You Would Plucke Out the Hart of My Misery
Instead of trying to figure out who the subject of the sonnets are, it makes more sense to speculate about the speaker. In the only sense that matters Shakespeare addresses his sonnets to himself. His muse here is midwife rather than mother. That is why he continually transforms his love of a person to love of an idea or essence. The poems themselves have a piercing eloquence that is controlled, convincing and fluent. They show great strength of mind, well ordered and well sorted. They display enormous self-confidence as well as inordinate cleverness. The speaker is really addicted to puns and there is the occasional tincture of false modesty, but the tone is generally enterprising and bold. The speaker takes a great deal of pride in his performance. The poems represent a narrator who is sexually alert and eager, but who is also capable of intense jealousy and infatuation. This is not necessarily Shakespeare the man, this is Shakespeare the poet.
It would be wrong to argue that the plethora of outside parallels means that there is no parallel at all. It is certainly possible that elements of Shakespeare’s emotional life entered the poems just as they entered the plays. We may note, for example, the strain of competitiveness within his nature. He seems to have been charged by the prospect of literary challenge and by the presence of literary rivalry.
It is interesting that throughout his career he never once praised a fellow dramatist. He was highly ambitious, energetic and resourceful. Who else would have conceived of the great range of history plays at such a young age? In his earlier plays, he thrived upon parody of the fashionable authors, such as Marlowe and Lyly, which can be interpreted as a form of aggression. He was very good at creating sly and aggressive characters such as Richard III. It is intriguing that much of the dialogue in his plays takes form in competitions of wit. It should be added that Shakespeare did not become the most eminent dramatist in London by chance or accident, he actively wished for it.
This may have some connection with another persistent tone in the sonnets, where the narrator seems to be solitary. It is significant that the “beloved’, is never mentioned by name – especially given the fact that Shakespeare assures him that he will be rendered immortal. Shakespeare wanted the world to honour and remember his love rather than any recipient of it. In the sonnets, Shakespeare is musing essentially upon the true nature of the selfhood. His subject was his own self, and in cunning and witty subjectivity.
For most of his professional life, he lived in lodgings, away from his family, declining to join in the “debauchery” of his colleagues. No letters survive. He may have written very few. Was he shy, or reserved, or aloof? We have also found him by report to be amorous, witty, fastidious and fluent. It should be recalled that he played his own role in the world with supreme success; he invested with great joyfulness those characters who, like Falstaff, create and re-create themselves for any conceivable situation.
It is also the mare of his powerful presence that is utterly and uniquely “Shakespearian” in all of the themes and moods inherent within sonnets. There is no other writer quite with his consistent and continuing identity through comedy and tragedy, verse and prose, romance and history.
There is also the mystery of his invisibility, his self-effacement, and self-deprecation. We may plausibly. He had no “morality" imagine that he accommodated himself to every situation and to every person whom he encountered. There is nothing of personal vanity or personal eccentricity about him.
In his sonnets, there is an element of self-abasement and even self-disgust. It is the key part of the meaning of the sequence. Knowing himself guilty, he was drawn to those who would hurt him. For most of his life he was Shakespeare the player rather than Shakespeare the gentleman, and the taint of the public theatre never completely left him. There are many critics who have therefore detected in Shakespeare a revulsion from the stage and a distaste for the business of writing, and acting in, plays. When he compares one of his characters to an actor, the allusion is generally negative.
This is particularly true of his plays. How much this was a commonplace of the age, and how much a reflection of Shakespeare’s true attitude, is difficult to discern. If he felt scorn at the same time he also knew what it was like to be scorned.
There is a hint of homosexual passion in The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello and elsewhere – a passion unlike that by the writer of the sonnets to his favoured boy. There are also veiled references to venereal disease in connection with the “Dark Lady”, Shakespeare’s sonnets are suffused with sexual humour and innuendo. The language of these poems is itself sexual, quick, energetic ambiguous and amoral. There are more than thirteen hundred sexual allusions in the plays, as well as the repeated use of sexual slang. There are sixty-six terms for vagina among them “ruff”, “scut”, “crack”, “lock”, “salmon tail” and “clack dish”. There are a host of terms for the penis as well as references to sodomy, buggery, and fellatio.
