As a young man, Shakespeare found himself among a crowd of authors, with whom sonnetteering was a literary craze; and it is not surprising that he should follow the fashion. Most of these were probably composed about 1594, when the poet was thirty years old; but in regard to this there is some uncertainty. A few were certainly later. They were not printed in a complete volume until 1609;[[6]] and then they were issued by a piratical publisher, apparently without the author's consent.
In the Shakespearean sonnet the complicated rime scheme of its Italian original has become very much simplified, being reduced to the following form: a, b, a, b; c, d, c, d; e, f, e, f; g, g. This is merely three four-line stanzas with alternate rimes, plus a final couplet. Such a simplified form had already been used by other English authors, from whom our poet borrowed it.
Shakespeare's sonnets, apart from some scattered ones in his plays, are 154[[7]] in number. They are usually divided into two groups or sequences. The first sequence consists of numbers 1-126 (according to the original edition); and most of them are unquestionably addressed to a man. The second sequence contains numbers 127-154, and the majority of these are clearly written to a woman. There are a few in both groups which do not show clearly the sex of the person addressed, and also a few which are not addressed to any one.
Beyond some vague guesses, we have no idea as to the identity of the "dark lady" who inspired most of the last twenty-eight sonnets. Somewhat less uncertainty surrounds the man to whom the poet speaks in the first sequence. A not improbable theory is that he was the Earl of Southampton already mentioned, although this cannot be considered as proved.[[8]] The chief arguments which point to Southampton are: (a) That Shakespeare had already dedicated Venus and Adonis and Lucrece to him; (b) that he was regarded at that time as a patron of poets; (c) that the statements about this unnamed friend, his reluctance to marry, his fair complexion and personal beauty, his mixture of virtues and faults, fit Southampton better than any other man of that period whom we have any cause to associate with Shakespeare; and (d) that he was the only patron of Shakespeare's early years known to us, and was warmly interested in the poet.
The literary value of the different sonnets varies considerably. When an author is writing a fashionable form of verse, he is apt to become more or less imitative and artificial at times, saying things merely because it is the vogue to say them; and Shakespeare here cannot be wholly acquitted of this fault. But at other times he speaks from heart to heart with a depth of real emotion and wealth of vivid expression which has given us some of the noblest poetry in the language.
Another question, more difficult to settle than the literary value of these poems, is their value as a revelation of Shakespeare's own life. If we could take in earnest everything which is said in the sonnets, we should learn a great many facts about the man who wrote them. But modern scholarship seems to feel more and more that we cannot take all their statements literally. We must remember here again that Shakespeare says many things because it was the fashion in his day for sonnetteers to say them. For example, he gives some eloquent descriptions of the woes of old age; but we know that contemporary poets lamented about old age when they had not yet reached years of discretion; and consequently we are not at all convinced that Shakespeare was either really old or prematurely aged. Such considerations need not interfere with our enjoyment of the poetry, for the author's imagination may have made a poetical fancy seem real to him as he wrote; but they certainly do not lessen our doubts in regard to the value of the sonnets as autobiography. The majority of the sonnets, at least, cannot be said to throw any light on Shakespeare's life.
There are, however, six sonnets, connected with each other in subject, which, more definitely than any of the others, shadow forth a real event in the poet's life. These are numbers XL, XLI, XLII, CXXXIII, CXXXIV, CXLIV. They seem to show that a woman whom the poet loved had forsaken him for the man to whom the sonnets are written; and that the poet submits to this, owing to his deep friendship for the man. Two of these sonnets are given below.
SONNET CXLIV