William Shakespeare

1564–1616
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Circa 1600, English playwright and poet William

Shakespeare (1564-1616). (Photo by Stock
Montage/Getty Images)
While William Shakespeare’s reputation is based
primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a
poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609),
quarried since the early 19th century for
autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the
nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to
the margins of the Shakespeare industry. Yet the study
of his nondramatic poetry can illuminate Shakespeare’s
activities as a poet emphatically of his own age,
especially in the period of extraordinary literary ferment
in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of Queen
Elizabeth.
Shakespeare’s exact birth date remains unknown. He
was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-
Avon on April 26, 1564, his mother’s third child, but the
first to survive infancy. This has led scholars to
conjecture that he was born on April 23rd, given the
era’s convention of baptizing newborns on their third
day. Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, moved to
Stratford in about 1552 and rapidly became a
prominent figure in the town’s business and politics. He
rose to be bailiff, the highest official in the town, but
then in about 1575-1576 his prosperity declined
markedly and he withdrew from public life. In 1596,
thanks to his son’s success and persistence, he was
granted a coat of arms by the College of Arms, and the
family moved into New Place, the grandest house in
Stratford.

Speculation that William Shakespeare traveled, worked

as a schoolmaster in the country, was a soldier and a
law clerk, or embraced or left the Roman Catholic
Church continues to fill the gaps left in the sparse
records of the so-called lost years. It is conventionally
assumed (though attendance registers do not survive)
that Shakespeare attended the King’s New School in
Stratford, along with others of his social class. At the
age of 18, in November 1582, he married Anne
Hathaway, daughter of a local farmer. She was
pregnant with Susanna Shakespeare, who was baptized
on May 26, 1583. The twins, Hamnet and Judith
Shakespeare, were baptized on February 2, 1585. There
were no further children from the union.

William Shakespeare had probably been working as an

actor and writer on the professional stage in London for
four or five years when the London theaters were
closed by order of the Privy Council on June 23, 1592.
The authorities were concerned about a severe
outbreak of the plague and alarmed at the possibility of
civil unrest (Privy Council minutes refer to “a great
disorder and tumult” in Southwark). The initial order
suspended playing until Michaelmas and was renewed
several times. When the theaters reopened in June
1594, the theatrical companies had been reorganized,
and Shakespeare’s career was wholly committed to the
troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men until
1603, when they were reconstituted as the King’s Men.

