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- Shakespeare’s dramatic habit of mind.
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# SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
power, the likelihood that any production of his pen should embody a genuine piece of autobiography is on *a priori* grounds small. Robert Browning, no mean psychologist, went as far as to assert that Shakespeare ‘never so little’ at any point of his work left his ‘bosom’s gate ajar’, and declared him incapable of unlocking his heart ‘with a sonnet-key’. That the energetic fervour which animates many of Shakespeare’s sonnets should bear the living semblance of private ecstasy or anguish, is no confutation of Browning’s view. No critic of insight has denied all tie of kinship between the fervour of the sonnets and the passion which is portrayed in the tragedies. The passion of the tragedies is invariably the dramatic or objective expression, in the vividest terms, of emotional experience, which, however common in human annals, is remote from the dramatist’s own interest or circumstance. Even his two narrative poems, as Coleridge pointed out, betray ‘the utter aloofness of the poet’s own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst’. Certainly the intense passion of the tragedies is never the mere literal presentment of the author’s personal or subjective emotional experience, nor does it draw sustenance from episodes in his immediate environment. The personal note in the sonnets may well owe much to that dramatic instinct which could reproduce intuitively the subtlest thought and feeling of which man’s mind is capable.
The particular course and effect of the emotion, which Shakespeare portrayed in drama, were usually suggested or prescribed by some story in an historic chronicle or work of fiction. The detailed scheme of the sonnets seems to stand on something of the same footing as the plots of his plays. The sonnets weave together and develop with the finest poetic and dramatic sensibility themes which
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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
had already served, with inferior effect, the purposes of poetry many times before. The material for the subject-matter and the suggestion of the irregular emotion of the sonnets lay at Shakespeare’s command in much literature by other pens. The obligation to draw on his personal experiences for his theme or its development was little greater in his sonnets than in his dramas. Hundreds of sonneteers had celebrated, in the language of love, the charms of young men—mainly by way of acknowledging their patronage in accordance with a convention which was peculiar to the period of the Renaissance. Thousands of poets had described their sufferings at the hands of imperious beauty. Others had found food for poetry in stories of mental conflict caused by a mistress’s infidelity or a friend’s coolness.¹ The spur of example never failed to incite Shakespeare’s dramatic muse to activity, and at no period of literary history was the presentation of amorous adventures more often essayed in sonnets than by Shakespeare’s poetic contemporaries at home and abroad during the last decade of the sixteenth century. It goes without saying that Shakespeare had his own experience of the emotions incident to love and friendship or that that experience added point and colour to his verse. But his dramatic genius absolved him of the need
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