Vol. 30 No. 9 · 8 May 2008
pages 12-15 | 6090 words
Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet
Barbara Everett
If we speak of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, we mean a collection with this name first published in 1609, when Shakespeare was 45 and most of his plays had been staged; he died only seven years later. The 1609 text is the only authentic source for all the editions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published since. So much is problematic about this first edition that it is best to start off with simplicities. The book contains 154 poems, all except two made up of 14 lines; with the exception of one poem, each of these lines has ten syllables and five iambic feet. With the exception of two, each of the poems has three quatrains, each containing two rhymes, followed by a rhyming couplet. There are only two major sonnet forms in English, and this is one of them, the Shakespearean. The other, the Petrarchan, is more coherent aesthetically, having only two rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines) and two more in the sestet (the last six), but it is much harder to write in English than in Italian, because English has fewer rhymes. With its series of stanzas, the Shakespearean form will always seem more a speaking than a singing poem, more reflective, meant for thinking or arguing in. But Shakespeare is no less ‘poetic’ than Petrarch. The Sonnets vary a lot, in quality as in substance. At their best they have an extraordinarily rich, dense and delicate verbal texture: they form an inimitable network of ideas, images, echoes and ambiguities, a world that is real yet always in process of change and evolution.
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[*] A possibility put forward first by Barbara Everett in the LRB of 18 December 1986.
[†] Shakespeare, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge, 342 pp., £50, January 2007, 978 0 521 85912 7).
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 11 · 5 June 2008
From Brian Vickers
In her essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets Barbara Everett referred kindly to my recent book, Shakespeare, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and John Davies of Hereford, and accepted my argument that this ‘aesthetically pretentious and emotionally vulgar’ poem was not written by Shakespeare (LRB, 8 May). But she describes my counter-claim, that the real author was John Davies of Hereford, as having been arrived at by ‘computer analysis’. In fact, as I mentioned in the preface, it derived from prolonged reading of Davies’s work, analysing his style. Only after I had identified his characteristic usages did I check online databases of early modern poetry and the electronic version of the OED, which credits Davies with having introduced more than six hundred Latinate words into English. Most of these were never used again, but they include several that appear only in the Complaint and in verse known to be by Davies. I also identified 80 passages in this poem of 329 lines with syntactical and prosodic structures, rhyme forms, imagery and classical allusions identical to those used by Davies, citing several hundred instances in his work.
Everett appears not to have digested this evidence, for she concludes that ‘until there is absolute proof that the poem is, or is not, Shakespeare’s, the case has to be left open.’ No sensible person working in authorship attribution would ever claim ‘absolute proof’, but I believe that the 145 pages I devoted to documenting the convergence of styles entitles us to attribute it to Davies with a high degree of probability. How much evidence does one need?
Brian Vickers
London NW6
From Martin Sanderson
According to Barbara Everett, Shakespeare’s Sonnets ‘search for the as yet unexplored voice of the inward self in love, while also serving love’s sense that a living human being and its world beyond the self are incomparably real’. As yet unexplored in English, she must mean, so as not to discount the love lyrics of Sappho or Catullus.
Martin Sanderson
Ipswich