By 1592 Shakespeare already enjoyed sufficient

prominence as an author of dramatic scripts to have
been the subject of Robert Greene’s attack on the
“upstart crow” in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. Such
renown as he enjoyed, however, was as transitory as
the dramatic form. Play scripts, and their authors, were
accorded a lowly status in the literary system, and
when scripts were published, their link to the theatrical
company (rather than to the scriptwriter) was
publicized. It was only in 1597 that Shakespeare’s name
first appeared on the title page of his plays—Richard
II and a revised edition of Romeo and Juliet.
While the London theaters were closed, some actors
tried to make a living by touring outside the capital.
Shakespeare turned from the business of scriptwriting
to the pursuit of art and patronage; unable to pursue
his career in the theatrical marketplace, he adopted a
more conventional course. Shakespeare’s first
publication, Venus and Adonis (1593), was dedicated to
the 18-year-old Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of
Southampton. The dedication reveals a frank appeal for
patronage, couched in the normal terms of such
requests. Shakespeare received the Earl’s patronage
and went on to dedicate his next dramatic
poem, Lucrece, to the young lord as well. Venus and
Adonis was printed by Richard Field, a professionally
accomplished printer who lived in Stratford.
Shakespeare’s choice of printer indicates an ambition to
associate himself with unambiguously high-art
productions, as does the quotation from
Ovid’s Amores on the title page: “Vilia miretur vulgus:
mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret
acqua” (Let worthless stuff excite the admiration of the
crowd: as for me, let golden Apollo ply me with full cups
from the Castalian spring, that is, the spring of the
Muses). Such lofty repudiation of the vulgar was
calculated to appeal to the teenage Southampton. It
also appealed to a sizable slice of the reading public. In
the midst of horror, disease, and death, Shakespeare
was offering access to a golden world, showing the
delights of applying learning for pleasure rather than
pointing out the obvious morals to be drawn from
classical authors when faced with awful catastrophe.
With Venus and Adonis Shakespeare sought direct
aristocratic patronage, but he also entered the
marketplace as a professional author. He seems to have
enjoyed a degree of success in the first of these
objectives, given the more intimate tone of the
dedication of Lucrece to Southampton in the following
year. In the second objective, his triumph must have
outstripped all expectation. Venus and Adonis went
though 15 editions before 1640; if was first entered in
the Stationers’ Register on April 18, 1593. It is a fine
and elegantly printed book, consisting of 1,194 lines in
199 six-line stanzas rhymed ababcc. The verse form
was a token of social and literary ambition on
Shakespeare’s part. Its aristocratic cachet derived from
its popularity at court, being favored by several courtier
poets, such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Arthur Gorges,
and Sir Edward Dyer. Venus and Adonis is
unquestionably a work of its age. In it a young writer
courts respectability and patronage. At one level, of
course, the poem is a traditional Ovidian fable, locating
the origin of the inseparability of love and sorrow in
Venus’s reaction to the death of Adonis: “lo here I
prophesy, / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend /... all
love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.” It invokes a
mythic past that explains a painful present. Like so
many texts of the 1590s, it features an innocent hero,
Adonis, who encounters a world in which the precepts
he has acquired from his education are tested in the
surprising school of experience. His knowledge of love,
inevitably, is not firsthand (“I have heard it is a life in
death, / That laughs and weeps, and all but with a
breath”). There is a staidly academic quality to his
repudiation of Venus’s “treatise,” her “idle over-handled
theme.
Shakespeare’s literary and social aspirations are
revealed at every turn. In his Petrarchism, for example,
he adopts a mode that had become a staple of courtly
discourse. Elizabethan politicians figured themselves
and their personal and political conditions in Petrarchan
terms. The inescapable and enduring frustrations of the
courtier’s life were habitually figured via the analogy of
the frustrated, confused, but devoted Petrarchan lover.
Yet Shakespeare’s approach to this convention typifies
the 1590s younger generation’s sense of its
incongruity. Lines such as “the love-sick queen began
to sweat” are understandably rare in Elizabethan
courtly discourse. Power relations expressed through
