From Shakespeare - with love - CD (audiokniha) The Best of The Sonnets

As with so many of the aspects of Shakespeare’s life, it’s not known exactly when he wrote his sonnets, or for whom, or if they are in any way autobiographical. He may have begun writing them as early as 1593, at the same time as he was writing his epic love-poem Venus and Adonis.

The eroticism found in this poem is echoed in several sonnets, and such titillating verse was very popular at the time. These sonnets are youthful poems, but others are written from the perspective of middle age, and as the sonnets did not appear in print until 1609, when Shakespeare was 45, he may well have been adding to the collection throughout his working life. However, it is debatable whether they reflect Shakespeare’s later poetic style as well as his earliest. The Irish writer and scholar C.S. Lewis once commented: ‘If Shakespeare had taken an hour off from the composition of Lear to write a sonnet, the sonnet might not have been in the style of Lear’. The sonnets were certainly in existence by 1598, when a Cambridge schoolmaster, Francis Meres, compiling a book of celebrated English writers, mentions Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ that had been circulating amongst the author’s friends and colleagues. The following year, two of the ‘sugared sonnets’ appeared in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim, but the remaining 152 hadto wait until their publication in 1609. Might Shakespeare have been reluctant to have the sonnets printed because they were so personal to him? Some of the poems are very open about the poet’s love for another man. Did Shakespeare think they were too explicit for public consumption? The web of autobiography that may, or may not, be threaded through the sonnets tells us nothing specific. Who, for instance, was the young man addressed in the first half of the sonnets? One candidate may be a ‘Mr. W.H.’, to whom the sonnets were dedicated, but it isn’t clear whether he was William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, or Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton (whose initials would have to be reversed to fit the speculation) – both of whom were patrons of Shakespeare. It is also possible that the dedicatee was not Shakespeare’s choice anyway, but that of the printer, Thomas Thorpe, and thus the enigmatic ‘Mr. W.H.’ might have been completely unknown to Shakespeare. Similarly, the notorious dark lady alluded to in Sonnets such as 127 and 130, and the rival poet in Sonnets 80, 83 and 86, cannot be positively identified and are the subjects of endless speculation. But rather than speculate on biographical clues that may be hidden in the text, and which are impossible ever to prove, the sonnets might best be read as examples of Shakespeare’s burgeoning poetic and dramatic skills. It is surely not beyond belief that Shakespeare merely imagined the situations in the sonnets, as he clearly imagined and conceived the dramatic situations in his plays. For example: how to persuade a handsome young man to settle down, get married, and pass on his good looks and virtues to his children, as is represented in Sonnets 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 and 17. Shakespeare in fact offers 17 different approaches to this problem, each ingeniously contrived poetic exercises, at turns brilliantly witty as well as moving. By setting himself the task of expressing emotion within a strict poetic form (a sonnet is a mere 14 lines), Shakespeare challenges his talent, and our comprehension, to the utmost. The strong emotions expressed in the sonnets connect them with Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Since it’s possible that he was writing these poetic exercises throughout hisworking life in the theatre, it is tempting to look for connections between them and the plays, and conjecture as to whether they were written at the same time. It is the imagery in the sonnets that so often echoes imagery found in the plays. For instance, in Sonnet 134 the poet uses money references to show the callousness of his mistress, who is having an affair wi