Love in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Introduction

In his poem, ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ (Poetical Works, 1827), Wordsworth famously said that the sonnets were the ‘key’ with which ‘Shakespeare unlocked his heart’ and whilst this can certainly be seen to be the case, the sonnets do much more than that. Writing of various forms of love, and indeed of love itself, using the contemporary sonnet form, Shakespeare develops the aspects of love which the sonnets reflect into an all-encompassing discussion on the major themes of life itself that continue to inform and direct the human condition, a fact which is perhaps partly responsible for their continuing popularity with both public and critics alike. This dissertation sets out to discover, through close reading of carefully selected representative sonnets and critical context, the way Shakespeare accomplishes this.

The sonnet form as Shakespeare, whose 154 sonnets were first published in 1609, and his contemporaries used it was introduced into England in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas Wyatt who translated sonnets in the Petrarchan form from the original Italian:

As we should expect in a period when he [Shakespeare] was beginning to write the sonnet, allusions to Petrarchism become increasingly common.

(Whitaker, 1953, p. 88)

The Shakespearian or Elizabethan sonnet form differs from the Italian, originally developed by Petrarch in the fourteenth century, principally in form. Both styles are usually comprised of fourteen lines but have a different rhyme sequence and structure. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octet (a sequence of eight lines in which the theme is opened) and the subsequent sestet (which reflects on the theme it has introduced), whilst the Shakespearian is structured in iambic pentameter in three quatrains and a couplet, the three quatrains rhyming in abab form and the final couplet rhyming cc. It is important to understand Shakespeare’s structure because it so often reflects the theme, with the three quatrains each addressing a different aspect of the sonnet’s focus and the couplet usually providing an epigram summing up the idea which the sonnet reflects.

Indeed, Shakespeare does not only use the sonnet form in his poems but also within his plays, incorporating what a contemporary audience would recognise to be evidence of ‘true’ and even ‘holy’ love. The most famous example of this is in the first meeting between Romeo and Juliet, written in 1594, where their words are exchanged in sonnet form:

Romeo:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo:

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet:

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo:

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet:

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

Romeo:

Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. (Shakespeare, William. 1954. Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene v, p. 30)

This is an excellent example of the innovative way in which Shakespeare uses the sonnet form and it is therefore appropriate to look at it in detail in the introduction to this dissertation in order to show the aspects of love with which the discussion will be concerned:

From the early poems to the young man of rank, urging him to marry and have a son, through the idealising attempts to negate the space of social difference in the mutuality of ‘private’ love, to the bitter wit of the ‘Will’ poems to the dark woman, the player-poet seeks to reduce the gap between addresser and addressee that is the very condition of the Petrarchan mode. It has not escaped commentators or audiences that in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare represents a moment of reciprocity via the archetype of in commensurability: a sonnet, uniquely shared by Romeo and Juliet in Act 1. (Schalkwyk, 2002. p. 65)

In the first quatrain, Shakespeare has Romeo, who was previously infatuated with Rosaline, a state we are given to understand that he has often found himself in before this, declare his feelings in holy imagery which Juliet, in the second quatrain, immediately picks up on and develops. Thus, though inversion of the traditional male role as director is not removed, Shakespeare gifts Juliet with an aspect of equality with Romeo, by making her his equal in wit, a gender specific imperative which is found in both his plays and sonnets alike. Moreover, in the third quatrain, the lovers share their feelings and the structure itself, with each taking separate lines of the sonnet. This mutuality reflects how the play will develop, with Juliet continuing to grow in strength, and also shows the importance of the connection between what appears to be love and what is true love, associated fundamentally with God, as evidenced by the religious imagery of ‘pilgrims’ and ‘saints’ and perhaps most importantly ‘palmers’, which signifies one who has made the pilgrimage to Rome. The contemporary audience would recognise this first dialogue between the lovers as emblematic of true love precisely because it is expressed in the sonnet form. Also, Shakespeare establishes the connective between true love and religion which, as will be seen in the dissertation discussion, is another feature of the sonnets as a whole and indeed the sonnet form.

The way in which Romeo and Juliet share the sonnet is, as is noted above (Schalkwyk, 2002. p. 65), very different from the way that the older Petrarchan sonnet form implements the structure to address the theme or indeed ‘object’ of love. Shakespeare’s concept of love as expressed in the sonnets is essentially based upon reality, human beings interacting or regarded as representative of love without the necessity to involve the idea of ‘worship’ as is certainly the case with Petrarch’s ‘Laura’. Although many of the sonnets are addressed to an unknown and somewhat generically enigmatic female, referred to as ‘the Dark Lady’ by critics, the sense of the sonnets being concerned with human love in all its aspects is always primary, as Shakespeare writes in ‘Sonnet CXXX’:

I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

(Shakespeare, William. 2003. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. ed. Katherine Duncan Jones. p.375)

This is a thought that he completes by following the colon with a couplet summation that despite this, or perhaps because of it, his love is ‘as rare’ as any ‘belied with false compare’. It is clear that love for Shakespeare is as concerned with humanity as much, if not more, than the conception of love and the distant, silent, ‘object’ of that love as ‘divine’. Thus, the idea that Romantic love has little to do with love as it is actually experienced is another aspect of love with which the sonnets are concerned and which this dissertation will address.

