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Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire A
prosimetrum of 154 sonnets, glosses, and other commentary,
in
which the sacred beauty of friendship and sexual love are explored.
ADVISEMENT Lovers of all kinds turn to
Shakespeare’s 154
Sonnets for his depth of emotion with richness of thought. Most of the
poems were written to a beautiful young man and some to a mysterious
dark lady. These new sonnets, similarly, range through many moods from
youthful folly (today causing me profound embarrassment) to perhaps a
hint of maturity, arraying insights from the world’s religions in the
sonnets and in the sonnet glosses, protesting against the Cartesian
disenchantment of the world. Because the sonnets are arranged by parts
of the Mass, and many sonnets identify the erotic with the divine, some
may consider the book blasphemous.
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About Shakespeare’s Sonnets Did Shakespeare (1564-1616) authorize the 1609 pub lication of his sonnets? The Elizabethan sonnet-writing vogue was over. The Bard's reputation as a dra matist was well established; he retired in 1611. Thomas Thorpe, a marginal publisher, per haps to make a buck — I mean a guinea — issued them, perhaps without Shake speare’s permission. Nonetheless, bless Thorpe for them. In 1640, as if the sonnets had never been in print, another publisher rearranged and issued them. Two of the “dark lady” sonnets appeared in an anthol ogy of 1599, and a year earlier a critic praised Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” but we don’t know what the selection might have been. The first seventeen may have been commissioned by a third party. What we have today may have been written well before 1600. (The 154 are not Shakespeare’s only sonnets — sonnets appear in his plays Henry V, Love’s Labor Lost, and Romeo and Juliet, but they are dramatic, not lyric, sonnets.) Modern editions vary as the scholars seek the best ways to bring the spelling and punctuation from practices over 400 years ago to today’s readers, and deal with textual problems and printer errors like the obvious one in 146. We do not know if the 1609 sonnets are in the order Shakespeare would have wanted, although many seem to flow from one to the next. An authoritive commentary is by Helen Vendler. Sonnets like number 20 have been used to prove both that Shake speare’s passion for the young man (1-126) was sexual — and that it was not. It need not matter when we consider the spiritual weight of the poems. The lust for the promiscuous dark lady (127-152) certainly seems sexual. (The last two are anacreontic.) Because there is bare mention of the Sonnets for thirty years after their 1609 publication, despite Shakespeare’s fame, I wonder if Shakespeare tried to suppress the Thorpe edition. Shakespeare may have been embarrassed by so full and intimate a record of his mercurial passions; but without any evidence, I like to think that perhaps he hoped that, should others read them, his — and his readers’ — struggles might be redeemed through such ingenious verse. |