves at pasture; his brow does not darken over the
vast reciprocity of tears. He is honest and of an open and free nature–the very
qualities he ascribes to his tragic heroes. Treat every one above his deserts
and after your own nobility.
The
Sonnets are a Testament of Love–erotic, feudal, filial, parental, amicable,
sexual. They are the most triumphant war cry against all-destroying time:
Devouring
Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws
And
make the earth devour her own sweet brood
Pluck
the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws
And
burn the long-lived phoenix in her own blood.
They
are the most tormented and biting revulsion against scalding lechery and the
stench of sex. They are the Scripture of Charity;
How
would ye be
If
He, who is the top of judgement, should
But
judge as you are?
They
celebrate Blake’s Clod as no poet celebrated it. There is no parallel, writes
Lever, in the whole corpus of Renaissance poetry to Shakespeare’s sustained
exploration of the theme of friendship through more than 120 sonnets. What
friendship is this that writes:
for
I love you so
That
in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If
thinking on me then should make you woe.
This
self-abnegation is not a pose. Love is the Subduer of
Rhetoric, the Enemy of Lust, the Destroyer of Time. The separable spite of the
sonnets is consumed in the mutual flame of The Phoenix and the Turtle; in
the 116th sonnet we have the poet’s great affirmation:
Love
is not Time’s fool.
The
neatest summary of the story and thought in the sonnets is Bacon’s well-known
sentence: “Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love
perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth
and embaseth it.” This triplicity
amazingly enough fits into the three thematic strands in the sonnets:
Procreation, Friendship, Lust: the young Man, the Poet, the Dark Mistress.