Indeed, one imperative which seeks to involve a less direct form of love is the notion of Platonic love, or love as an ideal, as expressed in ‘Sonnet CXVI’: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments’ (Shakespeare, William. 2003. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. ed. Katherine Duncan Jones. p.343). It is generally accepted that the first seventeen of the sonnets are addressed to a young man and in these Shakespeare turns more frequently to the idea that marriage should be the object of a man’s life. However, he then turns, in sonnets XVIII-CXXVI, to homoerotic expressions of love to a man, identified, simply because of the dedication on the first (possibly unauthorised) publication, by Thomas Thorpe, as ‘Mr. W.H.’:

The interpretation of the expression ‘only begetter’ is doubtful. Did Thorpe mean that Mr. W. H. was the fair youth of the sonnets (though on this reading the dark lady also has a claim as a begetter, to some of the sonnets), or was he merely the gentleman who gave Thorpe the manuscript–Mr. William Harvey perhaps, who in 1598 married the widowed mother of Lord Southampton? The manuscript can only have come from one in the innermost circle of those who knew Shakespeare and his noble friend. If Southampton was the friend, William Harvey may have been the ‘only begetter.’ (Alexander & Nisbet, 1935, p. 94)

Like the ‘Dark Lady’, the young man is not identified within the sonnets and the location of his identity has similarly exercised scholars across the generations. However, although it is certainly true that spurious identification is of passing interest:

The identity of the fair youth matters much more to those who believe that the poems grew from personal experience than to those who believe that they are poetic fictions, influenced more by sonneteering convention than by life. (Bate, 2008, pp. 41-2)

Bate’s point is well-taken since the actual identity of the object of love is indeed much less important to an appreciation of the sonnets than their importance as representative of aspects of love:

Somehow the poems convince each reader that what he or she sees in them is what is really there. But somehow they then sneak up behind you and convince you of something completely different. (Bate, 2008, p. 43)

It might be argued, in fact, that precisely because of the lack of knowledge concerning the individual to whom the sonnets are addressed, readers have formed a generic connective with them across the generations which is cathartic in its anonymity:

How do we lesser mortals know to perform our lesser miracles of life? Again we face the enigma of all creation, which Shakespeare himself has simply accepted and has nowhere attempted to explain. What was there when there was nothing? And how does something more forever come from something less? Whether the creation be instantaneous, in six days, or in aeons of ages the miracle is no less. And in it we live, and move, and have our being. And perhaps, alas!, have in us too little of the poet to see that there is any miracle at all. (Baldwin, 1950, p. 384)

Thus, the individual biographical aspects of the sonnets, though of interest, can never be a primary informative and this may, indeed, be beneficial, as we shall hope to see.

Chapter One: ‘The Marriage of True Minds’

Little is known about Shakespeare’s life and this has given rise to much speculation about his biographical background:

It is one of the ironies attendant on the growth of Shakespeare’s reputation that even the most diligent scholarship has been able to uncover very little of the background of the poet’s personal or public life. However, the poverty of detail has merely spurred his biographers to increased scholarly, inferential, and imaginative activity. (Marder, 1963, p. 156)

What is certain, since it is documented through baptism of the children, is that he was married to Anne Hathaway, a fairly well connected Stratford girl, older than himself, when he was eighteen, and they had three children: a daughter, Susanna, and twins, Hamnet and Judith. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he spent the vast majority of his life away from home in London where most of his writing took place.

There has been a great deal written about how happy or otherwise the couple might have been, especially since he left Anne nothing in his will except his ‘second best bed’. Many have read this as an insult but perhaps a more appropriate reading is that the best bed was for guests and the second best the marriage bed therefore to bequeath this to his wife, far from being an insult, was a love token. Carol Ann Duffy writes of this in her sonnet ‘Anne Hathaway’:

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. (Duffy, The World’s Wife, 2000, p. 30)

This tender version of love would seem much more appropriate, especially since the first seventeen of the sonnets, known as the ‘procreation sonnets’, are largely concerned with the recommendation of marriage to a young man. If Shakespeare was so violently against marriage then it seems unlikely that he would have recommended it. However, as always with the sonnets, this is not as straightforward as it seems with the directive to marry being somewhat complicated by other imperatives with which Shakespeare is clearly concerned, not least his affection for the ‘Fair Youth’.

The early sonnets in the sequence should be considered as they pertain to the question of marriage itself, therefore, rather than as they relate to Shakespeare’s life:

Shakespeare’s Sonnets raise a number of problems. We do not know when they were written, to whom they are addressed, nor even if they are certainly autobiographical. (Knight, 1955, p. 3)

With this in mind it is not only preferable but essential, therefore, to qualify any discussion on the possible relationship between the sonnet topics and Shakespeare’s life with the reminder that we know so little about the latter that any inferences must be regarded as tenuously speculative at best. Thus, the marriage question which relates to the first seventeen sonnets cannot be seen as directed in any major sense by the poet’s own life:

The greatest sonnets, those which are neither wholly conventional nor wholly autobiographical, preserve this balance between embroilment and detachment in a way which is truly dramatic. A personal experience may underlie each, but it is experience transmuted, as in the plays, into the correlative form of characters in action. To some degree these characters are the dramatic counterparts of actual people-the youth, the dark woman-though they are not the people themselves. Others belong, as personages, only to the microcosm of poetry: Time, for example, one of the most powerful villains among Shakespeare’s dramatis personae; and above all, Shakespeare’s own diverse masks and moods, fully realised and understood. (Mahood, 1988, p. 90)

The idea that the sonnets are in any way biographical must, indeed, be questioned but it must also be remarked that the way the words are used within the sonnets might be attributable to Shakespeare’s personal consciousness:

The nature of the wordplay in the Sonnets varies according to whether Shakespeare is too remote or too near the experience behind the poem or whether he is at a satisfying dramatic distance from it. When he is detached, the wordplay is a consciously used, hard-worked rhetorical device. When his complexity of feeling upon the occasion of a sonnet is not fully realised by him, the wordplay often reveals an emotional undercurrent which was perhaps hidden from the poet himself. But in the best sonnets the wordplay is neither involuntary nor wilful; it is a skilfully handled means whereby Shakespeare makes explicit both his conflict of feelings and his resolution of the conflict. (Mahood, 1988, p. 90)

Thus, when in ‘Sonnet CXVI’ he writes of ‘the marriage of true minds’ (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p.343) he is perhaps inviting us to infer a connective between what he writes and what he feels, an altogether different kind of ‘marriage’, metaphorical rather than literal and certainly more ‘of the mind’ than of the heart.

