The Sonnets (Barnes & Noble Edition)

By William Shakespeare and Robert Thomas Fallon

Shakespeare’s sonnets are love poems that explore the joy, the pain, the regret, and the transience of this most volatile of human sentiments. Readers will find that the sonnets mirror their own romantic experiences, as Shakespeare gives words to the feelings we have all felt at one time or another.  First published in 1609, the sonnets still evoke romance and passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428089

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest playwright the world has seen. He produced an astonishing amount of work; 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and 5 poems. He died on 23rd April 1616, aged 52, and was buried in the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.

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INTRODUCTION

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS ARE LOVE POEMS THAT EXPLORE the joy, the pain, the regret, and the transience of this most volatile of human sentiments:

Some of the poems evoke love’s joy, others its despair.

Some decry the cruelty, others the waste, of unrequited love.

Some mourn lost love, others exult in the new.

Some refer to rival poets, others to rival suitors.

Some are addressed to a young man, at times encouraging him to marry, at others praising his youth and beauty, and at yet others complaining of his inconstancy and cold indifference.

Some are composed to a dark Lady, so called because of her swarthy complexion and black hair.

Some express fear of high passion, others revel in it.

Some dwell on the ravages of time upon the radiant glow of a young lover, declaring the poet’s devotion an ageless constant, others proclaim the lines of the poem itself an assurance of eternal youth.

Shakespeare’s sonnets first appeared as a quarto edition in 1609—a quarto was a small book about the size of a modern trade paperback. It is generally agreed, however, that the poet had nothing to do with the publication. There were no copyright laws in those days and a printer could reproduce any work he could get his hands on. Indeed, half of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in quartos during his career, none of them apparently with his approval or to his profit.

The 1609 edition is a bit of a puzzle. It appears that Shakespeare composed the sonnets some ten to fifteen years earlier. The first recorded recognition of the poems was a remark by a Francis Meyers in 1598, praising the sugared sonnets passed around in manuscript among his private friends, and two of them appeared the following year in a miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrime. So everything we know points to the conclusion that the sonnets were composed during the mid-1590s, when Shakespeare was in his early thirties. One must wonder why they were not published until so many years later.

Equally puzzling is the aforementioned evidence that the poet played no part in the publication of his sonnets, raising the question as to how they came into the possession of the printer. A short dedication in the opening pages of the book seems to raise more questions than it answers: To the only begetter of the ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H. It is signed T. T., identified as Thomas Thorpe, a well-known printer at the time. How the sonnets came into his possession is unknown, as is the identity of W. H. If we interpret the begetter not as the poet himself but as the source or the inspiration of the sonnets, we are offered some suggestive possibilities.

The most plausible proposal for the identity of W. H. takes us back to the sonnets themselves. Of the 154 poems in the collection, numbers 1-126 are addressed to a young man, 127-154 to the so-called dark lady (the 1609 quarto numbered them conveniently and they have been so identified ever since). Aside from the questions raised by the fact that Shakespeare addressed some of the most passionate love poems in the English language to another man, it is widely believed that the inspiration for these sonnets was Henry Wriothesley (pronounced Rizley), the Earl of Southampton. If so, it is unclear why the begetter, is W. H. and not H. W. and why an earl is addressed as Mr. It has been suggested that since gentlemen of the time considered it beneath their dignity to engage in any activity as common as publication, Thorpe inverted the initials to avoid embarrassing Wriothesley but cleverly kept them so that the earl could be properly acknowledged.

A sonnet is a highly structured poem, and it is helpful to our enjoyment of any work or activity if we are familiar with that structure from the outset. Modern poets tend to find conformity to a traditional design unnecessarily confining to the creative spirit, but such was not the case in Shakespeare’s time. Poets of his day felt that form was an integral part of meaning and were accustomed to compose in an established tradition. In doing so, they invited comparison to their renowned predecessors as well as their contemporary rivals, whose art they sought to match or surpass. The first edition of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost appeared in ten books, but he revised it for the second in twelve, again inviting comparison to the twenty-four of Homer’s Iliad and the twelve of Virgil’s Aeneid, thereby declaring himself the English heir to their fame. Practical matters as well determined the length and scope of a work. Shakespeare himself acknowledged that he was restrained by his audiences’ impatience with a play longer than a two hours’ traffic o’our stage.

A familiarity with the form, structure, and length of the sonnet, therefore, is critical to our appreciation of these poems, providing us with a frame of reference, a place to stand, in experiencing their art. Briefly, a sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines, each of which consists of ten syllables. A musical rhythm is achieved by accenting every other syllable in a line starting with the second, as in "That time of year thou mayst in me behold, a meter referred to as iambic pentameter. A musical sound is achieved by adherence to a regular rhyme scheme, described in an alphabetical shorthand as ABAB CDCD," indicating that the final syllable of line 1 is echoed by the one in line 3, that of line 2 in line 4, and so forth, as in:

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 ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

(Sonnet 73, punctuation and spelling are modernized)

The rhyme scheme of sonnets in fact comes in two varieties. The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch is said to have been the first to compose in the sonnet form in a series of poems lamenting the indifference of an unresponsive Laura. His rhyme scheme divided the poem’s fourteen lines into two parts of eight, the octave, and six, the sestet, or in the aforementioned shorthand, ABBA ABBA CDE CDE (though the sestet could vary, e.g., CDCD EE). This division lent itself to a variety of rhetorical patterns, a question and answer, for example, an assertion followed by a denial, or something in the order of on the one hand, on the other. Hence, line 9 of the poem often began with but, yet, or so, indicating an alternative, or turn, to the sentiment