Shakespeare’s sonnets are rich with profound insights on human life, love, jealousy, resentment, longing, as well as the intense imagery, extended metaphors and impeccable poetic taste that we expect of the bard – and it’s therefore only the most perverse and narrow-sighted goblins who go digging through this pile of gold, garnets, emeralds and other such precious stones for lumps of cloudy quartzite: clues as to the dull doings of a single man’s life. I am such a creature.
What do we know about Shakespeare’s life? A good deal, in fact, compared to how much we know about his middle-class Elizabethan peers. We know his father’s profession, his date of birth, his mother’s name, details of properties he owned as well as those he lived in, of lawsuits he was involved in, his marriage, his children’s names, marriages, dates of birth and death, etc. A good deal more can be surmised about his education, his social circle in London (curiously peopled with Huguenot refugees), and, indeed, what he looked like (we can be fairly confident that the so-called “Chandos” portrait is an accurate rendering). We therefore have no particular need to go leafing through the sonnets for biographical details – especially given the fact that they are not, strictly speaking, about him, but about the addressees: the “Fair Youth” and the “Dark Lady”. Our questions, therefore, are: who were these people? What was Shakespeare’s relationship with them? When were the sonnets written? How did they come to be published? None of these questions are answered directly in the sonnets or elsewhere, so answers must necessarily be speculative and uncertain. Still, I believe that though I lack proof for the forthcoming answers, they nevertheless locate the balance of probability – although I will also indulge in some more idle speculation which serious people are free to ignore.
First thing’s first: are we certain, even, that characters of the sonnets are not just that: characters? Is it not possible that Shakespeare invented them, wrote the sonnets as a purely literary project, and had them published in 1609 in order to make money – poetry was, after all, his job. It is possible, but for centuries now readers of the sonnets have tended towards an epistolary theory: that these are love letters, and failed-love letters, and please-love-me letters, sent to real people with whom Shakespeare was actually (and somewhat cringe-worthily) besotted. I believe the sonnets contain an epistolary smoking gun, essentially ruling out the “literary project” theory, but it must be explained in context so will have to wait. Let’s start at the beginning, and by “the beginning” I mean: sonnets 134 and 135.
Drama! Shakespeare’s lovely and loathsome lady-friend - she of eyes quite unlike the sun - has seduced his little pal; now both, apparently, are utterly in her power. “[T]hou hast both him and me.” In the next sonnet, we have this (reproduced as it appeared in the 1609 quarto; the typology is important here):
“And ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in over-plus.” In fact what we see here is that the Dark Lady has now rejected our poet - he is desperate to be returned her company (a theme which will continue in subsequent sonnets). Shakespeare is punning on his own name (and not, you might notice, the name of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford), but isn’t there something odd about this? He’s begging her to take him back - and yet she has “Will” already (and not only “will”) - indeed, she is “rich in ‘Will’”, to which he begs his own addition. She has “Will”, and yet has rejected “Will” - or what need of the begging? The most natural reading of this, I think, in light of the previous sonnet (“thou hast both him and me”) is that there are two Wills: our Shakespeare, and the friend whom the Dark Lady has seduced.
Let’s turn to the famous dedicatory page of the 1609 quarto, on which page Shakespeare’s own name is conspicuous in its absence:
The most immediate thing that jumps out here is, of course, the masonic cypher which reveals the true identity of William Shakespeare and points to his secret burial place - but if we look a little deeper we might notice that the credit for the sonnets is given to a “Mr. W. H.”, not, as we might expect, Mr. W. S. The dedication was composed by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. So who is Mr. W. H.? Well, if “our ever-living poet” is the poet of the sonnets - which stands to reason - then Mr. W. H. is the person to whom the sonnets promise “eternity”. This is the Fair Youth; the subject and (if the epistolary hypothesis is correct) recipient of the vast majority of the sonnets, and almost certainly the same friend seduced by the Dark Lady - our second “Will”.
Something to bear in mind: when Shakespeare published his two long poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”, the printer he used was Richard Field - almost certainly a life-long friend of the Bard (he grew up in Stratford-on-Avon, a two minute walk from Shakespeare’s childhood home; his father was a tanner, Shakespeare’s a glover, and indeed John Shakespeare once sued Field’s father for recovery of a debt). We know that Shakespeare was involved in the printing of these two poems because their dedicatory pages (in both cases dedicated to the Earl of Southampton) do bear his name. These two volumes bear lavish cover-decorations, and are carefully and precisely set-out. The Sonnets, on the other hand, were printed for Thorpe by George Eld, and he has done a slap-dash job, with very little cover-decoration and lines which sometimes don’t fit, and so words are squeezed onto the line above. It’s highly likely that Shakespeare himself wasn’t involved in the publication (or else why wouldn’t he use Field?), and that the poems were printed without his consent. But how then were they collected? Well, if the epistolary hypothesis is true, there’s only one person guaranteed to have copies: their recipient. The Fair Youth might therefore be called the “begetter of these insuing [sic] sonnets” because he was the one who provided them for publication.
