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His Non-dramatic Poetry
In his lifetime William Shakespeare himself published, or had
published over his own head but under his name, non-dramatic poetry: the two
early and ambitious narrative poems “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of
Lucrece”, the Sonnets, many occasional verse (some of which is not his, but
which was published as his in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599), “A Lover’s
Complaint” (bound up with the Sonnets, as makeweight) and the celebrated
enigmatic lyric “The Phoenix and the Turtle” (published in Love’s Martyr,
1601), about whose meaning and significance (is it a comic joke, obscene,
deadly serious, what is the “bird of loudest lay”?) there has been little
agreement and, relatively, little commentary. The portmanteau term Poems,
applied to Shakespeare's works, has not usually included the Sonnets - here,
however, the latter are counted as such. In the later seventeenth and
earlier eighteenth centuries comparatively little interest was taken in the
non-dramatic works.
The Ovidian narrative poems “Venus and Adonis” and “The
Rape of Lucrece” were published by the young Shakespeare with a lot of
immediate pleasure and high hopes. Although the two poems show some
effortless charms, it is Sonnets (1609) that are more mature and
deeper - as well as hugely superior in poetic quality.
 Sonnets
was issued under the imprint of Thomas Thorpe. The printing was not only
against the author’s will, but also to his extreme displeasure and possibly
even fear. This sequence is unlike the earlier and more conventional
narrative poems, for it tells various apparently personal sexual and social
affairs. The collection of poems includes 154 short poems composed as
sonnets. These were published, together with a poem called “A Lover’s
Complaint”, in 1609. It seems clear, however, primarily on stylistic
grounds, that many of the sonnets were written well before that date. There
is very little direct evidence in the poems themselves which might point to
a specific date (Sonnet 107 is sometimes held to refer to the coronation of
James I in 1603), and we have no independent authorities to help us with the
dates of composition. The range of styles and attitudes explored in the
poems suggests that some of them must have been written during the so-called
“problem” period (1600-1603), for there is a great similarity between some
of the sonnets and the style of Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. Others seem
much earlier than this.
The
sonnet, as a poetic genre, began in Italy in the
thirteenth century, and, under the later influence of the Italian poet
Petrarch, became internationally popular. Petrarch established the basic
form of the so-called Petrarchan sonnet: 14 lines divided into two clear
parts, an opening octet (8 lines) and a closing sestet (6 lines) with a
fixed rhyme scheme (abbaabba cdecde). Often the octet will pose a problem or
paradox which the sestet will resolve. Petrarch also established the
convention of the sonnet sequence as a series of love poems written by an
adoring lover to an unattainable and unapproachable lady of unsurpassed
beauty. The Petrarchan sonnet convention, in other words, established, not
merely the form of the poem, but also the subject matter.
The sonnet form was brought into English poetry in the 16th
century by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey). They
introduced some modifications in the form, sometimes substituting for the
traditional division into octet and sestet a division into three
quatrains (4 lines each) and a closing
couplet, with a different
(but still tightly controlled) rhyme scheme. This form later became known as
the Shakespearean Sonnet, named after its greatest practitioner. Shakespeare
uses both the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean structure in his sonnets. By
Shakespeare’s time the sonnet sequence was a very well established literary
convention.
The Petrarchan convention of love (a despairing lover writing
to a lovely, unattainable lady in words of reverent praise and worshipful
adoration) gave rise, as all really popular conventions do, to its opposite,
an anti-Petrarchan convention, in which the woman to whom the poem was
addressed was castigated as a deceitful and often ugly manipulator. In other
words, the sonnet form developed as subject matter both the faithful
adoration of the idealized female lover and the spiteful contempt for a
person entirely unworthy of love (which was a continuation of a very old
misogynist tradition in European literature).
An important part of the sonnet convention was often a
celebration of the poet’s “wit”, that is, of his ability to show his poetic
skill in appropriating metaphors and conceits (extended metaphors) in clever
ways, so that the poem becomes, not just a tribute to the lady but also a
testament to his great skill as a poet. Hence, the sonnet convention often
encouraged a highly artificial and very literary treatment of feelings of
love. One of the most remarkable features of many of Shakespeare’s best
sonnets is the way his language transforms this frequently artificial and
conventional form of literature into something direct, urgent, and sincerely
passionate.
The precise order of the poems in Shakespeare’s sonnet
sequence has occasioned some scholarly dispute, although there is, in
general, widespread agreement with a more or less standard order.
Conventionally the sonnets fall into three clear groupings: Sonnets 1-126
are addressed to or concern a young man; Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to or
concern a dark lady (dark in the sense of her hair, her facial features, and
her character), and Sonnets 153-154 are fairly free adaptations of two
classical Greek poems.
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