Sonnets, then, were at once private and social; that is, they characteristically took the form of a personal, intimate address, and at the same time they circulated within a small group whose values and desires they reflected, articulated, and reinforced. They could eventually reach a wider world—Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence of 108 sonnets and eleven songs, Astrophil and Stella, written in the early 1580s, came to define courtly elegance for a whole generation of readers—but only a tiny number of readers would know the actual individuals and precise situations to which these intricate poems cunningly allude. Those outside the charmed coterie—and all are now in this category—had to content themselves with admiration for the poet’s craft and with groping in the darkness of biographical speculation.
There were reasons in the summer of 1592 why Shakespeare would have been particularly eager to take on a commission to write poems urging a wealthy young man to marry. One of his principal sources of income—the income that supported him and the wife and children he had left behind in Stratford—had vanished. On June 12, 1592, London’s lord mayor, Sir William Webbe, had written to Burghley about a riot that had taken place, the night before, in Southwark. A group of felt makers’ servants, along with a crowd of “loose and masterless men,” had tried to rescue a companion who had been arrested. The unruly mob had assembled, the lord mayor ominously noted, “at a play, which, besides the breach of the Sabbath day, giveth opportunity of committing these and such like disorders.” Evidently, Burghley took the threat of further unrest seriously, for on June 23 the Privy Council issued an order suspending all performances in the London theaters. The suspension might not have lasted through the whole summer season—the theater companies, along with other people adversely affected (such as the “poor Watermen of the Bankside,” that is, the boatmen who provided transportation across the river), vigorously petitioned for relief—but a far worse disaster struck some six weeks later.
The theater’s most dreadful adversary, far worse than puritanical preachers or hostile magistrates, was bubonic plague. Public health regulation in Elizabethan England was haphazard at best, and nothing, or at least nothing accurate, was known about the actual causes of plague. Indeed, one of the official measures routinely taken when plague deaths began to rise—the killing of dogs and cats—undoubtedly made matters worse by destroying the enemies of the rats that in fact, as we now know, carried the fleas that carried the dread bacillus. But people had grasped, through bitter experience, that the isolation of plague victims slowed the spread of the disease—hence the terrible nailing shut of the quarantined houses—and they grasped too that there was a relation between the progress of epidemics and large crowds. Authorities did not cancel church services, but when plague deaths began to rise, they looked askance at any other public assemblies, and when such deaths reached a certain number (above thirty a week in London), they shut the theaters down.
Shakespeare and his fellow actors must have watched nervously as the mortality figures inched up in the warm summer weather and become more and more alarmed as they increased. No doubt the voices of the theater’s enemies became more strident, shouting that God had sent the plague to punish London for its sins, above all for whoredom, sodomy, and playacting. Playhouses, bearbaiting arenas, and other places of public assembly—the churches excepted—were ordered to close until further notice. If the playing companies were lucky, the patrons would give them small sums to tide them over. Some of the actors would have packed up some props and costumes in wagons and gone on tour, garnering what income they could, however meager, in the provinces. But that life was a decidedly difficult one, and Shakespeare would doubtless have welcomed an alternative, if one came his way. A proposal to write sonnets to a fabulously wealthy, spoiled young man reluctant to marry would have seemed like a gift from the gods.
Yet even within the first seventeen sonnets, written as if to order, there are signs that the poet’s task was complicated by thoughts and feelings that were difficult to reconcile perfectly with the assignment. Perhaps the very relationship that made it plausible for someone to suggest that Shakespeare write these poems stood in the way of their satisfactory accomplishment. “Make thee another self for love of me,” the poet urges (10.13), as if he expected his emotional claims to count. But how exactly could they count? And if they did, how exactly could they bear on the plea that the youth father a child? What stake does the poet have in his friend’s child? The answer nominally lies in the child’s ability to counterbalance the malevolent power of time: when the passing years have irreparably destroyed the exquisite beauty the youth currently possesses, his son will carry that beauty forward into the next generation. But even as he presents this argument, the poet brings forth another, one that manifestly means far more to him and that fulfills the fantasy of perfect, female-free reproduction:
And all in war with time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
(15.13–14)
“I engraft you new”—the reproductive power in question here is the power of poetry. For a lingering moment the birth of a child still matters: Without a living image of the fair youth to verify all of the poet’s claims, “Who will believe my verse in time to come” (17.1)? But the imagined child here has been reduced to a piece of corroborating evidence, and he soon disappears entirely:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(sonnet 18)
The dream of the child as mirror image, projected into the future, has been shouldered aside by “this”—this love poem, this exquisite mirror made of language, this far more secure way of preserving perfect beauty intact and carrying it forward to succeeding generations. Shakespeare has in effect displaced the woman he was urging the young man to impregnate; the poet’s labor, not the woman’s, will bring forth the young man’s enduring image.
