Shakespeare’s Man Descending a Staircase: Sonnets 126 to 154

Summary

Most critics still shy away from treating Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle as a whole since they are in a quandary over the principle or principles of its 1609 order; they turn instead to Meres’s ‘sugar’d sonnets’ and deal with them individually. Others have indulged in what Hilton Landry calls ‘the great international game’ of rearranging the Quarto’s order. And even the few who defend it, have almost invariably done so in a spirit of resignation, faute de mieux. I cannot agree with any of these critical positions since they derive from a failure, it seems to me, to understand the genre of both the cycle and its two constituent sequences.

I wish to take my lead from Philip Edwards, since his chapter, 'The Sonnets to the Dark Woman', is especially sensitive to the role of each poem in a coherent dramatic whole: he writes, 'Although individual poems, however brilliant, may be "failures", the cumulative effect of the [second] sequence is success of the highest order, not failure'.4