I do not think I need labour this point further; as I have already noticed, Orsino, the Duke of “Twelfth Night,” sums up Shakespeare's philosophy of love in the words:
“Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”—
Shakespeare told us the truth about himself when he wrote in sonnet 142, “Love is my sin.” We can expect from him new words or a new method in the painting of passionate desire.
The second peculiarity of Shakespeare which we must establish firmly in our minds before we attempt to construe the sonnets is his extraordinary snobbishness.
English snobbishness is like a London fog, intenser than can be found in any other country; it is so extravagant, indeed, that it seems different in kind. One instance of this: when Mr. Gladstone was being examined once in a case, he was asked by counsel, Was he a friend of a certain lord? Instead of answering simply that he was, he replied that he did not think it right to say he was a friend of so great a noble: “he had the honour of his acquaintance.” Only in England would the man who could make noblemen at will be found bowing before them with this humility of soul.
In Shakespeare's time English snobbishness was stronger than it is to-day; it was then supported by law and enforced by penalties. To speak of a lord without his title was regarded as defamation, and was punished as such more than once by the Star Chamber. Shakespeare's position, too, explains how this native snobbishness in him was heightened to flunkeyism. He was an aristocrat born, as we have seen, and felt in himself a kinship for the courtesies, chivalries, and generosities of aristocratic life. This tendency was accentuated by his calling. The middle class, already steeped in Puritanism, looked upon the theatre as scarcely better than the brothel, and showed their contempt for the players in a thousand ways. The groundlings and common people, with their “greasy caps” and “stinking breath” were as loathsome to Shakespeare as the crop-headed, gain-loving citizens who condemned him and his like pitilessly. He was thrown back, therefore, upon the young noblemen who had read the classics and loved the arts. His works show how he admires them. He could paint you Bassanio or Benedick or Mercutio to the life. Everybody has noticed the predilection with which he lends such characters his own poetic spirit and charm. His lower orders are all food for comedy or farce: he will not treat them seriously.
His snobbishness carries him to astounding lengths. One instance: every capable critic has been astonished by the extraordinary fidelity to fact he shows in his historical plays; he often takes whole pages of an earlier play or of Plutarch, and merely varying the language uses them in his drama. He is punctiliously careful to set down the fact, whatever it may be, and explain it, even when it troubles the flow of his story; but as soon as the fact comes into conflict with his respect for dignitaries, he loses his nice conscience. He tells us of Agincourt without ever mentioning the fact that the English bowmen won the battle; he had the truth before him; the chronicler from whom he took the story vouched for the fact; but Shakespeare preferred to ascribe the victory to Henry and his lords. Shakespeare loved a lord with a passionate admiration, and when he paints himself it is usually as a duke or prince.
Holding these truths in our mind, Shakespeare's intense sensitiveness and sensuality, and his almost inconceivable snobbishness, we may now take up the sonnets.
The first thing that strikes one in the sonnets is the fact that, though a hundred and twenty-five of them are devoted to a young man, and Shakespeare's affection for him, and only twenty-six to the woman, every one of those to the woman is characterized by a terrible veracity of passion, whereas those addressed to the youth are rather conventional than convincing. He pictures the woman to the life; strong, proud, with dark eyes and hair, pale complexion—a wanton with the rare power of carrying off even a wanton's shame. He finds a method new to literature to describe her. He will have no poetic exaggeration; snow is whiter than her breasts; violets sweeter than her breath:
“And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.”