Shakespeare and sonnet form

In this essay I consider some of the uses to which Shakespeare put the literary form of the sonnet along with the component parts into which it can be divided – the iambic pentameter line, the quatrain, the sestet, and the rhyming couplet – both in his plays and in independent poems. From this I go on to offer a fresh consideration of the sonnets by Shakespeare published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609, Shakespeares sonnets Neuer before imprinted, with special emphasis on those printed in the earlier part of the volume, often referred to as ‘the young man sonnets’. ¹

I start with the plays. It's a remarkable fact that almost all plays written in England and in the English language for the public theatres, which opened in the later years of the sixteenth century, up to the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, were composed at least partly in verse, usually blank verse, with occasional excursions into rhyme and lyric measures for passages such as prologues, epilogues, inset plays, and songs. (The major exceptions are George Gascoigne's Supposes, of 1566, which is a prose translation from the Italian, and the prose comedies of John Lyly, written during the 1580s.) No wonder that playwrights were often referred to simply as ‘poets’. Thus, for example, three of Shakespeare's plays – 3 Henry VI, King John, and Richard II – along with the collaborative Edward III, only recently admitted to the canon, are written entirely in verse, and there is very little prose in the early history plays in general – 1 Henry VI has a scrap – a proclamation spoken by the Mayor of London's Officer in 1.5 – and in Richard III prose is used only for the Duke of Clarence's murderers, in 1.4 – and even they speak in verse when addressing their aristocratic victim. ² It's as if the dignity of verse was felt to be especially appropriate for plays involving many royal and aristocratic characters.

As time went on prose came increasingly to be intermingled with verse, especially for comic, villainous, and low-life characters. Shakespeare uses prose in his comedies from the start of his career, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and it figures importantly in the later history plays, in for example the Falstaff scenes in 1 and 2 Henry IV, and becomes an increasingly expressive medium for all genres of plays throughout Shakespeare's later career. But at every stage, right through to the late romances and the final collaborations, the blank verse line known as the iambic pentameter, made up of five iambs, or alternating unstressed and stressed syllables, is the staple verse unit for his plays as also for those of his contemporaries and immediate successors.

The iambic pentameter is also the staple verse unit of the form of the sonnet that was developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the Italian poets Dante and Petrarch. Chaucer translated one of Petrarch's sonnets in his narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde, written probably in the 1380s, without adhering exactly to the Italian form, which was not imported into England until 150 years later, in Henry Tottel's immensely popular collection Songes and Sonettes Written By the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt the Elder and others. Popularly known as Tottel's Miscellany, and first published in 1557, this volume, frequently reprinted, is responsible for the subsequent popularity of sonnet form especially in the 1590s, when no fewer than seventeen sequences of sonnets – some of them interspersed with poems in other forms – reached publication between 1591 and 1597. Shakespeare refers directly to Tottel's anthology in The Merry Wives of Windsor when the gauchely inexperienced young Abraham Slender wishes he had it to hand as help in his wooing of Anne Page: ‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of songs and sonnets here’, he says (1.1.181–2).

In standard sonnet form the iambic pentameter almost invariably forms part of a sequence of fourteen rhyming lines arranged in three four-line units – quatrains, rhyming abab, cdcd, efef, followed by a closing couplet rhyming gg. An example of the four-line unit is the opening of Sonnet 1 in Shakespeare's 1609 collection: 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.

Typically, in a regular sonnet the closing lines form a sestet made up of a quatrain with alternate rhymes followed by a couplet – in Sonnet 1, 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.

These six-line units can themselves form the basis of individual stanzas for longer poems. Thus Shakespeare's narrative poem Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, two years after the posthumous publication of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella inaugurated the intensely popular if short-lived vogue for sonnet sequences, is made up of 199 six-line stanzas, or sestets. The Rape of Lucrece, published in the following year, also uses the iambic pentameter as its basic verse unit, though here the verse stanza is the seven-line unit known as rhyme royal which had been introduced into English in the fourteenth century by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Foules.

It is perhaps significant that Shakespeare wrote those narrative poems during the early 1590s when the sonnet vogue was at its height, and when he was writing (though not publishing) many of his sonnets. And the rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter with which the sonnet form concludes can itself form an independent unit of verse. The highly stylised tragedy of Richard II, for example, employs numerous couplets in its verse structures, and throughout his career Shakespeare frequently uses a couplet to round off a blank verse scene: ‘Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell’ (Macbeth, 2.1.63–4).