As the sequence begins, the poet addresses the youth familiarly but in an almost didactic tone, of the older to the younger, as here in ‘Sonnet I’:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee. (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p.113)

The importance of this sonnet in establishing the poet’s themes throughout the sequence must be stressed, as here we see Shakespeare writing of the transience of beauty, the selfishness of the individual, the battle between desire and fulfilment, the beauty of the natural world and its comparative with human beauty (to which he will return in the well-known ‘Sonnet XVIII’ and elsewhere) and the basic responsibility of man to procreate or, as the sonnet has it, ‘increase’ and ‘thereby beauty’s rose might never die’. All of these relate to the human condition and also perhaps to Shakespeare’s own concerns:

In the case of a poet, I suggest it is chiefly through his images that he, to some extent unconsciously, ‘gives himself away’. He may be, and in Shakespeare’s case is, almost entirely objective in his dramatic characters and their views and opinions, yet, like the man who under stress of emotion will show no sign of it in eye or face, but will reveal it in some muscular tension, the poet unwittingly lays bare his own innermost likes and dislikes, observations and interests, associations of thought, attitudes of mind and beliefs, in and through the images, the verbal pictures he draws to illuminate something quite different in the speech and thought of his characters. (Spurgeon, 1935, p. 4)

Thus, the fact that the boy is referred to in relation to ‘fairest creatures’ facilitates the poet’s directive that this places upon the individual a responsibility: beauty is not given to ‘die’ but to be carried on by the ‘tender heir’. The register is imperative and commanding, with the poet adopting the voice of one who has the authority to instruct by reason of superior age and wisdom, hence perhaps the juxtaposition of ‘riper’ and ‘decrease’ in the preceding line to reference to the ‘tender heir’ and ‘memory’. The youth is instructed that he is, in common parlance, his own worst enemy, ‘Thy self thy foe’, since he does not see the waste of his beauty which lies in his refusal to share his gifts with posterity via procreation. This accusatory tone is extended to the ‘self-abuse’ of masturbation in ‘Within thine own bud buriest thy content’, which also bears the pun of pleasure and substance, and the youth referred to as a ‘glutton’ and ‘tender churl’, the latter implying an indulgence in the chiding of the boy. This is, of course, the supreme image of the waste with which the poet is concerned since to make ‘a famine where abundance lies’ is almost seen as a blasphemy, refusing, selfishly, to procreate and ‘eat the world’s due’ by the selfish pursuit of personal indulgence: ‘contracted to thine own bright eyes’, as with Narcissus, in love with his own reflection and failing to see the self-destruction that is inherent in this.

In addition, by referring to the boy in terms of a ‘rose’, the poet introduces the classic Romantic emblem of love as well as re-emphasising the transience of the poet’s beauty. This idea of beauty and its connective with nature is again related in terms of a comparative with nature’s beauty and inveterate perishability in ‘Sonnet XVIII’:

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. (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p.147)

The comparison of the transience of nature’s beauty with that of the youth to whom the poem is addressed is clear, yet the rhetoric of the opening seems to imply an equivocal nature to the connective of the extended metaphor that follows. The tentativeness of the image is also emphasised by this questioning in the first line and it enhances both the intimacy of the register of address and the relationship of the poet with the wider readership. This latter is important because it is so much a concern in the poem, with the idea of immortality attached here to writing as it was previously attached to procreation. The common denominator here is the idea of creation itself and its connective with the ‘eternal’.

This is perhaps one of Shakespeare’s more famous sonnets, if not the most famous, therefore it is fitting that in a dissertation concerned with the aspects of love which the sonnets present, attention should be paid to the aspect of the writing which pertains to the process of creation and its connective with the reader. It is interesting to note, indeed, that the poet chooses to stress the importance of the ‘eternal lines’ which he is composing and how this overcomes the basic transience of life and beauty whether in nature or humanity. Indeed, the punctuation of this sonnet is indicative of its imperative since there is frequent usage of the colon throughout, implying a thought begun and completed in each quatrain, functioning almost as enjambment and enhancing the idea that the many aspects of beauty and life which this sonnet covers are embodied within one thought as evidenced in the single extended metaphor which informs the sonnet as a whole. The poet’s almost godlike assimilation of the power to grant immortality appears dangerously hubristic in abstract and indeed encourages the inference that Shakespeare was aware of the strength of his poetic gifts and their ability to confer a kind of immorality on the object of love, who by the end of the sonnet has become subject to the sonneteer rather than in command. As the poet is also using his gifts to describe the loved one via nature, the features of the numinous within nature become connected with this hubristic stance. Thus, ‘nature’s changing course’ and ‘Chance’, which significantly begins a line, are to some extent negated, or at least qualified, by the poet’s art. Features of life which terrify, therefore, such as death cannot ‘brag’ in the face of the ‘eternal’ nature of Art:

Shakespeare prophetically felt the immortality and universality of his plays even though he seems to have made no great effort toward their preservation in print. (Marder, 1963, p. 361)

This might, this sonnet would seem to suggest, also be extended to the sonnets. Indeed, in daring to criticise the glories of nature, Shakespeare appears to place creative Art above it, since it, unlike all that is ‘natural’, survives, only, though, as long as it is appreciated, as the final couplet significantly testifies:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

In this way, Shakespeare demonstrates an awareness of the fundamental importance of the connection between writer and reader, reinforced perhaps by his experience as an actor and writer of drama. Hence, the voice of the actor may be perceived in the words of the sonneteer and universality as well as the eternal perceived in both:

On this planet the reputation of Shakespeare is secure. When life is discovered elsewhere in the universe and some interplanetary traveler brings to this new world the fruits of our terrestrial culture, who can imagine anything but that among the first books carried to the curious strangers will be a Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. (Marder, 1963, p. 362)

Thus, Shakespeare may be seen, via the sonnets and plays, to transcend what is perceived as immediate in aspects of love and engage with the eternal.

