Shakespeare's sonnets by Don Paterson

Shakespeare's sonnets are synonymous with courtly romance, but in fact many are
about something quite different. Some are intense expressions of gay desire, others
testaments to misogyny. Wary of academic criticism, Don Paterson tries to get back
to what the poet was actually saying

Detail of a painting of Shakespeare, claimed in 2009 to be the only

authentic image made during his life, dating from about 1610 but since
questioned. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Don Paterson
Saturday 16 October 2010 00.06 BST
The problem with reading Shakespeare's sonnets is the sonnets themselves,
by which I mean their reputation. Much in the same way as it's almost
impossible to see the Mona Lisa as anything but a parody of itself, or hear
Satie's Trois Gymnopedies without the feeling that someone's trying to sell
you something a bar of chocolate perhaps it's initially hard to get close
to the sonnets, locked as they are in the carapace of their own
proverbialism. "A Shakespeare sonnet" is almost as much a synonym for
"love poem" as "Mona Lisa" is for "beautiful woman". When something
becomes proverbial, it almost disappears; and worse, we're allowed to think
we know it when we really don't.
The sonnets are close to being one such cultural cipher. If you'd asked me a
year ago, I'd have been breezily confident that I knew a fair number of them
reasonably well, and had a few by heart. Then there was the literary dinner
party. A hideously exposed bluff prompted me to re-examine my avowed
familiarity. (Lesson: only bluff at parties where you can immediately walk

to another, darker, part of the room so you're not obliged to remain in

your seat, blushing through the cheese course.)
At least I wasn't alone. Twain's definition of the classic, "something that
everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" is well known, but
I might also add, less memorably, that a classic is a book you can safely
avoid reading, because no one else will admit they haven't either.
I took a straw poll. Everyone said they loved the sonnets, all right; but they
all named the same 10 poems. And some of those were pretty bad. The
deadly boring Sonnet 12 came up a lot: "When I do count the clock that tells
the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night", as did, inevitably,
Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more
red, than her lips red: / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If
hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head . . . " The latter is a none-tooclever piece of misogynist junk, a litany of barely-disguised disgust
masquerading as poem in praise of "real" earthly womanhood; the problem
is that after enumerating her apparently infinite faults, Shakespeare almost
fails to remember to pay the poor woman any kind of compliment at all. Its
reputation seems to have been made by the fact that someone decided it
would be fun to teach to schoolchildren.
Others, such as the devastatingly insightful Sonnet 118: "Like as, to make
our appetite more keen, / With eager compounds we our palate urge . . ."
and the mad Hindu asceticism of Sonnet 146: "And Death once dead,
there's no more dying then . . ." barely rated a mention.
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Even more distressingly, more than one perfectly well-read individual
remarked: "Many of them are addressed to a man, I believe," as if the
information had only recently come to light through ingenious advances in
21st-century cryptography.
So I started to make a list of questions: were the 10 poems that everyone
quoted the best 10? Do the sonnets contain what we believe them to
contain? Are they still useful to us? Do these poems still move us, speak to
us, enlighten us? Is their reputation as a lovers' handbook deserved, or have
they simply hitched a ride on the back of the plays?

First, a word about the sonnets themselves. They consist of 154 poems first
published in 1609 as Shake-speares Sonnets. Never before imprinted. They
can be neatly divided into three main groups. The first is a run of 17 poems,
which all embroider the same theme; with two or three exceptions, they are
so dull it's a wonder anyone ever reads any further. These are the so-called
"procreation sonnets", in which Shakespeare urges an unnamed young man
to marry and reproduce, so his beauty will survive. I agree with William
Boyd (who scripted a marvellous piece of free speculation for the BBC
called A Waste of Shame) that they read a lot like a commission, and could
well have been paid for by the Young Man's mother, perturbed by his Lack
of Interest in the Opposite Sex.
The second is a sequence of 108 poems addressed, apparently, to the same
Young Man. In gut-wrenching, febrile, tormented detail, they chart the
whole narrative of a love affair. Then we have a strange 12-line poem,
whose "absent couplet" seems to invoke the absent couple, and symbolise
the end of the affair. Then we have 28 poems addressed to a mistress, the
so-called "Dark Lady" (the number 28 might echo the menses, which would
fit with the poems' barely disguised obsession with the uncleanliness of
women's bodies), and then a bizarre pair of poems to close with.
It's still controversial as to whether the original Quarto edition was
authorised by Shakespeare, but I fall very strongly into the "there's
absolutely no way he didn't authorise them" camp. The sequence has been
ordered in a meticulously careful, sensitive and playful way that can only
indicate the author's hand. (My reasoning is simple: publishers care, and
editors care, but none of them care that much.) The sonnets seem to have
been composed between 1582 and their date of publication, 1609 between
Shakespeare's 18th and 45th birthdays. I know: this is a useless piece of
information. However the 1582 date refers to an isolated piece of juvenilia.
Sonnet 145 is a sonnet so bad that only the likely youth of its author can be
offered up as an excuse, while the so-called "dating sonnets" seem to imply
that the larger part of the project was likely over some time before 1609.
Sonnet 107, for one, seems heavily nailed to James I's coronation. Most folk
still argue that the poems were written in a six- or seven-year span in the
mid-1590s. Indeed, Francis Meres refers to them in 1598: "The witty soul of
Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his
Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugar'd sonnets among his private