It is perhaps a little surprising that Shakespeare used stanza form, with its repeated closing couplets, in all his narrative poems – Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and A Lover's Complaint – surprising, because it enforces a momentary hiccough in the narrative after every stanza. Venus and Adonis, for example, a poem of 1194 lines, breaks up into 199 six-line units, which might seem unconducive to continuous reading. In his plays, on the other hand, and more predictably, he uses blank verse for continuous narratives such as Egeon's long autobiographical narrative in The Comedy of Errors (1.1.31–139) – spoken ironically after he has been invited to ‘say in brief the cause’ of his travels – and for many other passages of story-telling written throughout his career, such as Friar Laurence's 40-line account of the events leading up to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.228–67), Hotspur's satirical portrait of the dandyish lord on the battlefield (1 Henry IV, 1.3.28–68), Hamlet's father's story of his murder (Hamlet, 1.5.42–79), Othello's of his wooing of Desdemona (Othello, 1.3.75–94), and Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra in her barge (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.197–233). And of course Milton's Paradise Lost, first published in 1667 (in its 10-book version), is conspicuous among many later narrative poems to be written throughout in blank verse.

It is clear, then, that Shakespeare found the fourteen-line sonnet form made popular by Tottel's Miscellany highly congenial both in its entirety and in the distinct units into which it can be broken up. It is, as it were, a kind of vessel into which he can pour a great variety of thoughts, helping him to articulate a wide range of emotions, to conduct arguments with himself, and to give memorable verbal expression to states of mind that could be articulated only through the subtleties afforded by the more-than-rational medium of poetry. He made frequent use of it both in the poems published in the 1609 volume and also, sometimes in modified form, in a number of his plays. In All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, published in 2020, Paul Edmondson and I gather together both the sonnets that appeared in 1609 and the passages in sonnet form, or closely related to and dependent upon that form, from his plays, and arrange them so far as is possible in the order in which they were written. ³ (We are largely dependent on the studies of MacDonald P. Jackson for the chronology.) In my view this enterprise could facilitate a fresh appreciation of the significance that sonnet form, both in its entirety and in the component parts into which it can be divided, had for Shakespeare throughout his career.

It would be good to try to explore the diversity of the aims and achievements of all the sonnets in the 1609 collection. But so comprehensive an investigation is beyond the scope of this essay. In what follows I try first to demonstrate the fallaciousness of the commonly expressed view that the sonnets of 1609 form a continuous sequence, and especially that the first 126 are addressed to a particular young man while the remainder concern a specific so-called ‘dark lady’ (a phrase that does not occur in Shakespeare). And in my closing paragraphs I concentrate on the first seventeen poems in the collection, the ones that are often regarded as Shakespeare's attempts to persuade a young man to marry and to beget children.

The sonnets in the 1609 volume are printed consecutively, without a break, but the fact that No. 126 is not in regular sonnet form – it is made up of six rhyming couplets – and that it is the last to be indisputably addressed to a male – it begins ‘O thou my lovely boy’ – has encouraged the idea, going back to the work of Edmond Malone in the late eighteenth century, that the first 126 are all addressed to a specific young man, and that the remainder (except for the last two) refer to a specific so-called ‘dark lady’. This idea has been constantly repeated over the years, and continues to be propagated even in apparently authoritative resources to the present day. Thus, to give just a few examples out of the many that could be cited, the current Wikipedia entry for Shakespeare's sonnets says straightforwardly: ‘The first 126 are addressed to a young man; the last 28 are either addressed to, or refer to, a woman’. The British Library website is only marginally less misleading: ‘Sonnets 1 to 126 seem to be addressed to a young man, socially superior to the speaker. Sonnets 127 to 152 seem to be addressed to a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespearean legend’. And the Introduction to the Sonnets in the Norton edition of the Complete Works (second edition, 2008), of which Stephen Greenblatt is the General Editor, says: ‘Sonnets 1–126 recount the speaker's idealized, sometimes painful love for a femininely beautiful, well-born male youth; 127–152 his unidealized, ultimately bitter affair with a darkly attractive, unaristocratic ‘mistress’‘. Astonishingly, use of the word ‘recount’ makes the collection seem like a continuous narrative. It is absurd to say that the sonnets as a whole ‘recount’ anything. These statements are based not on reading of the collection, but on memories of what other writers have mistakenly said about it.