Chapter Two: ‘I do believe her though I know she lies’

The potent sexual content of the sonnets becomes a major directive following the romantic turning point of ‘Sonnet XVIII’. The sequence moves powerfully from restrained yet poetic discussion of aspects of love to explicit sexual references which are concerned more with lust than love and often deceit is linked to this and this duplicity is most often associated with the heterosexual sonnets.

Importantly, the passion is not directed solely towards heterosexual love, instead it involves an equal, if not stronger, reflection of homoerotic desire, with the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady equally powerful in the poet’s passion, indeed, often the two overlap producing an androgynous aspect to the passion which also appears in the plays:

The first thing that startles the reader about the sonnets is the emotional virtuosity of the protagonist. The poems appear to have been composed over a longer period of years, and to cover a greater range of passionate experience, than any one of the plays. In recognizing the variety of moods and attitudes Shakespeare accumulates in the sonnets, we may choose either to admire his protean nature as an actual passionate friend and lover, or to stress his dexterity in accumulating such an extraordinary range of amatory motifs from literary sources. Either his own nature was unusually flexible and susceptible, or he deliberately chose to display the full scope of literary permutations of which emotional relationships are capable. Probably both views are true: he dexterously coordinated first-hand experience with the accumulated resources of the sonnet tradition, from the solemn and sentimental to the cynical and outrageous. (Richmond, 1971, p. 19)

This is particularly noticeable in ‘Sonnet XX’ where the poet longs for the youth to be a woman and the homoerotic replaces the marital directive which appeared in the didactic tone of the first sonnets in the sequence:

A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.(Shakespeare, William, 2003, p.151)

Shakespeare confronts directly here the clear belief that women are duplicitous and deceitful and that the ‘master mistress’ of his ‘passion’, though gifted with ‘a woman’s gentle heart’ is ‘not acquainted/With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion’. The ‘eye’, the traditional window of the soul, is ‘more bright’ but ‘less false’. Thus, the poet suggests that the beautiful youth has all a woman’s best gifts but none of her faults, a state of perfection to be idealised in desire. Shakespeare develops this by writing directly of the sexual difference where the punning ‘prick’d’ is clearly a reference to the redundancy of the penis for the poet. ‘Nature’ here is the enemy, even the jealous sexual predator, having ‘me of thee defeated’ thus frustrating the desires of the poet by changing what he perceives to be the original intention, ‘to create a woman’, in the addition of the male organ of procreation. The amorphous image appears to be the ideal with neither male nor female specifics to obscure or defeat the perfection of the union.

Whether this desire is linked to Shakespeare’s own desire is equivocal as are all inferences of autobiographical content, it is tempting but dangerous to make too may autobiographical assumptions. However:

In depicting this blend of adulation and contempt, and in all those sonnets where verbal ambiguity is thus used as a deliberate dramatic device, Shakespeare shows that superb insight into states of strangely mixed feelings which enabled him to bring to life a Coriolanus or an Enobarbus. Like Freud, he found the causes of quibbling by studying his own quibbles; and the detachment which such an analysis implies imparts to the best of the Sonnets that objectivity we look for in the finest dramatic poetry. (Mahood, 1988, p. 110)

Certainly, there is a Freudian homoerotic subliminal here but there is no evidence to suggest that this was an actual experience of the poet any more than we can say that he wrote Hamlet therefore he must have experienced being the Prince of Denmark. To do either is to ignore Shakespeare’s imaginative genius and his ability to transmute the fancy into the creative, with both forming then a reality which has little if any connection with fact. So, although Shakespeare may have had sexual liaisons with both sexes and been crossed in love, the genius is in producing what can be seen to be unrelated to what might possibly have occurred in fact into an emblem of a generic tendency in humanity to which most of us can relate: ‘If Shakespeare’s speaker fictionalized the young man, so too he fictionalizes himself’ (Berry, 2001, p.1).

Having said that, ‘Sonnet XX’ has been seen as offering significant clues not only to the nature of Shakespeare’s own sexuality but also to the identity of the ‘Fair Youth’ himself and certainly to the ‘reality’ of the human image even in its placing, as Kathryn Duncan Jones has pointed out in her notes to her 2003 edition of the Sonnets (the edition used throughout this dissertation): ‘The placement of this anatomical sonnet at 20 may allude to a traditional association of this figure with the human body, equipped with twenty digits’ (Duncan Jones, 2003, p. 150). The direct connection which Duncan Jones makes between anatomy and imagination in this sonnet is interesting in that it breaches the gap between what might be seen to be metaphorical and what is actually a human figurative. Indeed, she goes on in her Introduction to expand on this: ‘Many more numerological finesses may be discerned. For instance, the embarrassingly anatomical sonnet 20 [which] probably draws on primitive associations of the figure with the human body, whose digits, fingers and toes, add up to twenty’ (Duncan Jones, 2003, p. 101).

As to the identity of the youth to which clues are supposedly to be found in this sonnet, they largely attach to the usage of the word, or name it is suggested, of ‘hue’ and ‘hues’ (spelt ‘Hew’ and ‘Hews’ in the Quarto). This, it has been mooted, might relate to a specific individual, especially as critics have noted that the name appears in one form or another, even if only in disparate letters, throughout the sonnet. As with much of the investigation into a connective between Shakespeare’s life and his Art, the link is at best speculative and at worst spurious and in either case somewhat superfluous:

The sonnets have an extraordinary capacity to elicit categorical statements from their interpreters. It is announced that the youth is Southampton, the youth is Pembroke, the youth is nobody, the dark lady is Mary Fitton, she is Aemilia Lanyer, she is nobody, the sonnets are based on experience, they are not based on experience, the love was not homosexual, the love was homosexual, the love was a dramatic fiction which had nothing to do with Shakespeare’s sexuality. Somehow, the poems convince each reader that what he or she sees in them is what is really there. […] They can do this partly because of what they leave out […] this then is the genius of the sonnets. (Bate, 2008, p. 43).

