222 SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS
In the closing lines of No. 151, the
poet leaves no doubt about what
part of the body he means by
“flesh”: “Proud of this prize, / He is
contented thy poor drudge to be, /
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy
side. / No want of conscience hold it
that I call / Her ‘love’ for whose dear
love I rise and fall.”
Reputation
Unlike the narrative poems Venus
and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece, the sonnets were not a
publishing success, and the 1609
edition was not reprinted. The
sonnets (like the other poems)
were not included in the First Folio
of 1623. They did not appear inprint again until 1640, in a book
published by John Benson that
omits eight of them, changes their
order, alters pronouns in three of
them so that they appear to refer to
a woman rather than to a boy or a
man, mangles others, gives some
of them titles such as “An Invitation
to Marriage” and “The Picture of
True Love,” and adds poems by
other writers. After this, the sonnets
were largely ignored for close to
150 years, with the result that critics
such as John Dryden, Alexander
Pope, and Samuel Johnson have
nothing to say about them.
Only in the late 18th century
did the sonnets come back
into circulation. The English
Romantic poet-critics John Keats
and William Wordsworth both took
the sonnets seriously and were
influenced by them in their own
work. Keats is said to have kept a
bust of Shakespeare next to his
desk for inspiration. In a letter to the
painter Benjamin Robert Haydon,
dated May 10, 1817, Keats wrote:Painted between 1595 and 1610,
the Cobbe Portrait is believed to be the
only image of Shakespeare drawn from
life. It was probably commissioned by
his patron and muse Henry Wriothesley.He was naturally learned;
he needed not the spectacles
of books to read nature.
He looked inwards, and
found her there.
John Dryden
(1631–1700)