The last two sources that I quoted both omit Sonnets 153 and 154 from their generalisation. These two final, and clearly anomalous, poems differ in subject matter (though not in form) from all the other poems in the volume. Each is a narrative poem, telling the same story in slightly different form. Both poems are based ultimately on a six-line Greek poem written by an obscure poet of the fifth or sixth century CE known as Marianus Scholasticus. This poem circulated in manuscript and finally reached print in Florence in 1494. A Latin version appeared in 1603. No-one has been able to discover how Shakespeare came across it, or in what language he read it. Not until 1941 was it shown that 153 is a revised version of 154 – in other words that the 1609 volume prints them in reverse order of composition. ⁴ Except that they are in regular sonnet form, these two poems bear no obvious relationship to the other poems in the collection. Both of them are narratives which focus on the classical god Cupid, and playfully detail desire and longing.

Why, it is natural to ask, should Shakespeare, at any stage of his career, have wanted to pass his precious time in making two different versions of an obscure classical poem? It is, I suppose, conceivable that they are not by Shakespeare. The authorship of ‘A Lover's Complaint’, the long poem that follows directly after them in the 1609 volume – though with a separate heading and re-attribution of authorship to William Shakespeare – has nevertheless often been doubted. But if Sonnets 153 and 154 are by Shakespeare, it seems to me that the most likely explanation for their anomalous status, and for the fact that one of them revises the other, is that they are exercises in translation written by a conscientious and talented schoolboy – as Shakespeare obviously was in his early days. I find it possible to imagine him as a diligent sixth-former writing Sonnet 154 and offering it to his schoolmaster for scrutiny, receiving criticism of his handling of it, and as a consequence having another go at it. It is on this hypothesis that in All the Sonnets of Shakespeare we move these two sonnets from the end to the beginning of the collection, and print them in reverse order.

It seems to me that the basic reason for the fundamentally mistaken notion that the first-printed 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man and that 127 to 152 are either addressed to, or refer to, a woman results from the supposition that Shakespeare was trying to compose a sonnet sequence analogous to those by other writers published between 1591 and 1597. Almost all of those sequences are indeed addressed to a particular if sometimes idealised woman, who is given a fictionalised pseudonym such as Diana, Fidessa, Parthenope, Licia, Celia, Cynthia, and so on. These sequences are all much shorter than the Shakespeare collection – the longest is Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, made up of 108 sonnets (as opposed to 154 in the Shakespeare collection) along with eleven poems described as ‘songs’. All these sequences are relatively uniform in tone and in purpose. All but one of them, it is important to note, address a woman, who is named in many of them. The name ‘Stella’, for instance, occurs 14 times in the first 20 sonnets of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. The only name that occurs in any of Shakespeare's sonnets is his own – Will – which comes in the last of a group of sonnets in which the poet expresses anguish at the fact that both he and his friend are in thrall to a woman ‘coloured ill’. ‘Beshrew that heart’, he writes, ‘that makes my heart to groan / For that deep wound it gives my friend and me. / Is't not enough to torture me alone / But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be?’ (133). In Sonnet 135 the word ‘will’ in a wide range of senses occurs as many as 13 times, and seven times in 136, culminating with ‘my name is Will.’

Shakespeare's collection is far more diverse than any of the others. It is more properly regarded as a sonnet miscellany than as a sequence. It includes, as I have said, the two classical translations from Marianus Scholasticus. It includes (as was first pointed out as recently as 1971, by Andrew Gurr) ⁵ a wooing sonnet, No. 145, composed in octosyllabics instead of the usual decasyllabics and clearly addressed to Anne Hathaway, whose name is punned upon in the couplet – ‘I hate from hate away she threw, / And saved my life, saying not you’. This must date from no later than 1582, when Shakespeare married Anne. The collection includes a religious meditation – No. 146, beginning ‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth’ – which has no relation to the rest of the collection, and is Shakespeare's only explicitly religious poem (except perhaps for ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’). It also includes two sonnet letters, or epistles. One of these, No. 26, begins ‘Lord of my love’ – does that mean the addressee is an aristocrat? It continues ‘To whom I send this written ambassage / To witness duty, not to show my wit’. Yet, in spite of this apparent subservience, this is a love poem: its final couplet reads ‘Then may I boast how I do love thee, / Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me’. (The word ‘boast’ may also imply a sense of social inferiority.) The other sonnet-letter is No. 77, which begins: Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste, The vacant leaves [of the notebook that the poem accompanies] thy mind's imprint will bear And of this book this learning mayst thou taste.