friends . . . ", but I'm suspicious of the claim that they were all composed in
this period.
What we do know is that the sonnets were part of an extraordinary fashion
for sonnet-cycles in the 1590s. These were wildly competitive affairs. The
bar had been set high by Sir Philip Sidney with the 108 sonnets of Astrophil
and Stella, which had been in private circulation from the early 1580s. A
poet would be judged on more than the length of his sequence, of course,
but size still counted for a lot, and padding was rife.
After the "boring procreation sonnets", things look up at Sonnet 18, with
the wonderful "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" In this poem, the
subject shifts seamlessly and movingly from: "You're lovely, and must breed
so that the world is never denied your beauty," to "You're lovely! And to hell
with breeding the power of my own verse will keep your beauty
immortal." Shakespeare is now openly in love with the young man, and the
next 108 sonnets are given over to an account of their affair's progress,
although the jury's out as to whether it's always the same man being
addressed. I still have no settled opinion on the matter, but the poems do
seem to have a clear dramatic narrative.
However, the question: "was Shakespeare gay?" strikes me as so daft as to
be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of
sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side. Now is not the time to
rehearse them all, but the arguments against his homosexuality are
complex and sophistical, and often take convenient and homophobic
advantage of the sonnets' built-in interpretative slippage which
Shakespeare himself would have needed for what we would now call
"plausible deniability", should anyone have felt inclined to cry sodomy.
The argument in favour is simple. First, falling in love with other men is
often a good indication of homosexuality; and second, as much as I love
some of my male friends, I'm never going to write 126 poems for them, even
the dead ones. Third, read the poems, then tell me these are "pure
expressions of love for a male friend" and keep a straight face. This is a
crazy, all-consuming, feverish and sweaty love; love, in all its uncut, fullstrength intensity; an adolescent love. The reader's thrill lies in hearing this
adolescent love articulated by a hyper-literate thirty-something. Usually
these kids can't speak. The effect is extraordinary: they are not poems that

are much use when we're actually in love, I'd suggest; but when we read
them, they are so visceral in their invocation of that mad, obsessive,
sleepless place that we can again feel, as CK Williams said, "the old heart
stamping in its stall".
But do these poems still speak to us of love in the same way? An honest
answer to: "What are these poems to us now?" soon becomes: "What are
these poems to me now?" since I can't speak for anyone else. In the end,
putting together a guide to the sonnets, I decided I'd write it in the form of
a diary. That's to say I read the sonnets as you would any other book, fitting
them round my work routine and domestic obligations. So rather than lock
myself in the library for six months, I wrote my commentaries on the
poems while awake, bored, half-asleep, full of cold, drunk, exhausted,
serene, smart, befuddled and stupid. I wrote on the train, in bed, in the
bath and in my lunch-break; I wrote them while I was fed up marking
papers, or stuck on Bioshock on the Playstation, while I was watching the
bairns, Family Guy or the view out of the window.
The idea was to find a way of giving the sonnets more of a direct and
personal reading than they usually receive. This requires making a firm
distinction between two kinds of reading. Most literary criticism, whether
academic or journalistic, is ideally geared up for "secondary reading" by
which I mean all that stuff that requires us to generate some kind of
secondary text a commentary, an exegesis, a review and so on. By
contrast, a primary reading doesn't have to articulate its findings. It
engages with the poem directly, as a piece of trustworthy human discourse
which doesn't sound too revolutionary, but the truth is that many readers
don't feel like that about poetry any more, and often start with: "But what
does it all mean?" on the assumption that "that's how you read poetry".
But that isn't the kind of the first reading most poems hoped they were
going to get. The poem has much more direct designs on us. Its plan was to
make us weep or change our opinion of something forever. The sonnets are
no different, but currently give the appearance of being approachable only
via a scholarly commentary. As, in one sense, they are: the truth is that
unless you have the OED by heart, or are channelling Sir Philip Sidney,
you're likely to miss half the poem.

