The Art of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets is a wonderful
experience which provoked the following comments which I don't have the standing to make.... .
Dr. Vendler asks “Where, then, does the charm of lyric
lie?....they can be summed up in the phrase 'the arrangement of
statement'. Form is content-as-arranged;
content is form-as-deployed.” But I had a hard time accepting that the Sonnets
were at core primarily an “innovation in presentation” of a common theme –
romantic love. If instead one assumes
Shakespeare was intensely focused on the subject of “love” rather than "a love,"
then it is understandable that the sonnets would not conform to my idea of
traditional love poems. If the subject of
the sonnets is love then the sonnets are semantically very rich. Let me explain why I think it is fruitful to
take this perspective.
Read this way, the sonnets tease out many if not all of
love’s facets because Shakespeare set them in the context of a forbidden homosexual relationship. That context
provides an intense chiaroscuro to highlight love's facets in a way a
traditional love poem almost certainly could not.
What the first 17 sonnets establish very successfully, I
think, is that the speaker’s love of the youth is pure and intense. Even so, the sonnets don’t strike me as love
poems in the romantic sense at all. None
of the youth’s beauty is shared with the reader - just that the speaker was
besotted with someone he thought pretty.
S doesn’t share any of the particulars with us (color of eye, color of
hair, skin [color or texture] – the normal fare of a love poem). Instead many of the Sonnets leave us with the
strong feeling that the youth was a narcissistic, somewhat promiscuous fop and
the speaker was mired in degraded self loathing and feelings of rejection. I
can’t help but think that Shakespeare intended us to read the Sonnets this way
for a reason. What “Love” is, is learned
by what it is NOT in this context. To
again quote The Art...,, “Shakespeare’s mind operates always by antithesis.” A
homosexual relationship context allowed Shakespeare to discuss what love is in the
absence of off-spring; in the absence of social acceptance; in
the absence of the constancy provided by marriage; in the absence of
pure physical beauty; in the absence of being able to grow old together en
famile where physical beauty is relative to the stage of life. If my supposition is right, (to paraphrase The
Art of Shakespeare’s…) the context
is imaginative. It allows the terms of
love to take on meanings that reinforce, meaningfully contradict, and play with
those meanings as we previously conceived them in a way that is aesthetically
novel, in a way that is striking, memorable, beautiful, disturbing, and
surprising. As to why he would chose the Sonnet form for such a subject rather
than a free form play - it may be that conforming to the highly conventional
lyric structure gives him license to approach such a conventional subject on such
unconventional terms.
Take Sonnet 73 to illustrate these points.
73 might not be so successful if written to a woman – by
a long shot. I would never write this
sonnet to a woman I was trying to woo back.
To tell her to love me because she should love an aging increasingly
unattractive man before she too gets uglier and dies!?! Instead the homosexual context enables the
sonnet to posit a reasonable presumption that the youth might accept that he
and the speaker are alike but only
different in age. The speaker tells the
youth he should want to love him more intensely because time is so fleeting and
cruel – to love him in the moment – a wonderful sentiment that might not
work in a traditional love poem – a facet of love which is wonderfully explored
but only possible in this context.
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