Edmond Malone, as long ago as 1790, pointed out that the content of this poem resembles that of Shakespeare's dedicatory epistle addressed to the Earl of Southampton in The Rape of Lucrece of 1594. But the sonnet itself was identified as an epistle only as recently as 2019 when Adam Barker, in an article published in Notes and Queries, pointed out that the phrase ‘waste blanks’ refers to the pages in an almanac left blank for the owner to use for memoranda. ⁶

In some of the poems Shakespeare exposes and explores his personal inner life with a self-lacerating rigour and intensity as unsparing as that with which he anatomises the passions and portrays the anguished dilemmas of Timon of Athens or King Lear. No. 129, beginning ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action’, is as soul-searching an investigation of the self as any of Hamlet's soliloquies. No. 144, beginning ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, is an anguished meditation in which the poet declares his love simultaneously for ‘a woman coloured ill’ – is she dark of skin or dark of hair? – who is his ‘worser spirit’, and for a ‘man right fair’ whose ‘purity’ the woman is wooing, trying to ‘corrupt’ his saint ‘to be a devil’. It is a declaration of reluctant bisexuality, as anguished as a confession elicited from a patient in a psychiatrist's chair. The biographical implications of these poems have been inadequately recognised and explored. If we suppose – as I think we must – that the poetical voice is the voice of Shakespeare himself, the natural inference is that he, a married man, is nevertheless in love with both a woman who is not his wife and with another man (or boy, or youth).

Some of the sonnets fall naturally into groups, or what we might call mini-sequences. Nos 50 and 51, for example, are both written, as it were, on horseback: in the former the poet's horse ‘plods dully on … As if by some instinct the wretch did know / His rider loved not speed being made from thee’; but then in No. 51 the horse carries its bearer ‘in wingèd speed’ because it is unable to ‘keep pace’ with its bearer's desire as he returns to the loved one. Shakespeare must have made many long journeys on horseback between Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Longer groups linked by subject matter include Nos 78 to 86, which are about other poets writing about the loved one (the so-called ‘rival poet’ sonnets), and 118 to 120, about sickness in love. ⁷

Critics have often disagreed about whether the sonnets are genuinely autobiographical or whether they are as it were literary exercises. The dispute is crystallised in the variant attitudes of William Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Robert Browning on the other. ‘With this same key’, wrote Wordsworth, ‘Shakespeare unlocked his heart’. ‘Did Shakespeare?’, responded Browning. ‘If so, the less Shakespeare he!’ It is sometimes suggested that Shakespeare may have written some of the sonnets as sketches for speeches in unwritten plays. John Carey, for example, in A Little History of Poetry, writes ‘Shakespeare was a playwright. He spent his life making up speeches for imaginary people, and that is what these [he's writing specifically of Sonnets 29, 30, 33 and 71] probably are’. ⁸ But this attitude seems to me to be simply an evasion, a way of escaping from the biographical implications of poems that fail to fit the critic's image of what Shakespeare should have been like.

Many of the sonnets, far from being conventional love poems, betray concern, even anxiety, about the death both of the loved one and of the poet himself. This is a recurrent theme in the first seventeen poems, which form the longest group of interrelated sonnets in the collection. They are all addressed to a young man, who is urged to defy death by begetting a son. I think the fact that these poems open the collection – even though studies of chronology indicate that they are not the first to be composed – has had much to do with the misapprehension that all the poems in the earlier part of the 1609 volume – those numbered from 1 to 126 – are addressed to a young man with whom the poet is in love and whom he is urging to marry. It is as if commentators had read only these poems and assumed that they set the tone for the entire collection.