At least half of Shakespeare's allusions are unfamiliar, and many senses,

puns and proverbial usages have been completely lost. (For example:
knowing that "he praises who wishes to sell" was proverbial, or that "hell"
was Elizabethan slang for "vagina" really can make the difference between
getting a poem all right and getting it all wrong.) We need a native guide,
and it's then that we turn gratefully as I did, again and again to the
critics Katherine Duncan-Jones, Colin Burrow, John Kerrigan and the
divine vivisectionist himself, Stephen Booth. But what sometimes gets lost
in their brilliant textual analyses is the poem itself.
Direct readings are a bit different. They give us three things, I think: what
the poem is saying; what the poem is saying about us; and what the poem is
saying about the author. We can usually get all this without generating a
secondary text, through the simple act of rereading rereading being what
is most distinct about the act of reading poetry, and the reason poetry
books are so thin. We don't read poems as machines reading the
productions of other machines; we naturally posit a vulnerable and fallible
human hand behind them. Indeed we do this as instinctively as we meet the
eyes of a stranger when they walk into the room; not to do so strikes me as
perverse, and denies a sound human instinct. Why should we approach the
sonnets any differently?
Many people's "close reading" model was largely inherited from the New
Criticism, which railed against the so-called "intentional and affective
fallacies" (basically what the author intended by the poem, and how you
personally respond to it; why these are "fallacies" is lost on me), and
proposed that the poem had to be read on its own terms, and in its own
context, alone. We can still feel as if the author's state of mind and our own
feelings about the poem are somehow beyond the critical pale. But I just
don't see why. Sure: all such talk is speculative and subjective. But
worthless? Surely not.
I also wanted to try to bring a bit of sanity to the discussion of how
Shakespeare wrote these crazy poems in the first place. The main
motivation here was reading Helen Vendler's brilliant and infuriating The
Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. As a critic, Vendler has led me through the
thickets like a bemused and grateful child for years now, but I've had
growing misgivings over her critical method, and her Shakespeare book was

where I finally lost it. (Twice I found myself on my hands and knees, taping
the book back together after it had bounced off the wall.)
I wanted to say something to counteract the perception of Shakespeare's
compositional method as a kind of lyric soduku, and put in a word for the
kind of glorious, messy procedure I'm quite certain it was, whatever the
crystalline and symmetrical beauty of the final results. Like most poets,
Shakespeare uses the poem as way of working out what he's thinking, not as
a means of reporting that thought. Often he'll start with nothing more than
a hangover, a fever and a bad night spent being tormented by the spectre of
his absent lover. Then he'll use the sonnet as a way of making sense of it all
a way, first, to extract a logic from pain, and then a comfort from that
logic, however warped it might be. Form, in other words, allows him to
draw some assuagement from the very source of the agony itself.
So I decided to try to honour this sense of free play by taking as different an
approach as the individual poem might itself prompt. Sonnet 109, for
example, is a patently disingenuous excuse offered for Shakespeare's
negligence of his lover, and I made a parallel translation from bullshit
into English.
Other commentaries look at Elizabethan numerology, or whatever mad
little aspect of Shakespeare's ars poetica caught my eye. The black mass of
Sonnet 129: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action . . ."
ends in a discussion of the neuroscience of poet-coital tristesse.
Others in the Dark Lady sequence speculate as to where Shakespeare's
disgust of women's bodies might have originated. My not-very-original
theory is that he was forced to construe his homosexual love as wholly pure,
meaning simply that his lust ended up channelled toward the sex he wasn't
actually attracted to.
It's here we see the horrible symmetry of the sexual logic of sonnets, a kind
of little chiasmus with a half-twist: with the Young Man he's in the grip of a
pure love, but stalked by the presence of lust; with the Dark Lady he's in the
grip of a pure lust, but stalked by the absence of love.
Elsewhere, I got stuck into the kind of "idiot's work" that WH Auden tried
to warn us off: that of trying to establish the identity of the sonnets'
dramatis personae. The trouble is that it's impossible to read the