Indeed, ‘Sonnet XX’, with its feminine rhymes and gender specific juxtaposed with androgynous imagery, is singularly representative of Bate’s point that in their very lack of specific identity is their generic and fundamental appeal. By inverting what we expect, Shakespeare is able to cater to our every whim and imaginative fancy yet retain a deeply rooted grip on reality, far removed from the deification of the Petrarchan sonnets.

This is abundantly clear in one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, addressed to the enigmatic Dark Lady, ‘Sonnet CXXX’:

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.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,

As any she belied with false compare. (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 375)

This sonnet is the precise inverse of the Romantic ideal, as it mocks the very substance of the Petrarchan model, the picturing of women as goddesses: ‘Sonnet 130 turns on a witty paradox’ (Farrell, 1975, p.7). Each of the images used here by the poet has an obvious comparative with the Romantic: the sun compared to eyes, the lips to coral, the breasts to snow, the hairs to wires, the skin to damask, the breath to perfume, the voice to music. Each of these is then presented in the obverse so that the reader is both surprised by the shock of the unexpected and disconcerted by the apparent dismissal by the poet of his mistress as lacking in the charms which are traditionally associated with praise of the beloved, especially in the sonnet form and more particularly in the Italian form as seen in Petrarch’s praise of the elusive Laura:

Sonnet 130 praises the beloved by forcing us to recognize the inadequacy of our customary means of conceiving her. It invokes the beloved only by means of negation; it identifies what is not true. The poet seeks to dramatize her extra-ordinary worth. She is beyond us, ‘inconceivable.’ As in the Renaissance use of the term admiratio, ‘rare’ suggest the miraculous and transcendent. Apart from its negative strategy, the sonnet also arouses wonder in us through its paradoxes. Its ridicule of ‘false compare’ is actually a vow of love as well. Our response is meant to be at once amusement and ‘serious’ admiration. But there is a further–and crucial–paradox in the sonnet’s theme. For the poem maintains that the beloved is most individual and most real when she is not directly conceived, but wondered at. As in all paradoxes, the contradiction here is only apparent. The poet allows only two possibilities for awareness. Either the mind is rigidly conventional and hence false to reality, or it is in a state of awe, open to reality but beyond words. Wonder need not preclude meaning absolutely–after all, the sonnet does express the poet’s love and the beloved’s worth. We feel we know what the poem means. But we cannot reduce that meaning to any glib verbal formula. In Sonnet 130 this paradox–that we know most truly by not knowing–is lighthearted and relatively simple: a stroke of wit. (Farrell, 1975, p.7)

As Farrell points out, what we first see as derogatory transmutes to high praise within the sonnet where the ‘mistress’ emerges as far superior to the ‘goddess’ and the so-called ‘language of love’ basically a deception practised by poets who know little of a woman as she really is when experienced as a loving, living, breathing human being. Thus, Petrarchan traditions were replicated in English,

But they were also resisted. ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,’ Shakespeare defiantly claims in Sonnet 130 as he begins a down-to-earth catalogue of happily unrealized ideals and welcome shortcomings in his dark lady. (Rhu, 1998, p.1)

The audacious satirising of not just the work of his contemporaries but also his own in this sonnet exemplifies the originality and also the innovation of Shakespeare’s sonnets for to invert what was contemporaneously habitual in an attempt to see love ‘warts and all’ gives the sonnet sequence an integrity that is frequently missing from poems of ‘courtly love’ so popular at the time.

Indeed, some of the images Shakespeare produces here still have the capacity to shock, especially in the employment of words like ‘reeks’ to describe his mistress’ breath. However, in this instance, the connotation is partly affected by the passage of time since in Shakespeare’s day the adjective would be more generically applicable to scents or smells, rather than as we now infer, the application of the unpleasant, closer to stinks. Shakespeare would probably have intended a far more restrained reading, relating the mistress’ breath to the ordinary, thus not ‘perfume’ or in fact devoid of anything so human as scent at all. In a similar way, music is used to describe the difference between it and the mistress’ voice rather than the similarity but it does not imply that the mistress’ voice is unpleasant, indeed the poet writes that he ‘love[s] to hear her speak’ which typifies the tone of the poem: he adores the mistress but loves her for what he sees and experiences not what he deifies. Hence, the final lines are perhaps the deepest expression of love between human beings that might be found anywhere in literature:

And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,

As any she belied with false compare.

By linking in rhyme, in his final couplet, the twin ideas of ‘rare’ and ‘compare’, the poet shows how he is directed within this sonnet by the desire to show the difference between idealisation and ‘true’ love, just as he does, indeed, in the infatuation Romeo shows for Rosaline at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet compared with the true and almost holy love he has for Juliet.