There is only one sonneteer of the period other than Shakespeare who addresses a male beloved in erotic terms. That is Richard Barnfield, best remembered for his much anthologised sonnet beginning ‘If music and sweet poetry agree’, addressed to a friend cryptically referred to as ‘Master R. L’. ⁹ Barnfield occupies an interestingly enigmatic position in relation to the sonnet tradition in general and to Shakespeare's place in it in particular. Born into a well-off family in 1574 (and thus ten years younger than Shakespeare), he was one of the elder poet's earliest admirers and imitators. He was also a great admirer of Christopher Marlowe, to whom be refers curiously, in his collection called Greene's Funerals, as ‘Malta's poet’ (Sonnet IX) – presumably in allusion to his popular play The Jew of Malta. In his sequence of poems called The Affectionate Shepherd to his Love, published in 1594, Barnfield echoes both Venus and Adonis, which had appeared in the previous year, and The Rape of Lucrece, of the same year. Clearly he had bought them hot off the press. And he expressed his admiration for their author directly four years later in a sonnet which gives us what may be our first direct mention of Shakespeare in print. (The other possibility is Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, of the same year.) Headed ‘A Remembrance of Some English Poets’ and published in his book Poems in Divers Humours of 1598, this poem pays explicit tribute in its first quatrain to Edmund Spenser, in its second to Samuel Daniel, and in its third to Michael Drayton, all of whom had published sonnet sequences by this date. Its final stanza reads: And Shakespeare, thou, whose honey-flowing vein, Pleasing the world, thy praises doth obtain, Whose Venus and whose Lucrece – sweet and chaste – Thy name in Fame's immortal book have placed – Live ever you, at least in Fame live ever: Well may the body die, but Fame dies never. ¹⁰

It is interesting to find Shakespeare, whose only sonnets published by this date were those included in the collaborative and anonymously published plays Edward III and Romeo and Juliet (which reached print in 1596 and 1597 respectively), in the company of three eminent sonneteers. Did Barnfield know that Shakespeare wrote non-dramatic sonnets? And it was in the same year – 1598 – that Barnfield's poem appeared that his friend Francis Meres gave us the first mention of Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets, when he referred tantalizingly in his literary treatise Palladis Tamia to ‘Shakespeare's sugared sonnets among his private friends’. ¹¹ Interestingly, Barnfield had used the phrase ‘sugared sonnets’ in a poem published four year earlier, in Greene's Funerals (Sonnet 9, the same in which he refers to Marlowe). I haven't come across it anywhere else. It is singularly inappropriate for many of the 1609 sonnets.

Barnfield's short book The Tears of An Affectionate Shepherd sick for Love, or The Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganymede, published in 1594, is a homoerotic poem of considerable charm written in rhymed sestets in which Daphnis attempts to seduce Ganymede with the offer of numerous pleasures, rather in the manner of Marlowe's ‘Come live with me and be my love’. Barnfield writes, for instance, If it be sin to love a sweet-faced boy, Whose amber locks trussed up in golden trammels Dangle adown his lovely cheeks with joy When pearl and flowers his fair hair enamels, If it be sin to love a lovely lad O then sin I, for whom my soul is sad. ¹²

Towards the end of Affectionate Shepherd the poet addresses his beloved with a clear expression of sexual desire also written in the form of a sestet: When will my May come that I may embrace thee? When will the hour be of my soul's joying? Why does thou seek in mirth still to disgrace me, Whose mirth's my health, whose grief's my heart's annoying? Thy bane my bale, thy bliss my blessedness, Thy ill my hell, thy weal my welfare is. ¹³

Affectionate Shepherd got its author into trouble with unidentified contemporary critics. In the introductory epistle to his sonnet sequence Cynthia, published in the following year, 1595, Barnfield tries to wriggle out of the charge of having written a poem ‘about the love of a shepherd to a boy’ on the somewhat specious grounds that it is an imitation of an eclogue by Virgil. ¹⁴ This is true but irrelevant.

Cynthia is not included in the 1904 anthology of seventeen sonnet sequences edited by Sir Sidney Lee, on which many readers still rely for their knowledge of the genre. No doubt he omitted it because, in spite of the gender of the person nominally addressed, it is homosexual in content. Here, by way of illustration, is one of Barnfield's numerous unabashedly and cheerfully homoerotic poems, Sonnet 8: Sometimes I wish that I his pillow were, So might I steal a kiss, and yet not seen, So might I gaze upon his sleeping eyne, Although I did it with a panting fear: But when I well consider how vain my wish is, Ah foolish bees (think I) that do not suck His lips for honey; but poor flowers do pluck Which have no sweet in them: when his sole kisses, Are able to revive a dying soul. Kiss him, but sting him not, for if you do, His angry voice your flying will pursue: But when they hear his tongue, what can control Their back-return? for then they plain may see How honey-combs from his lips dropping be. ¹⁵

I said that Barnfield is the only poet of the period other than Shakespeare to address love poems to a male person – man, or boy, or, as Malvolio says, ‘in standing water between boy and man’ (Twelfth Night, 1.5.154). But Barnfield's tone is very different from Shakespeare's. His poems are coyly sybaritic, self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking. His tone is, not to put too fine a point on it, camp. Shakespeare's is very different: more varied, more serious, more searching, more truly masculine. And he addresses and writes about both male and female love objects.