the gendered language of Elizabeth’s eroticized politics
are reversed: “Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing / ...
Her eyes wooed still, his eyes disdain’d the wooing.” It
is Venus who deploys the conventional carpe diem
arguments: “Make use of time / ... Fair flowers that are
not gath’red in their prime, / Rot, and consume
themselves in little time”; she even provides a blason of
her own charms: “Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my
brow, / Mine eyes are grey, and bright, and quick in
turning.”
Like most Elizabethan treatments of love,
Shakespeare’s work is characterized by paradox (“She’s
love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d”), by narrative
and thematic diversity, and by attempts to render the
inner workings of the mind, exploring the psychology of
perception (“Oft the eye mistakes, the brain being
troubled”). The poem addresses such artistic
preoccupations of the 1590s as the relation of poetry to
painting and the possibility of literary immortality, as
well as social concerns such as the phenomenon of
“masterless women,” and the (to men) alarming and
unknowable forces unleashed by female desire, an
issue that for a host of reasons fascinated Elizabeth’s
subjects. Indeed, Venus and Adonis flirts with taboos, as
do other successful works of the 1590s, offering readers
living in a paranoid, plague-ridden city a fantasy of
passionate and fatal physical desire, with Venus leading
Adonis “prisoner in a red-rose chain.” In its day it was
appreciated as an erotic fantasy glorying in the
inversion of established categories and values, with a
veneer of learning and the snob appeal of association
with a celebrated aristocrat.
Since the Romantic period the frank sexuality of
Shakespeare’s Venus has held less appeal for literary
critics and scholars than it had to Elizabethan and
Jacobean readers. C.S. Lewis concludes in English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding
Drama (1954) that “if the poem is not meant to arouse
disgust it was very foolishly written.” In more recent
years a combination of feminism, cultural studies,
renewed interest in rhetoric, and a return to traditional
archival research has begun to reclaim Venus and
Adonis from such prejudice.
The elevated subject of Shakespeare’s next
publication, Lucrece, suggests that Venus and
Adonis had been well received, Lucrece comprises
1,855 lines, in 265 stanzas. The stanza (as in Complaint
of Rosamund) is the seven-line rhyme royal (ababbcc)
immortalized in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (circa
1385) and thereafter considered especially appropriate
for tragedy, complaint, and philosophical reflection. In
places the narrator explicitly highlights the various
rhetorical set pieces (“Here she exclaims against repose
and rest”). Lucrece herself comments on her
performance after the apostrophes to “comfort-killing
Night, image of Hell,” Opportunity, and Time.
Elizabethan readers would have appreciated much
about the poem, from its plentiful wordplay (“to shun
the blot, she would not blot the letter”; “Ere she with
blood had stain’d her stain’d excuse”) and verbal
dexterity, to the inner debate raging inside Tarquin.
Though an exemplary tyrant from ancient history, he
also exemplifies the conventional 1590s conflict
between willful youthful prodigality and sententious
experience (“My part is youth, and beats these from the
stage”). The arguments in his “disputation / ‘Tween
frozen conscience and hot burning will” are those of the
Petrarchan lover: “nothing can affection’s course
control,” and “Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy.” But
the context of this rhetorical performance is crucial
throughout. Unlike Venus and Adonis, Lucrece is not set
in a mythical golden age, but in a fallen, violent world.
This is particularly apparent in the rhetorical and
ultimately physical competition of their debate--
contrasting Tarquin’s speeches with Lucrece’s eloquent
appeals to his better nature.
The combination of ancient and contemporary
strengthens the political elements in the poem. It
demonstrates tyranny in its most intimate form,
committing a private outrage that is inescapably public;
hence the rape is figured in terms both domestic (as a
burglary) and public (as a hunt, a war, a siege). It also
reveals the essential violence of many conventional
erotic metaphors. Shakespeare draws on the powerful
Elizabethan myth of the island nation as a woman:
although Tarquin is a Roman, an insider, his journey
from the siege of Ardea to Lucrece’s chamber connects
the two assaults. His attack figures a society at war with
itself, and he himself is shown to be self-divided.”
Tyranny, lust, and greed translate the metaphors of
Petrarchism into the actuality of rape, which is figured
