Shakespeare’s sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint”: first impressions

1/ Having read all the plays, I decided to go for Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry. There are a handful of sonnets I know quite well (18, 116, 130, 138), but this time I was reading through them all with the intention of studying them closely over time, so there isn’t much to say. I love Shakespeare’s sonnets—not all, some are harder to read and some feel quite early—but I love most. 

2/ Sonnet 116 feels very different this time: 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

3/ I don’t think the publication was unauthorised: the sonnets were arranged in such a meaningful way that they had to be planned for publication by Shakespeare himself.  

4/ The sonnets, to me, feel more like literary exercises than expressions of personal thought and feeling. I think he was aiming to kill the sonnet and give it a rebirth—English theatre was no longer the same with Shakespeare and neither was the sonnet—he went against all norms and conventions, creating a sonnet sequence unlike anything that came before.

5/ I think Shakespeare wrote about real feelings of joy and lust and desire and longing and anger and jealousy and disappointment and confusion and hatred and so on, but there’s not necessarily one Fair Youth or one Rival Poet or one Dark Lady. 

6/ That doesn’t necessarily mean that I think Shakespeare’s not bisexual. I would say he’s almost certainly not gay; he could be bisexual or straight, probably bisexual. 

7/ It’s very likely that he had some venereal disease at some point, as hinted in some of the last sonnets. Scholars have long debated this subject, I myself think it’s likely around the time he was writing Timon of Athens and King Lear, because of the hateful and vicious and often out-of-place rants against female sexuality in these plays. 

8/ I didn’t like “A Lover’s Complaint”. Apparently there’s some debate surrounding the authorship—I’m not sure—some of it sounds Shakespearean and some of it doesn’t. If it was entirely Shakespeare’s, it must have been an early work. 

So here’s a record of my impressions. Slowly I’m going to read and absorb the sonnets properly over time.