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British Poetry

Notes The Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works to be printed AND published in
1609. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests
that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two
unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in
1598 to Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets among his private friends”. Few analysts believe that the
published collection follows Shakespeare’s intended sequence. He seems to have planned two
contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the
“dark lady”), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the “fair youth”). It remains
unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial “I” who addresses them
represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets “Shakespeare
unlocked his heart”. The 1609 edition was dedicated to a “Mr. W.H.”, credited as “the only begetter”
of the poems.
It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe,
whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite
numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.

Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual
passion, procreation, death, and time.

23.2 Sonnets: Being your Slave what should I do but Tend

Shakespeare’s sonnets comprise 154 poems in sonnet form that were published in 1609 but likely
written over the course of several years. Evidence for their existence long preceding publication comes
from a reference in Francis Mere’s 1598 Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, where his allusion to
Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets among his private frinds” might indicate that the poet preferred not
to make these works public. It is unclear whether the 1609 publication, at the hands of a certain
Thomas Thorpe, was from an authorized manuscript of Shakespeare’s; it is possible that the sonnets
were published without the author’s consent, perhaps even without his knowledge.
This is but one of the mysteries of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Another, which continues to spur debate
among literary scholars today, is the identity of the publication’s dedicatee, the collection’s “onlie
begetter,” a Mr. W. H. Speculation largely vacillates between two main candidates: Mr. William
Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke; and Mr. Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. Both
possibilities are tenable, as both were men of means and of literary interest enough to be patrons to
Shakespeare. In fact the poet dedicated other works to each: his First Folio to Herbert and his Venus
and Adonis and Lucrece to Wriothesley. Those who favor one man or the other draw on
circumstantial evidence concerning his life and character, such as the amicable terms on which
Shakespeare is known to have been with Wriothesley, or events in Herbert’s life that may be intimated
in the exploits of the sonnets’ “fair lord.”
The fair lord is one of three recurring characters in the sonnets, together with the dark lady and the
rival poet. The real-world referents of these persons are yet another locus of controversy. Some
critics suggest that the fair lord and the collection’s dedicatee are one and the same, while others
disagree. Still others question the autobiographical nature of the sonnets, arguing that there is no
hard proof that their content is anything but fictional.
These mysteries and others, including the ordering of the sonnets, the date of their composition,
and seeming deviations from the otherwise rigid format (one sonnet has 15 lines, another only 12;
sonnets 153 and 154 do not fit well in the sequence), have generated an abundance of scholarly
criticism over the years, and the dialogues they provoke remain highly contentious to this day.

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