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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE II
The alleged morbidity of the sonnets.
of seeking his cue there exclusively. It was not in his nature (to paraphrase Browning again) to write merely for the purpose of airing his private woes and perplexities.
Shakespeare acknowledged in his plays that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’. The exclusive embodiment in verse of mere private introspection was barely known to his era, and in these words the dramatist paid an explicit tribute to the potency in poetic literature of artistic impulse and control contrasted with the impotency of personal sensation, which is scarcely capable of discipline. To few of the sonnets can a controlling artistic impulse be denied by criticism. The best of them rank with the richest and most concentrated efforts of Shakespeare’s pen. To pronounce them, alone of his extant work, free of that ‘feigning’, which he identified with ‘the truest poetry’, is tantamount to denying his authorship of them, and to dismissing them from the Shakespearean canon.
The second general objection which is raised by the theory of the sonnets’ autobiographic significance can be stated very briefly. A literal interpretation of the poems credits the poet with a moral instability which is at variance with the tone of all the rest of his work, and is rendered barely admissible by his contemporary reputation for ‘honesty’. Of the ‘pangs of despised love’ for a woman, which he professes to suffer in the sonnets, nothing need be said in this connexion. But a purely literal interpretation of the impassioned protestations of affection for a ‘lovely boy’, which course through the sonnets, casts a slur on the dignity of the poet’s name which scarcely bears discussion. Of friendship of the healthy manly type, not his plays alone, but the records of his biography, give fine and touching examples. All his dramatic writing, as well as his two narrative poems and the testimonies of his intimate associates in life, seems to prove
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