It is, as Shakespeare supremely understood, the stuff of romantic comedy: the go-between becomes romantically entangled. This is the central plot device of Twelfth Night. Viola, disguised as a boy and serving Duke Orsino, is assigned the task of helping him woo the countess Olivia: “I’ll do my best / To woo your lady,” Viola tells her master, adding, in an aside, that her assignment is a painful one: “Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (1.4.39–41). There is, of course, a striking difference between this situation and the one sketched in the sonnets. Though Viola is dressed like a boy when she sighs longingly for her master, her desire is a woman’s desire for a man and thus can be consummated in marriage (as soon as she changes her clothes). But Twelfth Night goes out of its way to suggest that gender is not, after all, the crucial issue: Orsino is clearly attracted to the servant he believes to be a sexually ambiguous boy, and Olivia falls madly in love with this same ambiguous go-between. In something of the same spirit, though without the explicit narrative, Shakespeare’s sonnets stage the triumph of the poet’s own overwhelming love over the initial project of persuading the young man to marry.
Is it the truth or a piece of flattering rhetoric? Impossible to say. But for the vain young recipient of these poems, Shakespeare’s narrative—never explicit, but never completely out of view—must have been very gratifying. Something happened to the poet, the sonnets imply, when he undertook to persuad
e the beautiful youth to marry: he became aware that he was longing for the youth himself. The poet can no longer understand how it will all work out. He knows that the young man regards him as little more than a servant—an aging one at that. But he craves his company, and he feels in his presence something that he never felt with any woman. He wants to charm him, he wants to be with him, he wants to be him; he is his vision of youth, of nobility, of perfect beauty. He is in love with him.
The sonnets express this love in impassioned and extravagant praise: the image of the young man is “like a jewel hung in ghastly night” (27.11); his loveliness exceeds the most idealized accounts of Adonis or Helen (53); he is “as fair in knowledge as in hue” (82.5); his hand is whiter than a lily, and the tint on his cheeks is more delicate than a rose (98); whatever “antique pens” expressed “In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights”—“Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow”—was a prophecy of his own beauty (106.4–7). He is the poet’s sun, his rose, his dear heart, his “best of dearest” (48.7), his fair flower, his sweet love, his lovely boy.
At the same time, and in comparably impassioned terms, the sonnets elaborate the claims of poetry: “My love shall in my verse ever live young” (19.4); “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme” (55.1–2); time’s scythe mows everything down and yet “my verse shall stand” (60.13); the remorseless hours will drain the young man’s blood and carve wrinkles on his brow, but “His beauty shall in these black lines be seen” (63.13); age’s cruel knife may cut “my lover’s life” but “never cut from memory / My sweet love’s beauty” (63.11–12); “when I in earth am rotten” and you are in your tomb, “Your monument shall be my gentle verse” (81.2, 9). This last phrase casually incorporates the social status that Shakespeare constantly dreamed of, but the dream here is far more ambitious, laying claim to a godlike power: “Your name from hence”—that is, from my gentle verse—“immortal life shall have” (81.5).
The irony, of course, is that the sonnets themselves do not confer any life at all on the name of the beloved, for the simple reason that he is never actually named. Shakespeare, it seems, has deliberately kept the beloved’s name out of poems that claim to confer upon that name an immortal life.
If it is not unreasonable to speculate that the young man of the opening suite of sonnets is the Earl of Southampton, it is because the earl’s personal circumstances perfectly fit the situation that is sketched, because his family had already tried literary persuasion, and, above all, because Shakespeare in the 1590s dedicated to Southampton two long, elaborate nondramatic poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The dedicatory letters to these long poems are the only such documents from Shakespeare’s hand, and, along with the poems they introduce, they tell us a great deal about the man who wrote them—or at least about the side that he wished to present to the earl.
The language of the first of these dedications, to Venus and Adonis, is formal, emotionally cautious, and socially defensive: “I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden.” Probably written in late 1592, very close to the time he may have written the procreation sonnets, the elegant narrative poem, anything but “unpolished,” was clearly a bid for patronage—that is, for protection against renewed “censure” and for any more tangible rewards that the free-spending nobleman might care to offer.
