SECTION 20 - The Sonnets

Summary

Of all the problems which beset Shakespeare's early life, none is more problematical than that of his introduction to Southampton and early relations with him. In this field there is permissible scope for surmise, let the surmise only have some element of probability and some basis of fact.

Conjecture must needs touch the well-worn theme of the Sonnets and of the person addressed in the first series of them. Though the date of their publication was 1609, it will scarcely be contested that in composition they belong to the poetic, less-dramatic time of Shakespeare's output: that their elaborated language, harmonic cadences and cyclical involution of thought are of the time which produced Venus and Lucrece. The 126th Sonnet is reasonably interpreted as a dedication to the Lord of the writer's love of some ‘written ambassage’ which may very well be either of these poems—more probably Lucrece. In any case the allusion to the Sonnets by Francis Meres, as circulating in manuscript among private friends, is proof that at least some of them were written at a date earlier than 1598. It is fairly clear that the whole of the first series has reference to one individual who was not a woman: that he was adulated by some rival poet: that he was considerably younger than Shakespeare, and yet old enough to be wooed by women and to make his marriage a thing natural and desirable.