by gradatio, or climax: “What could he see but mightily
he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?”
The historically validated interpretation—for
Shakespeare’s readers, descendants of Brutus in New
Troy—is figured by Brutus, who “pluck’d the knife from
Lucrece’s side.” He steps forward, casting off his
reputation for folly and improvising a ritual (involving
kissing the knife) that transforms grief and outrage at
Lucrece’s death into a determination to “publish
Tarquin’s foul offense” and change the political system.
Brutus emerges from the shadows, reminding the
reader that the poem, notwithstanding its powerful
speeches and harrowing images, is also remarkable for
what is unshown, untold, implicit. Until recently few
commentators have taken up the interpretative
challenge posed by Brutus. Traditionally Lucrece has
been dismissed as a bookish, pedantic dry run for
Shakespeare’s tragedies, in William Empson‘s phrase,
“the Bard doing five-finger exercises,” containing what
F.T. Prince in his 1960 edition of the poems dismisses
as defective rhetoric in the treatment of an
uninteresting story. Many critics have sought to define
the poem’s genre, which combines political fable,
female complaint, and tragedy within a milieu of self-
conscious antiquity. But perhaps the most significant
recent developments have been the feminist
treatments of the poem, the reawakening interest in
rhetoric, and a dawning awareness of the work’s
political engagement. Lucrece, like so many of
Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, problematizes the
categories of history and myth, of public and private,
and exemplifies the bewildering nature of historical
parallels. The self-conscious rhetorical display and the
examination of representation is daringly politicized,
explicitly, if inconclusively, connecting the aesthetic
and the erotic with politics both sexual and state. At the
time of its publication, Lucrece was Shakespeare’s most
profound meditation on history, particularly on the
relations between public role and private morality and
on the conjunction of forces—personal, political, social—
that creates turning points in human history. In it he
indirectly articulates the concerns of his generation and
also, perhaps, of his young patron, who was already
closely associated with the doomed earl of Essex.
In 1598 or 1599 the printer William Jaggard brought out
an anthology of 20 miscellaneous poems, which he
eventually attributed to Shakespeare, though the
authorship of all 20 is still disputed. At least five are
demonstrably Shakespearean. Poem 1 is a version of
Sonnet 138 (“When My Love Swears that She Is Made of
Truth”), poem 2 of Sonnet 144 (“Two Loves I Have, of
Comfort and Despair”), and the rest are sonnets that
appear in act 4 of Love’s Labor’s Lost (1598).
Investigation of Jaggard’s volume, called The
Passionate Pilgrime, has yielded and will continue to
yield insight into such matters as the relationship of
manuscript to print culture in the 1590s, the changing
nature of the literary profession, and the evolving
status of the author. It may also, as with The Phoenix
and Turtle (1601), lead to increased knowledge of the
chronology and circumstances of Shakespeare’s literary
career, as well as affording some glimpses of his
revisions of his texts.
“With this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart,”
wrote William Wordsworth in “Scorn not the Sonnet“
(1827) of the Sonnets. “If so,” replied Robert
Browning in his poem “House” (1876), “the less
Shakespeare he.” None of Shakespeare’s works has
been so tirelessly ransacked for biographical clues as
the 154 sonnets, published with A Lover’s Complaint by
Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Unlike the narrative poems,
they enjoyed only limited commercial success during
Shakespeare’s lifetime, and no further edition appeared
until Benson’s in 1640. The title page, like Jaggard’s
of The Passionate Pilgrim, relies upon the drawing
power of the author’s name and promises “SHAKE-
SPEARES / SONNETS / Never before Imprinted.”
The 154 sonnets are conventionally divided between
the “young man” sonnets (1-126) and the “dark lady”
sonnets (127-152), with the final pair often seen as an
envoy or coda to the collection. There is no evidence
that such a division has chronological implications,
though the volume is usually read in such a way.
Shakespeare employs the conventional English sonnet
form: three quatrains capped with a couplet. Drama is
conjured within individual poems, as the speaker
wrestles with some problem or situation; it is generated
by the juxtaposition of poems, with instant switches of
tone, mood, and style; it is implied by cross-references
and interrelationships within the sequence as a whole.

