for Shakespeare's Sonnets class, 2024
Abstract
Just as it is common for people to wonder what real-life relationships are described in Taylor Swift’s songs, it is common for academics to wonder what real-world people correspond to the Young Man and the Dark Mistress of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The two areas of inquiry have a commonality: both rest on an assumption that the artist’s works are autobiographical in nature, and therefore the very validity of the inquiry rests on an unproven premise. This essay seeks to build, from evidence in the Sonnets themselves and from Shakespeare’s life, an argument as to whether the Sonnets are, or are not, autobiographical, to determine whether inquiry into the 'real' identity of the Young Man or the Dark Mistress has any chance of being fruitful. In the end, we conclude there is no evidence that they are not autobiographical, but precious little evidence that they are.
An Analogy with Taylor Swift
A cottage academy exists to analyze each song by Taylor Swift, one of this generation’s preeminent musical artists, and determine exactly who – often, specifically, which of her relationships (mostly, if you believe her reputation, breakups) – is really referenced in each one – is “The Alchemy”, filled with football metaphors, about her latest beau, footballer Travis Kelce (Earl and Willman)? Is “Hey Stephen” about musician Stephen Barker Liles, or “Style” about singer Harry Styles; is “We Are Never Getting Back Together” about actor Jake Gyllenhaal, or “Enchanted” about singer Adam Young (Mcglone and Stern)?
A not-so-cottage academy has existed, for hundreds of years, analyzing the Sonnets by William Shakespeare, his generation’s preeminent playwright, to determine who the Dark Mistress and Fair Youth really were (the latter presumed to be Mr. W.H., to whom Thorpe’s publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets was dedicated). Was the Fair Youth actually Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, or Shakespeare’s nephew William Hart, or William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke? Was the Dark Mistress actually Emilia Lanier (Rowse), or the wife of linguist John Florio (Bate), or William Herbert’s mistress Mary Fitton (Tyler)? Countless drops of ink (and, more recently, pixels) have been spilt on these questions over the centuries.
The parallels, as I have laid them out here, are obvious, and each hinges on the degree to which the writer’s work is autobiographical. There seems to be little debate over whether Swift’s songs are autobiographical – it is widely assumed they are completely so. To be fair to this assumption, Swift has spoken of parallels between a few specific songs and her own life, which is admittedly more than we have for Shakespeare’s sonnets, the background of which we know very little. But surely a masterful writer, whatever century they were born in, is capable of writing some art that is not fully autobiographical?
Psychoanalysts know that […] it is impossible for a creative writer to completely disconnect themselves from their literary creations. […T]here is a wide spectrum of possibilities, from strictly factual autobiography to purely imaginary fiction. (Waugaman)
Is this instinct to treat Shakespeare as the Sonnets’ speaker as well as their author, to treat Swift as her songs’ speaker as well as their writer, not an example of “the intentional fallacy that works from text back to author rather than in the more common reverse mode” (Charles)?
It seems I write dismissively of this assumption, but its answer does power some interesting questions, beyond just the real-world identities of the Young Man and Dark Mistress (a matter which I will not address here, beyond the question of if they have real-world identities). For example, one facet of the question of whether Shakespeare himself was or was not queer hinges on whether the author of the queer (or are they? that is another question) Young Man Sonnets was writing autobiographically (Charles).
Building Up an Argument from First Principles
The philosopher René Descartes took it as his mission to build all of human knowledge on what can be known a priori, before observation of the real world has even begun. Never mind whether he succeeded: I am taking a similar approach to the question of the autobiographicality of the Sonnets.
“A central tenet of literary theory for many years has been that we should focus solely on the text, not the life or psychology of the author. Fictional characters are said to be merely words on the page, and we are not allowed to speculate about their psychology or backstory.” (Waugaman) Here, we make no assumption of ‘the death of the author’, but neither do we assume the contrary position – we’re just looking for evidence one way or the other.
Waugaman, among others, argues that Shakespeare was actually in fact some other guy, which strays a bit further than the scope of this paper. Here, we will simply take it as axiomatic that William Shakespeare is the author of the Sonnets. We only seek to investigate whether he is also the speaker of the sonnets, the character known as the Poet.
“I always write of you”
Some readers draw the seemingly natural conclusion that “the 1609 arrangement gives us a coherent, probably authorial, ordering” (Heale) and that the Sonnets correspondingly tell a single coherent narrative of two relationships.
This is not a sufficient precondition to conclude that the Sonnets are all autobiographical, but it may be a necessary one. If the Sonnets, “written […] singly or in groups over a period of at least 10 years” (Heale) are not about some consistent two actual individuals, then either the author wrote some or all of them about fictional individuals, or the author fell head-over-heels in love with a succession of men, each more perfect in the author’s eyes than the last. The latter possibility, though humorously reminiscent of Romeo spending his first scenes mooning hopelessly over Rosaline before completely forgetting about her the instant he meets Juliet, does not feel compelling to attribute to as fine an explorer of the psyche as Shakespeare. (This is, admittedly, somewhat tenuous reasoning.)