sonnets without speculating on identities. We're often simply invited to by

Shakespeare's shameless hook-baiting, his cryptic clues placed there only to
pique our interest. As to whether the Young Man was Henry Wriothesley or
William Herbert, I have nothing to contribute but even more confusion
than there was before. The Dark Lady is, I think, utterly unknowable not
least because Shakespeare uses her as more of a cipher, a focal point for his
self-hating-fuelled misogyny.
I do think of this as the most oddly impressive aspect of the sonnets. The
Dark Lady poems are mostly horrible, and those that aren't are bad. Yet the
plays abound with depictions of strong women women of real agency,
wisdom, power and character. Shakespeare seems to have regarded his own
perspective as being as unreliable as anyone else's, and less suppressed his
own ego than "vanished" it, clearing the way for an apparently infinite
capacity for human empathy. There is no one saint, monster, sage or fool
that he couldn't ventriloquise; but to do so he had to remove himself
wholly from the picture. This strikes me as a psychological miracle.
One of my more original (or most likely wrong) contributions to all this
idiotic speculation came through a bit of amateur sleuth-work in Sonnet 86,
the most famous of the "rival poet" sonnets. Here, Shakespeare accuses
another poet of ruining his own work: "Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to
write / Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?" No. It's not this guy's
skill that bothers him; it's the fact that his beloved's lovely face was filling
up his lines. There's a universal law that states that poets can't share muses;
there's also another one that says they often have to. Too many poets, too
few muses. For Shakespeare, the prospect of hot-musing was deeply
repugnant.
However, in the middle of this poem, we find strange lines that many
commentators pass over in silence: "No, neither he, nor his compeers by
night / Giving him aid, my verse astonished. / He, nor that affable familiar
ghost / Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, / As victors of my silence
cannot boast . . . " Who is that affable familiar ghost? Well, the rival poet is
often assumed to be George Chapman, of "Chapman's Homer" fame. I feel
this must be right. There's far too much corroborating evidence in the
poem, which I won't go into here, but Chapman had dedicated poems to
Wriothesley, still our best contender for the Young Man's identity, and was
known to have boasted that the ghost of Homer himself had helped him

with his translation of The Iliad. However, what will have stuck in
Shakespeare's craw even more was that Chapman finished off Christopher
Marlowe's poem "Hero and Leander" doubtless boasting again of
Marlowe's own supernatural aid.
This must have driven him crazy. Kit Marlowe and Shakespeare were
friends, literary rivals, drinking buddies, likely collaborators; and as
identically matched, world-beating talents and almost exact coevals, the
two will have identified deeply with each another. "Familiar" is the key
word here. (Affable is just a heartbreaking touch.) Not only was Marlowe a
ghost one meaning of the word familiar he was also "familiar" in the
senses of close, often-encountered, recently-dead and "on a family footing".
He's even present in the very consonants of the word. Marlowe, we think,
worked as a secret agent or "intelligencer" in the proto-secret service that
Francis Walsingham set up for Elizabeth I, and in all likelihood conducted
espionage abroad. Surely this would have come out over a pint of ale or six?
Nothing, surely, would have delighted Shakespeare more than the thought
of the ghost of Marlowe gulling the proud Chapman with false intelligence,
and it will have offered him some comfort in his fight for the muse of
Wriothesley. And there I rest my shaky and conveniently mutually
supportive case.
But how has the little sonnet managed to honour Shakespeare's huge boast
of the immortality of his own verse? I've long been convinced that if you
could somehow snap your fingers and destroy every sonnet on the planet,
and wipe every sonnet from every human mind, it would reappear in almost
exactly the same form by teatime tomorrow.
Here is not the place to elaborate, but suffice to say that the square of the
sonnet exists for reasons which are almost all direct consequences of
natural law, physiological and neurological imperatives, and the grain and
structure of the language itself. Or to put it another way: if human poetic
speech is breath and language is soapy water, sonnets are just the bubbles
you get. Sonnets express a characteristic shape of human thought, and are,
after a bit of practice, very easy to write. Badly. (No one ever blew into
language and got a sestina or a villanelle one reason I hate the damn
things, two or three by Elizabeth Bishop and Auden apart. Carol Ann Duffy
once wrote an absolutely perfect squib called "Fuckinelle", with the
repeated lines "The poet has tried to write villanelle; / He's very pleased.

The audience can tell . . . " after which the form should have been officially
banned.)
Shakespeare modernised the form of the sonnet, and transformed it from a
stylised, courtly love shtick to a fluent and flexible form that could turn
itself to any subject. This isn't to diminish the contribution of his forebears
and contemporaries; but what distinguished Shakespeare from someone
like, say, Sir John Davies, was the maturity of his means. None of this was
accomplished by flailing "innovation", and this, I think, is the real poetic
miracle of the sonnets.
His strategy was twofold. First, he realised that human love was the one
theme capacious enough to encompass every other these are also poems
about death, sex, politics, sin, time and space and he needn't stray from
its centre. Second, he did this with a minimum of experiment, writing the
form into transparency, until it became as effortless as breathing. In other
words, he converted the rules of the sonnet to motor skills. The form was
then freed from its own expectations, and able to engage with any idea or
theme where it might identify the motif of its little golden square. But
without Shakespeare's genius to show the way, I doubt it would ever have
found itself so liberated.