In All the Sonnets of Shakespeare we identify (somewhat cautiously) fourteen sonnets as being definitely addressed to a male person and another 84 that could be thought of as addressed to either a male or a female. The tone of these poems is very varied. The first seventeen in the 1609 volume are, it is generally agreed, addressed to or concerned with a young man – almost certainly the same young man – whom the poet is advising, or even beseeching, to marry and to beget one or more children – No. 6, somewhat ludicrously, suggests it would be good if the man were to beget ten children – necessarily all boys – who could then each beget another ten with the result that he would have one hundred (male) grandchildren – ‘Ten times thyself were happier than thou art / If ten of thine ten times refigured thee’. One can only hope he was joking. Only two pairs of the first seventeen sonnets – 9 to 10 and 15 to 16 – are syntactically linked and not all of them can even be said on the most stringent criteria to be addressed to a male; but it is not unreasonable to regard them as a group of poems addressed to or concerned with one and the same young man and that the poet (or the poetical persona) is in love with him, but that nevertheless he wishes the young man to marry and to become a father. He is also deeply concerned with the passage of time and with death – both his own death and that of the addressee. The begetting of a child is seen as a way of challenging, if not of defeating death: ‘Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair / To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir’ (Sonnet 6). Clearly, then, the first seventeen sonnets form a subgroup on their own, and it is, I suggest, the longest such subgroup in the entire collection. It is the fact that this group is printed first in the 1609 volume, even though there is every reason to believe that they were not the first in order of composition, that has encouraged generations of readers to suppose that they set the tone for all the poems up to the break at No. 126, signalled by the anomalous form of that sonnet – it is written in rhymed couplets and has only twelve lines. By and large these seventeen poems are wonderfully lyrical and deeply serious in tone, though lightened from time to time with flashes of wit and humour. They suggest a close personal relationship between the poet and the young man, whom the poet refers to as ‘thy sweet self’ (1) and whom he addresses as for example ‘Love’ and ‘dear my love’ (13). It has been suggested that they may have been written to commission from a mother anxious to see her son continue the family line. To my mind this ignores the closely intimate nature of the relationship between poet and person addressed that the poems suggest, and does so in part because the wordplay in some of the poems has either gone unnoticed or been wilfully ignored. In the very first sonnet the poet rebukes the young man for allowing his semen to go to waste instead of using it for propagation: 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.

And in Sonnet 4 the poet accuses him of ‘having traffic’ with himself alone, implying masturbation.

The intimately sexual nature of these lines went for many years either unrecognised or ignored, perhaps out of prudery or embarrassment or sheer ignorance. In 2001 I was invited to write a Preface to a reprint of Eric Partridge's then standard study Shakespeare's Bawdy, first published in 1947. In my Preface I wrote that Partridge ‘was writing at a time when all editions of Shakespeare intended for use in schools were bowdlerized, when editors even of scholarly editions frequently shied away from sexual glosses’. ¹⁶ And I pointed out that even Partridge and later writers on sexual language in Shakespeare such as E. A. Colman in his The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare of 1974 and Frankie Rubinstein in her Dictionary of Sexual Puns and their Significance of 1984 fail to note that ‘bud’ in Sonnet 1 has as its secondary sense ‘the glans of the penis’. ¹⁷ From this it follows that ‘content’ means both ‘that which is contained’ and the ‘contentment’ to be obtained from sexual pleasure. This sense is only obliquely hinted at in the lengthy and learned notes to, for example, John Kerrigan's Penguin edition of 1986 and is not even acknowledged in Greenblatt's Norton edition which I mentioned earlier.

I have discussed this matter in detail because I think it argues strongly against the idea that the first seventeen sonnets are written to commission by a poet with only limited acquaintance with their addressee. This poet must surely have known the young man very well indeed to address him in such sexually intimate terms.

In concluding, let me stress once more that the sonnets of the 1609 collection constitute a miscellany of sporadically interrelated poems rather than a consecutive sequence. A reading of them alert to their diversity shows that Shakespeare found in sonnet form a vehicle for the expression of an extraordinarily wide range of emotions and, in the most personal of these poems, a channel for exploration into the deepest recesses of his psyche. Wordsworth, I suggest, got it right: ‘With this key Shakespeare’ did indeed unlock his heart.