There remains a question, however, of how closely

Shakespeare was involved in preparing the text of the
sonnets for publication. Some commentators have
advocated skepticism about all attempts to recover
Shakespeare’s intention. Others have looked more
closely at Thorpe, at Benson, and at the circulation of
Shakespeare’s verse in the manuscript culture: these
investigations have led to a reexamination of the ideas
of authorship and authority in the period. Although
scholarly opinion is still divided, several influential
studies and editions in recent years have argued, on a
variety of grounds, for the authority, integrity, and
coherence of Thorpe’s text, an integrity now regarded
as including A Lover’s Complaint.
The subsequent history of the text of the sonnets is
inseparable from the history of Shakespeare’s
reputation. John Benson’s Poems: Written by Wil.
Shake-speare. Gent (1640) was part of an attempt to
“canonize” Shakespeare, collecting verses into a
handsome quarto that could be sold as a companion to
the dramatic folio texts (“to be serviceable for the
continuance of glory to the deserved author in these his
poems”). Benson dropped a few sonnets, added other
poems, provided titles for individual pieces, changed
Thorpe’s order, conflated sonnets, and modified some
of the male pronouns, thereby making the sequence
seem more unambiguously heterosexual in its
orientation. In recent years there has been increasing
study of Benson’s edition as a distinct literary
production in its own right.
The Romantic compulsion to read the sonnets as
autobiography inspired attempts to rearrange them to
tell their story more clearly. It also led to attempts to
relate them to what was known or could be surmised
about Shakespeare’s life. Some commentators
speculated that the publication of the sonnets was the
result of a conspiracy by Shakespeare’s rivals or
enemies, seeking to embarrass him by publishing love
poems apparently addressed to a man rather than to
the conventional sonnet-mistress. The five appendices
to Hyder Edward Rollins’s Variorum edition document
the first century of such endeavors. Attention was
directed toward “problems” such as the identity of
Master W. H., of the young man, of the rival poet, and of
the dark lady (a phrase, incidentally, never used by
Shakespeare in the sonnets). The disappearance of the
sonnets from the canon coincided with the time when
Shakespeare’s standing as the nation’s bard was being
established. The critics’ current fascination is just as
significant for what it reveals about contemporary
culture, as the “Shakespeare myth” comes under attack
from various directions.
The sonnets were apparently composed during a period
of ten or a dozen years starting in about 1592-1593.
In Palladis Tamia Meres refers to the existence of
“sugared sonnets” circulating among Shakespeare’s
“private friends,” some which were published in The
Passionate Pilgrim. The fact of prior circulation has
important implications for the sonnets. The particular
poems that were in circulation suggest that the general
shape and themes of the Sonnets were established
from the earliest stages. Evidence suggesting a lengthy
period of composition is inconvenient for commentators
seeking to unlock the autobiographical secret of the
sonnets. An early date (1592-1594) argues for
Southampton as the boy and Christopher Marlowe as
the rival poet; a date a decade later brings George
Herbert and George Chapman into the frame. There are
likewise early dark ladies (Lucy Negro, before she took
charge of a brothel) and late (Emilia Lanier, Mary
Fitton). There may, of course, have been more than one
young man, rival, and dark lady, or in fact the sequence
may not be autobiographical at all.
No Elizabethan sonnet sequence presents an
unambiguous linear narrative, a novel in verse.
Shakespeare’s is no exception. Yet neither are
the Sonnets a random anthology, a loose gathering of
scattered rhymes. While groups of sonnets are
obviously linked thematically, such as the opening
sequence urging the young man to marry (1-17), and
the dark lady sequence (127-152), the ordering within
those groups is not that of continuous narrative. There
are many smaller units, with poems recording that the
friend has become the lover of the poet’s mistress (40-
42), or expressing jealousy of the young man’s
friendship with a rival poet (78-86). Sonnet 44 ends with
a reference to two of the four elements “so much of
earth and water wrought,” and 45 starts with “The
other two, slight air and purging fire.” Similarly
indivisible are the two “horse” sonnets 50 and 51, the
“Will” sonnets 135 and 136, and 67 and 68. Sonnets 20
and 87 are connected as much by their telling use of
feminine rhyme as by shared themes. Dispersed among
the poems are pairs and groups that amplify or
comment on each other, such as those dealing with
absence (43-45, 47-48, 50-52, and 97-98).
“My name is Will,” declares the speaker of 136. Sonnet
145 apparently puns on Anne Hathaway’s name (“I
hate, from hate away she threw”). Elizabethan
sonneteers, following Sir Philip Sidney, conventionally
teased their readers with hints of an actuality behind
the poems. Sidney had given Astrophil his own coat of
arms, had quibbled with the married name of the
supposed original for Stella (Penelope Rich) and with
the Greek etymology of his own name (Philip, “lover of
horses”) in Astrophil and Stella sonnets 41, 49, and 53.
Shakespeare’s speaker descends as much from
Astrophil as from Daniel’s more enigmatic persona,
most obviously in the deployment of the multiple sense
of will in 135 and 136. Yet Shakespeare’s sequence is
unusual in including sexual consummation
(Spenser’s Amoretti led to the celebration of marriage
in Epithalamion, 1595) and unique in its persuasion to
marry. There is evidence that some contemporary
readers were disturbed by the transgressive and
experimental features of 1590s erotic writing. Works by
Marston and Marlowe were among those banned in
1599 along with satires and other more conventional
kindling. Benson’s much-discussed modification of the
text of the Sonnets indicates at least a certain level of
anxiety about the gender of the characters in the
poems. Benson retained Sonnet 20 but dropped 126 (“O
Thou My Lovely Boy”) and changed the direct address
of 108 (“Nothing, Sweet Boy”) to the neutral “Nothing,
Sweet Love.”
The speaker sums up his predicament in 144, one of
the Passionate Pilgrim poems:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman color’d ill.

