A History of English Literature

men ride’, yet the poet’s illicit relation with her requires mutual pretences of love.
Finally, in sonnet 144, ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, the lovely boy and
the dark woman come together in a sexual union which doubly betrays the poet. The
sequence ends in humiliated revulsion, and is followed by two frigid epigramson
the burns inflicted by Cupid, and also a stanzaic narrative of 329 lines,A Lover’s
Complaint, now generally accepted as Shakespeare’s, and part of the design of the
Sonnets volume. In it, a shepherdess complains of being seduced and abandoned by
a young man of extraordinary beauty and eloquence. This anti-idyll clarifies the
design and the theme of the Sonnets, for the ‘Lover’ is the château-bottled seducer of
1–126,as experienced by one of his victims.
The volume has, then, four main personae: the lovely boy, the dark woman, the
poet and the ruined maid. The volume explores love unsatisfied. Neither of the
poet’s loves can be satisfied: the worship of the young man, because he is a man; the
love of the woman, because it is lust.A Lover’s Complaintshows the predatory nature
of sexual desire, a theme of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poems. The ‘Complaint’
completes the sequence in so schematic a way as to disable simple biographical inter-
pretations. Neither of the poet’s loves has the normal end of sexual love, the procre-
ation of children. Yet this unspoken orthodoxy makes sense of the insistent advice to
‘breed’ with which the sequence opens: ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’
(Sonnet 1, line 1). But there is no increase, there are no children.
Shake-speares Sonnets is a puzzling volume, and at first the series seems less than
the sum of its parts; but the truth lies in the other direction. The Sonnets imply a
story both complex and unhappy. This surprises those who know the anthology
pieces – love’s sensuous appeal in ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ (18); the
noble sentiments of ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ (116); the emotion
of ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’ (30); the grandeur of ‘Like as the
waves make toward the pebbled shore’ (60); the melancholy of 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves or none or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

The appeal of such poems is not to be denied; compared with other sonneteers,
Shakespeare writes a mightier line in a simpler rhyme-scheme, giving a more
dramatic delivery. But these excessively beautiful poems, taken together, are rich not
only in art and expression, but also in dramatic intelligence. Their generous idealism
is gradually penetrated by a dismayed understanding of love’s illusions.
Sonnet 73 ends: ‘This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong / To
love that well which thou must leave ere long.’ This compliments the young man for
co ntinuing to cherish the ageing poet. But this courteous acknowledgement of
inequalities in age, rank and love also recognizes that such kind attentions cannot
last. The end conceals a reproach: ‘well’ may be a play on the poet’s name, Will. Two
later sonnets are entirely devoted to plays on ‘Will’ as Desire. Such signatures
encourage us to take the ‘I’, the writer–speaker, as Shakespeare himself; yet the detec-
tives identifying the poet’s loves and the rival poet are all in the dark. The sonnets
move between the poles of autobiography and Sidneian romance. Although
Shakespeare sounds as if he is speaking openly, the relationships are always drama-
tized, and they are menaced by rivalries which remain cryptic. ‘Will’ names itself and
himself, but gives no names to his loves. Sonnet sequences had normally been

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 127

epigram Short sharp

pointed poem.