Fourteen years after the publication of the 1609 quarto, Shakespeare’s friends collected together his plays and published them in a folio volume. Here we find another dedication:
William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and his brother were life-long patrons of the arts; in the reign of Charles I they would be prominent members of the Whitehall Group. Here we see a Mr. W. H. associated with Shakespeare whose name is William - explaining the puns in sonnet 135. In 1595 - when William Herbert was fifteen - Henry Carey was trying to convince him to marry his daughter, Elizabeth. Henry Carey was, at the time, Lord Chamberlain - as in, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Lord Chamberlain. He was Shakespeare’s patron.
The first seventeen sonnets of the sequence are slightly odd. Known now as the “procreation” sonnets, they urge the Fair Youth to preserve his beauty by passing it on to children. Sonnet 1 is a fair representation:
So here’s what I think happened: young William Herbert is interested in the arts, attends Shakespeare’s plays, makes the acquaintance of the Bard. Henry Carey, trying to convince the lad to marry his daughter, decides to use this fortuitous circumstance to his advantage, and asks Shakespeare lend his quill to his cause. Shakespeare badgers his young friend with sonnets for this, to begin with, semi-professional reason, but when the whole thing falls through he, besotted with the young man, keeps writing. The sonnets pile up, hymns to the young man’s beauty. This gives us a timeline: Shakespeare must have begun writing the “procreation” sequence around 1595. 103 sonnets dedicated to the boy’s beauty later, we come to:
The poet has known the Youth for three years - and an interesting three years for Shakespeare’s career. William Herbert was known as something of a debauch - his only surviving children were illegitimate; he was known to have had affairs (including with Mary Fitton - misidentified, I believe, as the Dark Lady); he almost certainly contracted syphilis. Is it possible that our poet led the young lad astray? Fevered speculation warning for the following.
In 1597 - bang in the middle of this period of friendship - Henry IV, Part 1 is produced for the first time. It contains what I think might be the most moving scene in all of Shakespeare: Prince Hal is to go and see the King, covered in the shame of his debauched life-style and his inappropriate friendship with the knight-cum-bandit, drunk and whoremonger Sir John Falstaff. In preparation for this meeting, the inhabitants of the Boar’s Head Tavern put on a rehearsal: Falstaff is to play the king, and Hal is to practice his excuses. Falstaff takes the opportunity to pay himself some compliments (“there is virtue in that Falstaff”), and so, in play, the parts are reversed (“Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father.”) Hal, in the part of the king, suggests to Falstaff, in the part of Hal, that the fat knight must be banished from his side. The comedy of the scene turns to sudden pathos when Falstaff, in the prince’s part, begs for the prince’s continued friendship:
Can we see this as a reflection of the relationship between the older, balding, somewhat heavy Shakespeare and the youthful and aristocratic William Herbert? Not with any certainty - it is only possible. But if we do so, our hearts must break again at Hal’s response to Falstaff’s plea: “I do, I will.”
At any rate, whether or not we wish to read so much into Henry IV, Part 1 I think we can be fairly confident (though by no means certain) in the identification of the Fair Youth with William Herbert. Mr. W. H., the other “Will” of sonnet 135, the dedication of the first folio, the abortive courtship of Elizabeth Carey - all are consonant with the hypothesis. Add to this the fact that the sonnets are replete with references to the poet and the Youth’s different social classes: over and over again Shakespeare tells us that the Fair Youth is his social superior and, indeed, patron. Here’s a brief sampling of these sorts of references:
1) In sonnets 25 and 29 Shakespeare refers to his own status as a commoner:
2) In sonnet 78 Shakespeare references his comparatively poor education: “But thou art all my art and dost advance,/ As high as learning, my rude ignorance.”
3) In sonnet 80 he refers to the Rival Poet as a “better spirit” than himself, and also makes a fairly explicit reference to the Fair Youth’s patronage: “your shallowest help will hold me afloat”.
4) Sonnet 89 is very explicit about the Fair Youth’s superior social standing:
5) Sonnet 111 finds Shakespeare apologising for his lack of class:
6) Sonnet 122 contains another reference to patronage: “Thy gift, thy tables”.
There’s much else besides; when Shakespeare is not cloyingly (and brilliantly) praising the Fair Youth’s beauty, he is genuflecting to his high birth.
So, if the Fair Youth is William Herbert (which will be my assumption from now on), who is the Dark Lady?