The speaker’s attraction to the “worser spirit” is figured

in harsh language throughout the sequence: in fact, the
brutal juxtaposition of lyricism and lust is characteristic
of the collection as a whole. The consequent
disjointedness expresses a form of psychological
verisimilitude by the standards of Shakespeare’s day,
where discontinuity and repetition were held to reveal
the inner state of a speaker.

The anachronism of applying modern attitudes toward

homosexuality to early modern culture is self-evident.
Where Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew their
boundaries cannot be fully determined, but they were
fascinated by the Platonic concept of androgyny, a
concept drawn on by the queen herself almost from the
moment of her accession. Sonnet 53 is addressed to an
inexpressible lover, who resembles both Adonis and
Helen. Androgyny is only part of the exploration of
sexuality in the sonnets, however. A humanist
education could open windows onto a world very
different from post-Reformation England. Plato’s praise
of love between men was in marked contrast to the
establishment of capital punishment as the prescribed
penalty for sodomy in 1533.

In the Sonnets the relationship between the speaker

and the young man both invites and resists definition,
and it is clearly presented as a challenge to orthodoxy.
If at times it seems to correspond to the many
Elizabethan celebrations of male friendship, at others it
has a raw physicality that resists such polite
categorization. Even in sonnet 20, where sexual
intimacy seems to be explicitly denied, the speaker’s
mind runs to bawdy puns. The speaker refers to the
friend as “rose,” “my love,” “lover,” and “sweet love,”
and many commentators have demonstrated the
repeated use of explicitly sexual language to the male
friend (in 106, 109, and 110, for example). On the other
hand, the acceptance of the traditional distinction
between the young man and the dark lady sonnets
obscures the fact that Shakespeare seems deliberately
to render the gender of his subject uncertain in the vast
majority of cases.
For some commentators the sequence also participates
in the so-called birth of the author, a crucial feature of
early modern writing: the liberation of the writer from
the shackles of patronage. In Joel Fineman’s analysis,
Shakespeare creates a radical internalization of
Petrarchism, reordering its dynamic by directing his
attention to the speaker’s subjectivity rather than to the
ostensible object of the speaker’s devotion: the poetry
of praise becomes poetry of self-discovery.
Sidney’s Astrophil had inhabited a world of court
intrigue, chivalry, and international politics,
exemplifying the overlap between political and erotic
discourse in Elizabethan England. The circumstances of
Shakespeare’s speaker, in contrast, are not those of a
courtier but of a male of the upwardly mobile “middling
sort.” Especially in the young man sonnets, there is a
marked class anxiety, as the speaker seeks to define
his role, whether as a friend, a tutor, a counselor, an
employee, or a sexual rival. Not only are comparisons
drawn from the world of the professional theater (“As
an unperfect actor on the stage” in sonnet 23), but also
from the world of business: compared to the prodigal
“Unthrifty loveliness” of the youth (sonnet 4), “Making a
famine where abundance lies” (1), the speaker inhabits
a bourgeois world of debts, loans, repayment, and
usury, speaking in similar language to the Dark Lady: “I
myself am mortgaged to thy will” (134).

Yet Shakespeare’s linguistic performance extends

beyond the “middling sort.” He was a great popularizer,
translating court art and high art—John Lyly,
Sidney, Edmund Spenser—into palatable and
sentimental commercial forms. His sequence is
remarkable for its thematic and verbal richness, for its
extraordinary range of nuances and ambiguities. He
often employs words in multiple senses (as in the
seemingly willfully indecipherable resonance, punning,
polysemy, implication, and nuance of sonnet 94).
Shakespeare’s celebrated verbal playfulness, the
polysemy of his language, is a function of publication,
whether by circulation or printing. His words acquire
currency beyond himself and become the subject of
reading and interpretation.
This linguistic richness can also be seen as an act of
social aspiration: as the appropriation of the ambiguity
axiomatically inherent in courtly speech. The sequence
continues the process of dismantling traditional
distinctions among rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry
begun in the poems of 1593-1594. The poems had dealt
in reversal and inversion and had combined elements of
narrative and drama. The Sonnets occupy a distinct,
marginal space between social classes, between public
and private, narrative and dramatic, and they proceed
not through inverting categories but rather through
interrogating them. Variations are played on
Elizabethan conventions of erotic discourse: love
without sex, sex without love, a “master-mistress” who
is “prick’d ... out for women’s pleasure” as the ultimate
in unattainable (“to my purpose nothing,” 20)
adoration. Like Spenser’s Amoretti, Shakespeare’s
collection meditates on the relationships among love,
art, time, and immortality. It remains a meditation,
however, even when it seems most decided.
The consequences of love, the pain of rejection,
desertion, and loss of reputation are powerful elements
in the poem that follows the sequence. Despite
Thorpe’s unambiguous attribution of the piece to
Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint was rejected from
the canon, on distinctly flimsy grounds, until quite
recently. It has been much investigated to establish its
authenticity and its date. It is now generally accepted
as Shakespearean and dated at some point between
1600 and 1609, possibly revised from a 1600 first
version for publication in Thorpe’s volume. The poem
comprises 329 lines, disposed into 47 seven-line rhyme-
royal stanzas. It draws heavily on Spenser and Daniel
and is the complaint of a wronged woman about the
duplicity of a man. It is in some sense a companion
to Lucrece and to All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1602-
1603) as much as to the sonnets. Its connections with
the narrative poems, with the plays, and with the genre
of female complaint have been thoroughly explored.
The woman is a city besieged by an eloquent wooer
(“how deceits were gilded in his smiling”), whose
essence is dissimulation (“his passion, but an art of
craft”). There has been a growing tendency to relate
the poem to its immediate context in
Thorpe’s Sonnets volume and to find it a reflection or
gloss or critique of the preceding sequence.
Interest in Shakespeare’s nondramatic writings has
increased markedly in recent years. They are no longer
so easily marginalized or dismissed as conventional,
and they contribute in powerful ways to a deeper
understanding of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and the
Elizabethan era in which he lived and wrote.

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, on what may have

been his 52nd birthday.