The poet’s display of diffidence and anxiety in the dedication may well have been sincere. Published in 1593, Venus and Adonis was the first of Shakespeare’s works to appear in print. Apparently indifferent to the printing house through most of his career, here for once he showed clear signs of caring. He chose for the printer someone he could trust, his fellow Stratford-upon-Avon native Richard Field. The choice was a good one: Field produced an unusually handsome small book, suitable for presentation. Shakespeare was attempting, probably for the first and only time in his career, to find a patron, and with the theaters shut down and the plague continuing to rage, he may have thought that a great deal was riding on whether he was successful. Even if Southampton had already manifested his favor, in the wake of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, and even if the exalted aristocrat and the lowly player had already had some encouraging personal contact with one another—and, of course, these are merely speculations—Shakespeare could well have been uncertain about the reception of Venus and Adonis.
It was as if, in his late twenties, Shakespeare had decided to start afresh in a new profession, as if he had not written anything before. He was attempting to establish himself now not as a popular playwright but as a cultivated poet, someone who could gracefully conjure up the mythological world to which his university-educated rival poets claimed virtually exclusive access. And he was attempting also to address Southampton’s particular situation: the poem takes up the theme of the beautiful young man, scarcely more than a boy, who resists the blandishments of the goddess of love. If the poem’s “godfather”—the eighteen-year-old nobleman—is pleased with it, Shakespeare writes, then he will attempt “some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed”—like the sonnets, the dedicatory letter metamorphoses poems into children—then the poet will “never after ear so barren a land.” Perhaps Shakespeare meant it, for there would be no point in making another effort if Southampton rejected this one out of hand.
The plot of Venus and Adonis echoes the sonnets’ warning: a beautiful boy’s rejection of love—Love herself, in the person of Venus—enables death to triumph over him. For three-quarters of the poem’s nearly twelve hundred lines, Venus, feverish with desire, pleads, caresses, lures, harangues, and all but assaults Adonis. Accusing the young man of self-love, she begs him to produce an heir. But all is in vain. Breaking away from the goddess’s embrace, Adonis goes off to hunt and is promptly killed by a “foul, grim, and urchin-snouted boar” (line 1105). From the blood that spills from his wound springs a purple flower, the anemone, which grief-stricken Venus plucks and cradles in her bosom.
Taken in the abstract, the argument of Venus and Adonis could have appealed to the sober, calculating guardian Burghley. But the experience of the poem is anything but sober. Here too, as in the sonnets, prudential warning cedes place to something else, something seductive that this particular poet, William Shakespeare, is offering the young man. Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment. How otherwise would it be possible to be in so many places at once? Shakespeare offers here in a weirdly concentrated form the sensibility that enabled him to write his plays.
The effect is a tangle of erotic arousal, pain, and cool laughter. At moments, the love goddess seems enormous, a dominatrix towering over her diminutive, unwilling lover:
Over one arm, the lusty courser’s rein;
Under her other was the tender boy,
Who blushed and pouted in a dull disdain
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy.
(lines 31–34)
At other moments, she is the fragile heroine of a romance, fainting at a mere disapproving glance, and then, when the remorseful boy tries to revive her, suddenly reduced to a farcical rag doll:
He wrings her nose, he strikes her on the cheeks,
He bends her fingers, holds her pulses hard;
He chafes her lips; a thousand ways he seeks
To mend the hurt that his unkindness marred.
(lines 475–78)
In such passages we seem to be at a great distance from the figures, watching their frantic movements the way the audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream watches the crazed lovers in the Athenian woods. But then without warning—and without ever completely losing the comic detac
hment—we are unnervingly close. Venus not only sighs for Adonis; she “locks her lily fingers one in one” (line 228) around the struggling boy and proposes that he “graze” (line 233) on her body:
“Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain.”
(lines 235–38)
Adonis attempts to pull back from her frantic kisses only to submit passively for a few moments out of sheer exhaustion:
Hot, faint, and weary with her hard embracing,
Like a wild bird being tamed with too much handling.
(lines 559–60)
Metaphors frequently function in poetry as a way of distancing the reader from a character or situation, but not here. Here they are ways of intensifying physical and emotional proximity, so that we view everything in a sustained close-up. The dimples in Adonis’s cheeks are “round enchanting pits” that “Opened their mouths to swallow Venus’ liking” (lines 247–48). The goddess’s face “doth reek and smoke” (line 555) with erotic arousal. And when the two recline—or rather when Venus pulls Adonis down to the ground—they lie not simply on a bed of flowers, but on “blue-veined violets” (line 125).