Special Guests: Sir Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson – The Order of the Sonnets
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In this special episode, Professor Sir Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson who severally and jointly have written and edited many books on Shakespeare, talk to Sebastian Michael about their book All the Sonnets of Shakespeare and how the order of their composition may differ from the order in which they were first published in 1609, and also about where Shakespeare's other sonnets which he wrote for his plays fit into the collection.
SEBASTIAN MICHAEL:
Today we are going to talk quite specifically about the sequence and the order in which they were published, compared to the order in which they were composed. And I am thrilled, almost beyond measure, and genuinely honoured to be able to welcome to Sonnetcast two of the most eminent authorities on Shakespeare today in the world: Professor Sir Stanley Wells is a former life trustee and former chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Trust's first honorary president. He is Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and Honorary Emeritus Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, of which he was for many years vice chairman. He holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham. He is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and University College London, and holds honorary doctorates from Furman University, South California, and from the Universities of Munich, Hull, Durham and Warwick, Marburg, and Craiova. Sir Stanley received his knighthood in the 2016 Queen's Birthday Honours in recognition of his services to Shakespeare scholarship. He has edited several of Shakespeare's plays for the New Penguin Shakespeare and the Oxford Shakespeare, he was for nearly twenty years the editor of The Annual Shakespeare Survey, and writes for The New York Review of Books and many other publications. He has edited The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies and is general editor, with Gary Taylor, of The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, co-author of William Shakespeare – A Textual Companion, and general editor of the Penguin Shakespeare. His many books include – and this is an abridged list – Shakespeare – The Poet and His Plays; The Oxford Dictionary of Shakespeare; Shakespeare for All Time; Looking for Sex in Shakespeare; Shakespeare's Sonnets and Coffee with Shakespeare, both co-authored with Paul Edmondson, whom I will be introducing in just a second; Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?; Shakespeare, Sex and Love; and William Shakespeare – A Very Short Introduction. Together with Paul Edmondson, he has edited Shakespeare Beyond Doubt and The Shakespeare Circle for Cambridge University Press, and his most recent book is What Was Shakespeare Really Like, which came out just very recently in September 2023. Dr Paul Edmondson is Head of Research for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, an honorary fellow of The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and a visiting professor in human rights, Birmingham City University. His publications include Shakespeare – Ideas in Profile; Destination Shakespeare; Finding Shakespeare's New Place – An Archaeological Biography with Kevin Colls and William Mitchell, New Places – Shakespeare and Civic Creativity with Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare's Creative Legacies with Peter Holbrook, and in collaboration with Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Shakespeare Beyond Doubt – Evidence, Argument, Controversy; and The Shakespeare Circle – An Alternative Biography. He is a trustee of the British Shakespeare Association, the Rose Theatre, and The Friends of Shakespeare's Church. He is a priest in the Church of England; and both of them together, Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, have edited All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, which is the book that is of particular interest to us today for reasons we are about to discover. Hello, Paul and Stanley, thank you both for joining me here on Sonnetcast today. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Very good to be with you. PAUL EDMONDSON: Hi, Sebastian. Thanks for inviting us to take part. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Now, quite apart from the extraordinary body of knowledge that you bring to Shakespeare, the reason I thought it would be particularly interesting to talk to you at this juncture is that in this podcast, I follow the traditional sequence of the Quarto Edition of 1609, and with Sonnet 60, we reached the end of the group Sonnets 1-60, which in your edition you leave intact and date to about 1595 to 1597, which, as it happens, is just a tad later than I would love to be able to date them, 1593 to 1596, but of that and the datability of the sonnets maybe a bit more later. But here the question now of the order of the Sonnets and the dating of their composition becomes especially relevant. And so perhaps before we look into the the reasons for reordering them and the methodology that you employed: what do we know about the original sequence, how it comes about? You speak in your Introduction of a highly ordering mind at work in structuring the Quarto Edition. So why do you think the Sonnets were originally published in the order that we are so familiar with today, and most commonly know, the Quarto Edition of 1609? PAUL EDMONDSON: I've heard the word ‘sequence’ mentioned quite a few times already in this conversation, and we don't think it's a sequence. It's clearly not a sequence. The