Love in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Research Paper Example

Overview

Given the hundreds of years of controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s sonnets, in particular with regard to whom they were addressed and why, it is perhaps not that surprising a great deal of their essence has been set aside. The reality remains, however, that this expert in relating insights about the entire human condition focused his genius on the many aspects of love within these short poems. The identities of  the characters within the poems is unimportant to the poetry: “…What they are, what they mean to the poet and sometimes to one another, what they must mean to us, is written into the poems” (Martin 3).

Moreover, as will be examined, Shakespeare never refrained from expressing the sadness and complications inherent in loving; the body of sonnets is by no means a tribute to love. He documents pain and frustration alternately with expressions of sublime rapture. Then, no matter the actual intent of the poems, a natural conflict may be seen in the author’s state of mind, one that reveals that this greatest poet of the human soul was subject to the changes in perception about love that age and experience bring to everyone.

Early Sonnets

It is difficult to separate the essence of love as expressed by Shakespeare in his early sonnets for two reasons: a sea of critical analysis as to their object, as in the later works, clouds the subject itself, and then there is the matter of Shakespeare’s own viewpoint. It is surprisingly less “romantic” than might be expected in early poetic work concerning love and mating. It is, in fact, bluntly sexual and pragmatic. As the boy to whom the sonnets are addressed is urged to marry and carry on his line, love plays a dual role. There is the calculated love to achieve a purpose that Shakespeare strongly  recommends, and there is the undercurrent of the love he feels for the boy which compels him to so write.

In these early sonnets, sex and love are virtually indistinguishable, and both are duties and obligations. There is very little joy in this love Shakespeare begs his friend to find, and there is a good deal of cynicism: “Thematically, Sonnet 2 treats beauty as a commodity in which to invest. In line 6…beauty is called ‘the treasure of the lusty days’” (Sauer 361). Again and again, Shakespeare reiterates his message to the boy. He is possessed of astounding beauty and he must pass this on. Sonnet 13 closes with this blunt injunction: “You had a father; Let your son say so”

(Shakespeare 17).

Taken as a body, however, the reader senses deep love at play, and Shakespeare achieves this in an oblique way. He does not go overboard in expressing how and why he loves the boy; his most direct expressions of this love are actually allusions to how unworthy he is to be loved by the boy, and how so many others, with greater rights to his love, surround him. In this, however, lies the real heartbreak and essence of this love. As far as the reader knows, the author has no motive in begging the boy to marry someone and have children other than the boy’s own welfare. This gives these sonnets a painful sadness, as the reader feels how hopeless the author’s love is.

Once Shakespeare lets go of his insistence on procreation, however, the sonnets alternate in striking displays of joy and regret. The middle range of poems expresses a distinct pain at how the author can never be truly united with the object of his love, but there is as well a sense of euphoria about the love itself. It is a love that is content with its restrictions, as Sonnet 57 plainly states, “Being your slave, what should I do but tend/ Upon the hours and times of your desire?” (Shakespeare 68). This is love that completely accepts the author’s passive, and even neglected, role, yet which still glories in the love itself. It is cynical, but the predominant feeling is gladness.

Later Sonnets

In all the sonnets, and especially in the later poems, Shakespeare presents love as a difficult and often impossible condition, but nonetheless one that clearly commands the author’s soul. There is a strong sense, confirmed by Shakespeare himself, that he was not interested in producing flowery love poetry: “While claiming to speak  ‘in true plain words by (a) true-telling friend’, he accuses his rival poets for using whatever ‘strained touches rhetoric can lend’…” (Faas 8). Clearly, the poet wants it known that he resists typical poetic effusions about love.

That in place, it is a great irony that the sonnets live on as a perfect expression of love to millions, and for hundreds of years. It may be that Shakespeare, in capturing the darker dimensions to love while still admitting to its joy, did what many poets could not: he effectively expressed love as the complex and sometimes frustrating condition it is for everyone. A mere glorification of love, even one rendered with Shakespearean skill, could not have had the impact the sonnet collection has had, for these poems as a body of work reveal love as the multidimensional, often unsatisfying, and occasionally uplifting affair it is to humankind. The success of Shakespeare in capturing love in his sonnets lies, as does his achievement in other spheres of human activity, in an uncompromising and expansive view of all that love can mean, for good or for ill.

Works Cited

Faas, E. Shakespeare’s Poetics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

Martin, P.  Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love, and Art. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

Shakespeare, W. The Sonnets. London, UK: Chiswick Press, 1892. Print.

Sauer, M. M. The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600. New York, NY: Infobase Publishing, Inc., 2008. Print.