Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets that were printed together in a small volume called Shakespeare's Sonnets, which appeared in 1609, though most of the sonnets were probably written in the 1590s. Apparently Shakespeare was not involved in their publication, and the order of the individual poems is somewhat unsatisfactory, but it is possible to discern something of a story behind the sonnets. There seem to be three main characters: the speaker, who is a middle-aged poet; a Fair Youth; and a dark-haired married woman, traditionally called the Dark Lady. The speaker adores the Fair Youth in idealizing fashion, and he also has a very unidealized sexual affair with the Dark Lady, who is unfaithful to him (as both have been to their spouses) and who seduces the youth. Several of the sonnets refer to a rival poet, who also writes tributes to the youth.
The sonnets capture moments of feeling rather than narrating clearly, and in addition the confused order of poems makes the exact story hard to work out. The first of these difficulties is characteristic of a large number of such collections of poems, called sonnet sequences, the great models for which are the two collections of sonnets on Laura by the Italian poet Petrarch.
These sonnet sequences often have some biographical basis, and Shakespeare's may well have as well, though we know too little of his personal life to be sure. At any rate, a great deal of scholarship, much of it misplaced ingenuity, has tried to identify the people of the sonnets with people assumed to be connected with Shakespeare, who is naturally enough identified with the poet. One complication is that the 1609 edition has a dedication to "Mr. W. H.," described as "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets." Two favorite candidates, on the assumption that W. H. is the Fair Youth, are the Earls of Pembroke (William Herbert) and Southampton (Henry Wriothsley, which is W. H. backward). It seems likely enough that the sonnets have some biography in them, and surely they draw on Shakespeare's experience of the feelings of love, but the likelihood that fiction is mixed in to an unknown extent makes theories very tenuous. Certainly the emotions of the poems often feel very real, but then so do the emotions of many characters that Shakespere invented in his plays.
The first 126 sonnets seem to be about an attachment between the speaker and the Fair Youth that includes homoerotic feelings; many of the poems do not have a clear gender reference, but all that do refer to a male, and the poems seem to fit together into a description of one relationship. This raises two questions: is there a homosexual bond between the speaker and the Fair Youth, and was Shakespeare himself bisexual? It does seem clear that many of the poems respond with sensuous intensity to the youth's beauty, and indeed they use many of the devices conventionally used in Renaissance poetry by a male speaker referring to a woman that he loves. Sonnet 20 includes both the homoeroticism and also a specific denial of sexual interest in the youth, but its joking tone makes it a frustrating text for those who are seeking clear answers about the sexuality of either the speaker or Shakespeare.
At any rate one needs to read the sonnnets as individual poems exploring various parts of the experience of love. At the same time one can with some caution trace a story, with transitions of feeling and attitude among the different people. Finally, and with even more caution, one can make some inferences about Shakespeare's inner life, if not about his biography.
Most extended studies of the Sonnets touch on these issues of biography. For closer consideration see in the Bibliography Pequigney, Duncan-Jones, Hubler, and (somewhat dated but hugely comprehensive) Rollins.
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