The answer is: we don’t know. Most proposed candidates are women who may have been slightly dark-complected and who lived in London at the same time as Shakespeare. These candidates cancel each other out; that there is no reason to prefer one over another shows how desperate each of these attempts is. The candidate who has stood out from the crowd is Mary Fitton - Herbert’s mistress in the early 1600s. However, I think there are a number of reasons to reject this:
1) Mary Fitton wasn’t “dark” in skin or hair or eyes.
2) Fitton and Herbert’s affair took place too late if the sonnets were (as I believe - I’ll go into more detail later) written between 1595 and 1599.
3) Mary Fitton was a gentlewoman, but the sequence of events implied by the sonnets is as follows. First, the poet meets and falls in love with the Fair Youth. Second, the poet meets and falls in love with the Dark Lady. Third, the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth meet and the former seduces the latter. Fourth, the poet is rejected by the Dark Lady. The Dark Lady, therefore, ought to be someone from Shakespeare’s world - the taverns and playhouses of London - not from Pembroke’s.
There’s really nothing in the sonnets to identify her - except that Shakespeare did, it seems to me, find her physical darkness remarkable. I don’t think that she was just some passing brunette - he would not be so obsessed over her colouring if she was - but instead someone who was ethnically unusual in Elizabethan London. Alas, we’ll never know if that’s correct, or who she was. But we do know what happened when she broke up with the Bard.
He went a bit mad.
Sonnet 136 continues in the rather pathetic begging mode of 135. Sonnets 137-139 take a slightly grim turn; Shakespeare claims that love has blinded him, that the virtues he saw in the Dark Lady were false. These sonnets can at best be described as back-handed compliments, but it would be more accurate to say they verge on being explicit insults. And then, in sonnet 140, we encounter Shakespeare’s lowest moment. Remember earlier I said I thought the sonnets contained an “epistolary smoking gun” that proves the sonnets were written and sent to real people? This is it:
“Be wise”, my dear. You don’t want to make an enemy of me, do you? I’d better hear from you soon - and it had better be favourable news - or else, who knows, I might start a vicious rumour about you, and you know it will be believed.
This sonnet is an explicit threat. It only makes sense as such, and its place in the sonnets’ sequence explains the writer’s motivation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the original was made of letters cut out from Elizabethan pamphlets and pasted together. It is very, very sinister.
The relationship never recovers. The last part of the sonnets is dark - Shakespeare squirming utterly miserably in unrequited love. In sonnet 142, he’s no longer making threats, but begging for the Lady’s pity. It contains a rather interesting turn of phrase:
“Thy pity may deserve to pitied be.” Sound familiar? It’s the same idea as, “We do pray for mercy,/ And that same prayer doth teach us all to render/ The deeds of mercy[…]”: Portia’s speech (“The quality of mercy…”) in the Merchant of Venice. One wonders if they were written at around the same time - the Merchant of Venice is usually dated to 1597-1598, perhaps the play he wrote next after Henry IV, Part 1.
Sonnet 144 helps us with the dating of the sonnets.
This is exactly where we are in the narrative: Shakespeare has lost his lovers to one another. 144 was published in “The Passionate Pilgrim”, a poet anthology printed in 1599. It must therefore date to before that publication. This implies that, if our 1595 start date for the “procreation” sonnets is correct, and the sonnets are presented in the correct order in the quarto (which I believe they are - the narrative seems to confirm it), then all of them were written in three years or so. Three years is also the amount of time that Shakespeare tells us he has known the Fair Youth in sonnet 104, and since they must have met somewhat before he started on the procreation sonnets, that makes sense.
The final sonnets are full of recriminations and denunciations of false love. In sonnets 149-151, Shakespeare returns, with added sadness, to the tone that characterised the Fair Youth sonnets. All praise; none of the insults or back-handed compliments present in the Dark Lady sonnets. These, I believe, were the last sonnets that he sent to the young William Herbert. Sonnet 152 is one last angry screed against his mistress: “For I have sworn thee fair; more perjur’d I,/ To swear against the truth so foul a lie!”
The last two sonnets of the sequence stand alone: they are Spenserian, full of classical imagery and sexual innuendo. Sonnet 153 is clearly about venereal disease - you’ll recall that William Herbert was thought to have syphilis. Sonnet 154 is a meditation on the indefatigability of Shakespeare’s love for the Dark Lady; despite everything, he is still obsessed.
The portrait Shakespeare paints of himself in the sonnets is not an attractive one. Unfaithful to his wife, he corrupts a young man barely out of childhood. In love he has no restraint, nor even much dignity, and when rejected he became petulant, mean-spirited, needy, and cruel. The sonnets are a record of a morally catastrophic few years of his life, in which he, and his lovers, behaved appallingly. It is all the more amazing, then, that out of the dross and filth of his life he fashioned such beauty and sweetness, whose eternal summer shall not fade.