Shakespeare is never more lively or witty than dealing with sexual matters. They have such a pervasive presence that they overshadow the ending of The Merchant of Venice where a number of obscene puns dominate the closing dialogue. The English crowd always enjoyed sexual farce and he knew this kind of comedy would be successful with the audience, both high and low.
It could be argued that this is in part the sexual expressiveness of a celibate and/or faithful absent husband but common sense would suggest otherwise. The printed reminiscences (or gossip) of his contemporaries give a strong impression that he had a reputation for philandering. He may have been “pricked out”, as he puts it, for women’s pleasure in a world where sex itself was a dark and dangerous force. The writer of the sonnets seems to have been touched by a horror of venereal disease. Some biographers have been suggested that Shakespeare himself died from a related venereal condition.
The Elizabethan age was one of open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes. It was not only the capital that sexual activity was commonplace. It was recorded that, out of a population of forty thousand adults in the county Essex, some fifteen thousand were brought before the church court for sexual offences.
It was not always a clean or hygienic period in matters pertaining to the body and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed. It was in many respects a short and furtive act, a mere spilling of animal spirits. In certain of the sonnets that act provokes shame and disgust. Hamlet is a misogynist. Loathing for the act of sex is apparent in Measure for Measure and in King Lear. This is, of course, a function of the plot, and cannot be taken as an expression of Shakespeare’s opinions on the matter but it is a mirror of the reality all around him.
The poet’s attachment to the young man of the sonnets suggests that Shakespeare had an understanding of devoted male friendships. We have already noticed the presence of such friendships in the plays. It is also the case that Shakespeare was a “born” actor, and it has become apparent that actors are often possessed by an ambiguous sexuality. A great actor must always have a uniquely sensitive and yielding temperament and psychologists have often assumed this to be a “feminine” component inherited from love or imitation of the mother. We do not need to go far down the by-ways of psychology to find this an eminently sensible observation. From the time of the Greek dramas of the fifth century BC, actors have been wonton and effeminate, and in the late sixteenth century London preachers and moralists rallied against the uncertain sexuality of the players. Acting was also deemed to be unnatural, an attempt to escape from nature and an act of defiance against God.
In his writing, he knew what it was like to be both Cleopatra and Anthony, both Romeo and Juliet. This, of course, does not imply that he was in any sense a homosexual but suggests that he had a floating sexuality. We may recall that the recently discovered portrait of the Earl of Southampton dressed as a woman. It was natural in this era for high born men to assert the feminine aspect of their natures. It was a part of the Renaissance humanism considered it essential for “gentle” conduct. Even arguably homosexual poets such as Marlowe draped their allusions in approximately classical garb. It has also been demonstrated that, in sixteenth-century text, what may have been described as theoretical homosexuality was considered to be a predilection of the noble and well-born; so it would have been unthinkable for our “gentle” Shakespeare to make any poetical allusions to the subject. It was a love, not of the phallus, but of the mind.
It is instructive to compare the women in his plays with the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets. His comic heroines are lively and self-assured, which may also be a reference to their sexual vitality. They have enormous powers of will, also meant sexual power and potency.
There is no real typical Shakespeare woman and it is perhaps interesting to study the response they receive from men. The most obvious and most common reaction is one of sexual jealousy, whether it was Othello with Desdemona or Leontes at Hermine. It has become commonplace in Shakespeare biographies to say that Shakespeare suspected his wife of infidelity. It is plausible but impossible to say whether it’s true or not. We can only say that infidelity, true or false, plays as large a part in the plots of his plays and sonnets.
It is true that most of Shakespeare’s plays involve the problems of love, in all its forms, and that his is the most profound treatment of love in the English language. It is natural and inevitable,, therefore, that he should be preoccupied with sexual, as part of the game of love and relationships. But that does not explain why sex I often treated with shame, horror and disgust. In his treatment of love, he often uses war metaphors. The only couple who seem to be happily married is Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet and Macbeth and his wife are not without fondness for each other. But these fortunate pairs are hardly what the modern world would call “role-models”. Unhappy love and amorous conflict are the staple of drama, and dramatic convenience does not necessarily reflect Shakespeare’s personal misgivings. There is no need to introduce a poignant autobiographical note.
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