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Saturday, January 25, 2025

The Sonnets of Shakespeare and How They Got that Way.

'[P]erhaps , Shakespeare's " lovely youth" was merely the creature of imagination,' says Alexander Dyce, “and had no more existence than those fair ones, whom various writers have so perseveringly wooed in verse. I have long felt convinced, after repeated perusals of the Sonnets, that the greater number of them was composed in an assumed character, on different subjects, and at different times, for the amusement, and probably at the suggestion, of the author's intimate associates.”

Three points bear highlighting in Dyce's comment. First, the non-existent “fair ones” are a convenient invention. Second, his “repeated perusals” have convinced him of what he wished to believe. Third, nevertheless he was ironically correct, for all the wrong reasons, that the lovely boy, of Sonnet 126, was “the creature of imagination”.1

The main reasons that traditional Shakespeare scholars remain at the very least equivocal about the sonnets as autobiography are two. I'll start with the second: the documentary biography of the man from Stratford is limited and does not in any way remotely align with the poetry. Foremost, however, was the panic at the idea that the Shakespeare revealed in the sonnets might have been bi-sexual. Nevertheless, the sonnets were widely read as autobiography.

In accordance with the first version of the Stratford myth, the recipient of roughly half of the sonnets is an anonymous male friend, “H.W.” There was a sense, however, as far back even as the 1640 second edition of the poems, that the tone of some of the sonnets was problematical. One sonnet, in particular, — Sonnet 20 — was so particularly egregious as to provoke the towering scholarly figure, George Steevens:

—the master mistress of my passion,] It is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick addressed, to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation. We may remark also, that the same phrase employed by Shakspeare to denote the height of encomium, is used by Dryden to express the extreme of reproach.


“That woman, but more daub’d; or if a man,

Corrupted to a woman, thy man mistress.” Don Sebastian.


Let me be just, however, to our author, who has made a proper use of the term male varlet in Troilus and Cressida. See that play, Act V. sc. i. Steevens.2

When Steevens undertook the First Variorum Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, shortly afterwards, and published in 1578, he chose not to include the sonnets saying that they were “boring.”

Steeven's protege, Edmund Malone, included the Sonnets as Volume 10 of his own Variorum of 1790. In that volume he gave what is the orthodox reply to Steevens's objection to this day:

Some part of this indignation might perhaps have been abated, if it had been considered that such addresses to men, however indelicate, were customary in our authour's time, and neither imported criminality, nor were esteemed indecorous. See a note on the words— “thy deceased lover” in the 32d Sonnet. To regulate our judgment of Shakspeare's poems by the modes of modern times, is surely as unreasonable as to try his plays by the rules of Aristotle. Master-mistress does not perhaps mean man-mistress, but sovereign mistress. See Mr. Tyrwhitt's note on the 165th verse of the Canterbury Tales, Vol. IV. P. 197. Malone.3

According to Malone, that was just the way men talked to/about male friends in those days. While attempts were made over the following century to make Malone's reply the final word the subject was simply too fascinating to let lie.

In 1817, Nathan Drake published his Shakespeare and his Times. The two volumes included “A Disquisition on the Object of His Sonnets” in which he identified Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, as the recipient of the first 126 sonnets in the collection. His evidence was almost entirely his own personal assertions. The only legitimate documents to support his claim were the dedications to Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. The rest was conjecture.

But the booming Shakespeare industry needed new discoveries. It wasn't at all particular how it came by them. Southampton was soon accepted by the majority of scholars as the male object of Shakespeare's affections and a new myth was constructed around the choice. A new popular debate began on the periphery comparing Southampton's candidacy to that of others but only Philip Herbert, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, had legs.

Still uncomfortable with the verbal intimacy of the sonnets purportedly to the “lovely boy,” many scholars took the position evident in Dyce's comments above. This largely remained the situation for above 100 years. No Shakespeare lover wanted a gay bard, social mores simply would not allow it, and none could imagine another recipient than Southampton or Herbert in a pinch.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

As alternative authors began to be forwarded for the works under the pen-name of Shakespeare, and the sonnets mined for references to the lives of other candidates, the position that some or all of the sonnets are entirely fictional began to be more popular for another reason. Like so much from traditional scholarship, the question of autobiography was repurposed to meet the needs of the new specialty called “Stratfordianism”. Anything in the works of Shakespeare that could be argued to relate to the life of the Stratford man, conveniently enough, became autobiographical. Anything that could not was said probably to have been written in the person of a fictional character. At the very least, it was argued, the details are lost to us due to the scanty documentation of the lives of the common folk of the time. That lack of evidence for the Stratford man was actually powerful evidence in his favor. A given sonnet could move back and forth between the categories as needs required.

To find any other biography than the Stratford man was a sign of heinous disrespect and probably mental illness. To find that the author was not gay was homophobic.



1 See my “Sonnet CXXVI and the Lovely Boy.” Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015). @ location 308. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TWPBPP8/

2 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015) @ location 221. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TWPBPP8/ citing Malone, ed. Edmond. The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, Volume the Tenth. (1790). @ 207.

3 Ibid.



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