Of course, Shakespeare is also presenting us with a singular paradox here, since if the love object is not to be regarded as ‘deified’ then should he be writing elsewhere, as in Romeo and Juliet, of love itself as divine? The simple answer to this is that the poet makes a distinction throughout the plays and the sonnets between the emotion and the object of it. He also makes a distinction between what is ‘love’ and what is ‘lust’, though both are present within plays and sonnets alike:

[The] central fact [that] must never be forgotten by those who are repelled by the myriad manifestations of Shakespeare’s interest in women and their sexual features [is that] it was part of his character and his temperament; nor did he wish to hide it; he did not even wish to represent it as other than it was. He neither pretended that he was a publicist nor cloaked his amatory sentiments and amorous nature with the hypocrisy of prurient-minded prudes and smug, clandestine voluptuaries.(Partridge, 2001, p. 26)

Sexuality, whether heterosexual or homosexual, in the sonnets is not, therefore, in opposition to love, indeed it is frequently an important, basic and inherent aspect of it of which Shakespeare speaks proudly and honestly. It is frequently, however, tied in with deception, the most openly lustful and erotic sonnets being those wherein he also discourses upon the deceitful nature of love. It must be stressed, indeed, that these sonnets are almost entirely those addressed to the ‘Dark Lady’, her ‘darkness’, in fact, being reflective of wickedness as well as sexuality, as in ‘Sonnet CXLIV’:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still:

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.

To win me soon to hell, my female evil,

Tempteth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride.

And whether that my angel be turned fiend,

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;

But being both from me, both to each friend,

I guess one angel in another’s hell:

Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out. (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 405)

This sonnet stands out as emblematic of the battle between the sexual and the spiritual in love and the fact that both are constituent parts but often in opposition. The central dynamic is intensified by the way in which the female is identified with evil, ‘a woman coloured ill’ (hence, perhaps, the ‘dark lady’) and the male with the angelic, ‘the better angel is a man right fair’ (thus, ‘the Fair Youth’). The sonnet seems to sum up the way that throughout the sequence, Shakespeare has revelled in the manipulation of Platonic and homoerotic love with heterosexual desire and the demystification of the Petrarchan love object. Certainly, one must note the presence of a misogynistic element to this composition, especially since what might be termed the ‘Eve syndrome’ of the ability of the woman to ‘corrupt’ the ‘purity’ of the ‘saint’ is clearly in evidence. The pure Platonic which is often used to discuss the love between males is employed here in a different way, that is to decry the female as capable of corrupting the more spiritual and elevated affections which exist between men. (Interestingly, this was very much an informative of the aesthetes of the fin de siecle and there is indeed, a resonance of Shakespeare’s ‘two loves’ in the infamous poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Bosie’, in the poem that helped convict Wilde of homosexuality which employed much the same imagery in ‘the love that dares not speak its name’. Also, Wilde spoke very eloquently of the importance and indeed nobility of Platonic love at his trial.) The inherent deceit which the poet represents as part of a woman’s nature is picked up again in ‘Sonnet CXXXVIII’:

When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutored youth,

Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:

On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?

And wherefore say not I that I am old?

O! love’s best habit is in seeming trust,

And age in love, loves not to have years told:

Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be. (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 391)

Here the poet can be seen to take the idea of the individual’s duplicity to the realm of mutual deception, the notion that both lovers engage in joint deceit and the bewilderment which the poet feels at this. There is deliberate and repeated use of punning throughout the sonnet, especially in the double-meaning of ‘lie’: i.e. deceit and sex. There is also the desperate need to believe, which oddly strikes a religious note. Indeed, is important to note that religious imagery such as that which is subliminally employed here and, indeed, to great effect throughout the sonnets is, in our increasingly secular age, often ignored. However, recognition of the religious undertone which informs the poems is crucial to a comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare’s sonnets and therefore will be considered within the next chapter.

Chapter Three: ‘Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss’

It important to recognise that despite the secular nature of much of what energises Shakespeare’s sonnets the mode of expression is frequently religious despite opinions to the contrary:

We are accustomed to think of the universality of Shakespeare as not the least of his glories. No other poet has given so manysided an expression to human nature, or rendered so many passions and moods with such an appropriate variety of style, sentiment, and accent. If, therefore, we were asked to select one monument of human civilisation that should survive to some future age, or be transported to another planet to bear witness to the inhabitants there of what we have been upon earth, we should probably choose the works of Shakespeare. In them we recognise the truest portrait and best memorial of man. Yet the archaeologists of that future age, or the cosmographers of that other part of the heavens, after conscientious study of our Shakespearian autobiography, would misconceive our life in one important respect. They would hardly understand that man had had a religion. (Singer, 1956, p. 137)

This could hardly be more misplaced as a judgement since the idea that religion is absent from the sonnets simply because they do not directly address the topic is entirely to misunderstand them and the era in which Shakespeare was writing. Indeed, almost always when Shakespeare writes of true love, as he frequently does in both the plays and the sonnets, he employs religious terminology to do so as here in ‘Sonnet XXXIV’:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
‘Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak,
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds. (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 179)

Here, the poet speaks of the loss of a friend and love object but uses the imagery of ‘shame’, ‘repent[ance]’ and ‘grief’ to do so. There is also punning reference to the ‘cross’ and ‘the offender’s sorrow’ as well as ‘salve’ which ‘heals the wound’ and ‘cures not the disgrace’. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, there is, in the final line, the biblical reference to the ‘tears’ which are ‘pearl[s]’ of ‘love’ that ‘ransom all ill deeds’. Thus although the sonnet deals with personal loss, the imagery is too powerfully biblical to be overlooked or marginalised as is so frequently the case in contemporary commentaries. All the images of grief which are expressed here are connected with atonement and thus with the idea of sin and repentance. The desire to be cleansed, evidenced perhaps in the ‘tears’, is inherently part of the loss which energises via an absence. The accusatory rhetoric of the opening, therefore, transmutes by the end to a need to make amends and ‘heal’ a breach. Thus, it is fundamental it appears, for the poet, to form a connective between personal separation and division in human terms with the idea of a rift with God.