Luckily, the Sonnets themselves present evidence that they are a single coherent whole, in the form of Sonnet 76, where Shakespeare recognizes the repetitiveness of the Sonnet sequence: “Why is my verse so barren of new pride,/So far from variation or quick change?”, and answers the question: “O, know, sweet love, I always write of you” – the Poet is telling us, within the sequence itself, that every poem in the Young Man sequence, or at least the sequence up until Sonnet 76, is about the same subject.
“My Name Is Will”
There are, of course, several of the Sonnets where the word “Will” is capitalized in the original Q, indicating at least some form of personification, and, it is natural to assume, some identification between the Poet and William Shakespeare. Most noteworthy of such are Sonnets 135 and 136, consisting almost entirely of various multiple entendres on the word/name Will, the second of the two poems concluding with the straight-up, apparently nonmetaphorical, statement, “my name is Will.” At the barest, absolute minimum, we can safely conclude that the speaker of Sonnets 135-136 (and their ilk) is named Will, which does just happen to also be the author’s name.
Putting this together with the previous evidence that the sonnet sequence is a narratively coherent single whole, the speaker of all the sonnets is, one may conclude, one Poet: Will.
“Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity”
The Poet gives a variety of other biographical details about himself, mostly various descriptions of himself as old and decrepit in various ways, much older than the Young Man. The Poet describes himself as old often enough that either it’s an in-joke that he is only very slightly older than the Young Man, or he is actually old. Shakespeare, born 1564, was 45 when Q was published (he would have been a bit younger when the Sonnets were written – it is, of course, unlikely they were published before he wrote them). In Renaissance Europe, 45 could quite plausibly have qualified as decayingly old. This is certainly not proof that Shakespeare and the Poet are one and the same, but it is not the counterevidence it could so easily have been.
Similarly, the Poet does not have “public honour and proud titles”, according to Sonnet 25, and certainly neither did Shakespeare (Waugaman’s argument to the contrary notwithstanding).
It turns out biographical details such as these are actually few within the Sonnets, general enough that they might reasonably apply to most people (most people, after all, do not have public honour nor proud titles, and so on), and, though none of them present serious counterevidence to the possibility that the Sonnets are autobiographical, ultimately they are not, singly nor in aggregate, compelling evidence for the autobiographicality of the Sonnets.
“( )”
What conclusion, then, can we draw? Having assessed the evidence in the Sonnets and some of the academic literature, is the Poet Will one and the same as the author Shakespeare?
Ultimately, the answer remains a shrug, a resounding ‘maybe’. There is little to no counterevidence against the proposition that Will is Shakespeare himself, but there is precious little concrete corroborating evidence, either. It’s probably a fair assumption for the sake of discussion that the Sonnets are autobiographical, so long as we always bear in the back of our minds that we’re building on an uncertain foundation, and correspondingly none of our conclusions are entirely certain.
Luckily, if we’re in a mood where we want concrete, definite answers, we can just ask Taylor Swift which of her songs are or are not autobiographical.
Works Cited
Bate, Jonathan. "The dark lady." The genius of Shakespeare, Picador, 2008, 94, ISBN 9780330458436.
Charles, Casey. "’Was Shakespeare Gay?’ Sonnet 20 and the Politics of Pedagogy." College Literature, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 35-51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112402.
Earl, William and Chris Willman. "Which New Taylor Swift Songs Are About Matty Healy, Joe Alwyn or Travis Kelce? Breaking Down ‘Tortured Poets Department’ Lyric Clues." Variety, 19 April 2024, https://variety.com/2024/music/news/the-tortured-poets-department-song-relationships-breakdown-1235975036/. Accessed 25 April 2024
Heale, Elizabeth. "Will in the Sonnets." Shakespeare, vol. 5 no. 3, 2009, pp. 219-34.
Mcglone, Allison and Elizabeth Stern. "A Complete Breakdown Of Who Taylor Swift's Songs Are (Allegedly) About." YourTango, 23 October 2022, https://www.yourtango.com/2021341576/list-people-taylor-swift-has-written-songs-about. Accessed 25 April 2024.
Rowse, A. L. Shakespeare's sonnets - the problems solved. Macmillan, 1973, ISBN 9780333147344.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited and annotated by Stephen Booth, Yale University Press, 1977.
Tyler, Thomas. "Preface." Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1890, p vi, OCLC 185191423.
Waugaman, Richard M. "The Origins of Modern Literary Theory in the Repudiation of Autobiographical Readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets." Psychoanalytic Inquiry, vol. 43 no. 5, 2023, pp. 364-82.
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