In order to understand the importance of this imagery and its contemporaneous familiarity, one must refer to the era in which the sonnets were written and recognise that for Shakespeare and his contemporaries the use of religious imagery to express any aspect of life or love was natural. This can be clearly seen in the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries such as Ben Jonson, who relates his own religious confusion following the death of his son in his verse ‘On My First Son’ (composed in 1603 and published in 1609). Within this verse, Jonson questions the lack of faith which causes his grief but not the fact that his son was taken from him. In a similar way, George Herbert, who believed that the only reason to write was to glorify God, writes of redemption, as we have seen Shakespeare does, in terms of ransom. Indeed, the sonnet which Herbert wrote on the need to heal a rift with God, called ‘Redemption’ (first published posthumously in 1633), was noted by T.S. Eliot as ‘Christianity in fourteen lines’. Thus, the backdrop to Shakespeare’s religious imagery can be seen to be firmly established in the currency of the time. Indeed it would have been more unusual for him not to have employed religious imagery than to do so as he does here in ‘Sonnet CVIII’ (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 327):

What’s in the brain, that ink may character,
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love, or thy dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,
I must each day say o’er the very same;
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case,
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page;
Finding the first conceit of love there bred,
Where time and outward form would show it dead.

This sonnet again draws the attention of readers to the importance of the placing of the sonnets in sequential order since, as Kathryn Duncan Jones, amongst others, has pointed out in the notes to her 2003 edition of the Sonnets (used throughout this dissertation), 108 is the total number of sonnets in the famous sequence, Astrophel and Stella, published posthumously in 1591, by the foremost sonneteer of the day, Sir Philip Sidney (Duncan Jones, 2003, p. 326). Shakespeare would doubtless be aware of the significance of this number, as would his contemporaries, and in placing the sonnet he allies it to Sidney, perhaps in tribute.

However, the wider significance of the sonnet is in the clear connective which it displays between human love and the divine. As is the case with most of the early sonnets in the sequence, CVIII is addressed to a young man but here, the love is inextricably linked with the divine. This is clear from the references to prayer, especially ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, within the poem. However, the connection has been variously read as laudatory and blasphemous over the years but the idea of the sonnets being intentionally blasphemous ignores the fact that blasphemy in Shakespeare’s time was no mere trifle. It must be remembered that Elizabethan England was a time of great danger for anyone failing to conform to what was required in religious observation, prayers were required to be recited regularly and failure to adhere to this could mean imprisonment and even death. Thus, even though the sonnets were doubtless shared privately for some time before their rather doubtfully authorised publication, it is decidedly questionable that Shakespeare would have taken the risk of committing a blatant blasphemy to verse.

Thus, a far more likely reading is that which it has been mentioned previously also attaches to the first exchange between the lovers in Romeo and Juliet, that is, the idea that this love has a sanctity connected to the Divine and to the Eternal. Shakespeare makes a direct connection between the repetition of his expressions of love for the boy and the ‘prayers divine/ I must each day say o’er the very same’. He also refers to the boy’s name as ‘hallowed’ and causes a recognisable resonance, especially to his contemporaries, with the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ where God’s name is ‘hallowed’. This direct connective is of course one of the primary reasons for retrospective accusations of blasphemy in that corporeal, indeed homosexual, love might be linked with words of worship directed to the Creator. However, the poet’s intention might be read, especially in the light of historical religious context, as a means by which he can impress upon readers that this love is pure and spiritual and, like God, beyond the confines of time and an image of unity:

In any intellectual study we expect first some principle of unity; but it is exactly this that has been lacking to our understanding of Shakespeare. If no unity be apprehended, the result will be an intellectual chaos such as has surely emerged throughout recent Shakespearian investigation. (Knight, 1953, p.1)

Thus, the reference to the divine nature of love is not blasphemous so much as spiritually elevated in its own way and beyond the perishable corruption of age.

The notion of love being beyond the encroachment and corruption of time is one which is interwoven as a theme which informs the entire sequence of the sonnets as can be clearly seen in one of the more famous, ‘Sonnet CXVI’ (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p.343):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The poet’s significant use of ‘impediments’ in this sonnet and its obvious resonance with the marriage ceremony has led to much speculation as to the nature of the sexual impetus behind it. It seem as though the idea of Platonic love is being taken one stage further, to involve it with a formal union blessed by the Church and State. In Shakespeare’s time, of course, this would have been an undreamt of impossibility but that only adds to the enticement of it as the ‘impediment’ also involves the obstruction of the ‘marriage of true minds’ which is precisely the Platonic principle. Thus, the element of spirituality seems to continue as a subliminal in the sonnet sequence.

However, Shakespeare also discourses on the nature of love itself and what might be said to constitute ‘Love’ as a lasting emotion. Shakespeare does this, as he did with the praise of his mistress in ‘Sonnet CXXX’, by saying what love is not. That is, ‘Love is not love’ which can ever be altered, not just by time but by circumstance. This ends the first quatrain and the second begins with the exclamatory ‘O, no!’ which is a defiant recognition of a certainty that the poet knows what love is because he then goes on to explain its permanence in terms of opposition since it ‘looks on tempests and is never shaken’. The image of love as timeless and beyond the ‘tempests’ of life is further enhanced by its intransigence in the face of the sea’s turbulence, especially since Shakespeare so frequently uses the idea as a metaphor:

Since the sea is so tragically apprehended, its war with land so powerfully visualized, it is clear that any image of water breaking its bounds is an apt symbol for ‘disorder’. ‘Disorder’ and ‘tragedy’ are in Shakespeare practically synonymous. Disorder in man or state is like a good overflowing its limits. Passion may often be considered to swell higher than the bounds imposed by reason. (Knight, 1953, p. 23)

The idea that the sea represents chaos and that love is the antidote, resistant to this inclines the reader to infer that love, like Heaven, is opposed to the Hell of life represented by the sea here. Biblically, of course, God brought the world out of chaos and separated the ‘firmaments’ so the reader sees again a connective with the Divine, here. Moreover, the poet confronts the notion of age here and the idea that ‘alteration’ can be wrought by nature but that love is beyond that. This love that is ‘not Time’s fool’, the capital letter personifying ‘Time’ and connecting it with the image of Time as the ‘grim reaper’, an image enhanced by the ‘sickle’, cannot be touched and is inviolate. Finally, the love described here is ‘the star to every wandering bark’ and thus beyond earthly intervention; stars were seen as emblematic of Heaven in Shakespeare’s time, so again there is the Divine connective. The weakness of the ending in the rather throwaway couplet might possibly be to underline the strength of what has gone before but might also imply that against love of the kind with which the poet has been concerned in this sonnet all else, even creative power, is as nothing.

The religious imagery is also used when the poet is speaking of his love for the youth almost as a father for his son, thus invoking again the image of God as Father. The poet uses the religious imagery in order to make clear to the youth the importance of what has been suggested or advised in the didactic early sonnets, so that the procreation spoken of as so vital and so much a duty to the human race is reflective of the way in which mankind is designed to continue to grow and develop not only for his own sake but for the sake of the survival of the race. This is indeed a Divine directive which the poet perceives and which gives a reality to the early advice. It also strengthens the poet’s sense of its moral connection:

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth;
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts, do crowned sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store:
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despis’d,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give
That I in thy abundance am suffic’d,
And by a part of all thy glory live.
Look what is best, that best I wish in thee:
This wish I have; then ten times happy me! (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p.185)

Here, in ‘Sonnet XXXVII’, the metaphor of the ‘decrepit father’ who takes delight in his ‘active child’ is used to explore the idea that what was advised by the poet in the first sonnet of the sequence, marriage for the future of yourself and posterity, is of value in the happiness and fulfilment that it gives. Thus, the poet ‘made lame by fortune’ is restored by the vision of the health and vigour of the child. The subliminal religious connotation here is that the way in which the older man takes pleasure in the quasi-creation of the younger, even in metaphorical terms, is like that which the Divine Father might take in the ‘child’ which is mankind. The contrast between ‘shadow’ and ‘substance’ is also delineated in terms of the youth giving a vital reality to the older man that otherwise he might have lost. What might be seen as supernatural is thus transposed to the natural in the vital juxtaposition of shadow and substance both sharing the ‘glory’ of life. Indeed, this juxtaposing of the natural and the supernatural is a device Shakespeare frequently uses in the plays as well as the sonnets just as in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare contrasts different kinds of love, revealing the ‘true’ love in the sonnet exchange between Romeo and Juliet:

The poet of the traditional sonnet often feels in his heart that his love is wrong, and he sometimes argues against himself on the side of morality-an understandable consequence of his towering idealization of the lady. One feels sometimes that nothing would disconcert him more than the sudden success of his suit, so dainty sweet is melancholy. […] The poet addresses the lady in terms of fire and ice (he is the fire, she the ice), of earth and air. He longs to touch her hand; he cherishes the glove that she has dropped. And so on! With Shakespeare, however, the essence of love is mutuality. (Hubler, 1952, p. 43)

This idea is also to be seen in the baser imagery employed in the heterosexual poems of love addressed to the ‘Dark Lady’. In contrast to the divine aspect of the spiritual love which is described in the sonnets to the ‘Fair Youth’, the language of the sonnets addressed to the Dark Lady is often completely devoid of religious or spiritual presence, or contains references to the passion he feels for the largely duplicitous woman as evil, connected with the idea of Eve, temptation and Hell. The Dark Lady is usually assumed to have been a married woman, therefore singularly deceitful from the outset, and the poet presents her as such in most of the sonnets in which she appears:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 376)

Here, in ‘Sonnet CXXIX’, the third in the sequence addressed to the Dark Lady, the poet speaks in rapacious terms of the voracious appetites of the lovers. The sonnet which follows is that spoken of earlier, where Shakespeare mocks the elevation of the beloved to the realms of the goddess. Thus, he is speaking of an earthy woman here, one who does not appear ethereal but who ‘treads on the ground’ (‘Sonnet CXXX’, Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 375). Also, in ‘Sonnet CXXVII’ (Shakespeare, William, 2003, p. 372), the poet has written of the way that ‘In the old age black was not counted fair’, so the Dark Lady, who has exclusively descriptions of darkness attached to her, is associated with everything that attaches to darkness in the imagination: night, sexuality and evil:

There is nothing like the woman of Shakespeare’s sonnets in all the sonnet literature of the Renaissance. The ladies of the sonnet tradition were idealizations; Shakespeare’s heroine represents neither the traditional ideal nor his. The Elizabethan ideal of beauty was blonde; Shakespeare’s heroine, if we may call her that, was dark, and the blackness of her hair and eyes and heart is so heavily stressed that she has come to be known as ‘the Dark Lady’. He insists upon her darkness–first the darkness of her beauty, and later the darkness of her deeds. But from the beginning, even when his passion for her was untouched by regret, his praise of her beauty was marked by ambivalence. It was perhaps the dominance of the traditional and popular ideal which made him distrust the dictates of his senses. (Hubler, 1952, p. 39)

Hence, the juxtaposition of ‘heaven’ with ‘hell’ in his description of her as emblematic of passion is significant for, like the contrast of darkness and light, this brings to the fore the picture of the destructive side of the woman to whom the poet is drawn as one almost being eaten alive. Moreover, in references to ‘lust’ and ‘shame’ the poet declares that he sees this passion as sinful which as she is married, we assume, it is. Yet, what is the reader to make of the poet’s abdication of responsibility, here? He seems to be driven by his own lusts and dismissive of the woman once satisfied: ‘Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight’. Portraying himself ‘as a swallowed bait’, he is encouraging the reader to see him as being ‘caught’ and therefore reducing his own culpability by increasing hers. ‘Past reason’ is repeated emphasising again the lack of control which the man feels in the grip of this passion and his feeling that he is ‘hunted’ and unable to evade capture. There is no sense, here, o