ways in which the poems appear in 1609 do not tell a story. They were not written in the order in which they are published. That's something really to acknowledge straight off, isn't it? SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, it's a collection, though it does include within it a number of mini sequences. Some sonnets stand totally alone, but the first 17 do form a mini sequence clearly addressed to a young man. And sometimes there are pairs of sonnets, like 50 & 51, in each of which he's riding on horseback, for example. PAUL EDMONDSON: There are mini-sequences based on themes. For example, Sonnets 139 to 142 are about the power of a loved one's eyes. We, in looking at them freshly for our edition All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, noticed 19 pairs of sonnets and 14 mini-sequences. Now we'll come to the chronological rearrangement in a moment, but the fact that those mini-sequences and pairs survived our rearrangement is itself very interesting, and does suggest a highly ordering mind at work. So we have no objection to suggesting really clearly and simply: Shakespeare himself organised the 1609 collection in the order in which it was printed. SIR STAINLEY WELLS: Yes, by which we have to mean that the manuscript from which Thomas Thorpe printed the Sonnets, we believe to be a manuscript the ordering of which Shakespeare himself was responsible for. It's a big question, though, where the Sonnets actually came from, where Thomas Thorpe got them from, whether it was fully authorised or not. PAUL EDMONDSON: So, as you know, Sebastian, we want to uncouple any suggestion that Shakespeare himself was responsible for the order from Shakespeare allowing it to be printed. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Right. And this is a super interesting question. You just now said you believe the ordering mind is Shakespeare's own. In other words, you assume that the publisher received either with or without Shakespeare's authorisation an order that Shakespeare gave to the Sonnets. But they are not one sequence. They are a collection of poems in which we find, of course, mini-sequences and very clearly pairs. And so do you have an opinion on why Shakespeare – because you say it was Shakespeare who ordered them – why, he would have arranged the collection in this way? PAUL EDMONDSON: Well, I think he is writing sonnets over many years and then is putting them together as a special project over those years, constantly revising them as poets do their work. And I think as he's doing this, eventually his own best copy of his own work ends up being ordered in the way it appears in the 1609 printing. SIR STANLEY WELLS: But we don't know how that copy got to the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. That is a big mystery about the Sonnets, how they came into Thomas Thorpe's hands. PAUL EDMONDSON: And, I mean if you take just the example of the 19 pairs alone, is it the case that Shakespeare wrote one of those first and then thought, oh, I'll write a sequel? Or did he just happen to find a poem that seemed to match one that he'd written earlier, or was connected in some way. So looking at those pairs really carefully, you know, we might say, well, this is obviously a sequel. So, for example, Sonnets 50 & 51: 51 is very obviously a sequel to 50; some of them are perhaps a bit more tenuous as sequels, but they are pair-able in the way they appear in the 1609 Quarto. Why? Because of link words at the beginning of the second of the pair; or close in theme with a repeated word in the second of the two sonnets. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Of course. And this wasn't going to be one of my questions, but I'm prompted to ask it because of what you just said. Do you have an opinion, or hazard a guess as to what Shakespeare made of the fact that the Sonnets were published in his lifetime? In other words, do you speculate about whether he was effectively fine with that, or do you think this was an act of piracy that he would have objected to? SIR STANLEY WELLS: We have no evidence as to Shakespeare's reaction. Personally, I think he probably didn't want the Sonnets to be printed at that particular time. At the same time, you have to say he clearly had a manuscript or a series of manuscripts which he owned. He clearly cared enough about the Sonnets to keep them. I've compared it to a schoolboy collecting stamps: he clearly kept all these. So I do think that he wished them eventually to appear. But my suspicion is that, rather like John Donne, whose Songs and Sonnets were published posthumously, that Shakespeare was not wishing for them to be published in 1609. PAUL EDMONDSON: And I also think there's another way of thinking about either he did or didn't, or it was pirated. I think it could have been a well-meaning friend who published them for him. This is a plausible suggestion. He still didn't want them to appear because there's too much privacy in Shakespeare's Sonnets. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Some of them are very intimate poems indeed. People of the time would know that they were being addressed in the Sonnets. Francis Meres in 1598 spoke about Shakespeare's sonnets among "his private friends," so clearly some of them were very private poems. Others seem much more public utterances. PAUL EDMONDSON: They are many-moodied, as you know. But many of those moods are really quite negative moods and negative emotions and perspectives put over in Shakespeare's Sonnets, not least self-loathing, you know. So I think these are private poems. So I think he would have felt fairly bruised by their appearance in print in 1609. And it's interesting, isn't it, that it didn't sell well, that it's so little of interest as a sequence, no story at all. Why should a reader be interested in all this soul baring, this private stuff? And also a lot of the privacy of Shakespeare's Sonnets makes them very difficult to understand as poems. So I think for these sorts of reasons, it did not sell well, it was not popular, as well as the fashion for the sonnet form being ten years earlier, really. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, there are 17, I think it is, sonnet sequences published between 1591 and 1595. And we do believe that some of Shakespeare's sonnets were written during that period, and probably influenced indeed by some of those sonnet sequences, but for Shakespeare they were private poems. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I hadn't given all that much thought to that: the Quarto Edition of 1609 was not a hit, it was not a success, whereas to me it is the most interesting thing we have of Shakespeare's. But let us segue then into the question, which you've already started to answer, of course, and I know it sits at the core of this edition that we are taking as the prompt for our discussion, which is the reordering in a chronological – as far as is possible – order of the Sonnets. What motivated you to do this? You are not the first people to reorder the Sonnets, is probably fair to say: there are other editions that have attempted to reorder the Sonnets; but what I should point out to listeners, because it hasn't been mentioned yet: your edition includes the other sonnets that were written for plays, the ones that were not in the original edition. But could you talk a little bit about your motivation for attempting this project of reordering the Sonnets in a chronological order? PAUL EDMONDSON: So two things: first of all, no other reordering of the Sonnets, as far as we know, has put them into chronological order. The reasons why they've been reordered is to tell a different story, is to tell a particular story about Shakespeare's life or a related matter. This was not our project and not our interest. The second thing is to remind ourselves – Stanley, you remember this – when the idea came about: we were at the Shakespeare Institute doing some teaching of MA students. Stanley was talking about the Sonnets in relation to Shakespeare's life, I was talking about the writing of sonnets, and we started to think about the order in which Shakespeare had written the Sonnets, remembering, of course, that there are perhaps two ways of thinking about Shakespeare's Sonnets. One is the order in which they were printed in 1609, and the other is the order in which he wrote them, which is different from the order in which they were printed. This is a fact. SIR STANLEY WELLS: There are certain fixed points. For example, it's long… – it’s been recognised; actually not all that long has it been recognised that one of them is addressed to Anne Hathaway as ‘the wooing sonnet’, which therefore is clearly datable when Shakespeare was eighteen years old. There are two of the sonnets, which are translations from the Latin, and probably the Latin was translated from the Greek. So we conjecture, we follow the conjecture, which I believe is a very plausible one, that those are schoolboy exercises which would put them even before the Anne Hathaway sonnet. PAUL EDMONDSON Those are the Sonnets 153 and 154. So we were talking about these sorts of things at the Shakespeare Institute, and I suddenly stopped and said, 'Stanley, has anyone ever put the sonnets into putative chronological order and included sonnets from the plays within that chronology? SIR STANLEY WELLS: And the answer to both questions is no. PAUL EDMONDSON: So we went away and did it after that. That was the beginning of why we did what we did. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I need to hook in there: 'The Anne Hathaway Sonnet'. I remember so distinctly watching television and seeing Melvyn Bragg standing in front of, I think, the Shakespeare home in Stratford-upon-Avon and declaring with categorical certainty: it is the first sonnet that Shakespeare ever wrote. Now, you suggested that the last two, the allegorical poems, may be even earlier than that. But what interests me, really, about this is how certain – and it will then lead to the methodology – how certain can we be of this? PAUL EDMONDSON: All readings are conjectural. We don't know when Shakespeare wrote any of his sonnets or any of his plays, very much. One’s very much on uncertain ground, talking about chronology, and dating anything can't be precise. We don't know where he was when he wrote anything. So these questions are only slightly interesting because they cannot, in the end, be answered. But what can be compelling is better readings than others. And we're pretty clear that Andrew Gurr's reading from 1971, which identifies Sonnet 145 as Shakespeare's earliest poem, is an excellent, undeniable reading. Why? Because not only does it pun on Hathaway, the maiden name, obviously, of Shakespeare's wife, which takes us to an earlier part of his life, early 1580s, married 1582, but it also is in a different form to the other sonnets, and to anyone's poetic ear seems less sophisticated. Ergo: it's an earlier poem. Now, although we can't prove that, it feels as though it's extremely likely. And one would want to say that there is a world of difference between the style of 145 and virtually all the other poems in the collection. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, I would just demur to the extent of suggesting that the two translations are likely to have been made even before the Anne Hathaway Sonnet, when Shakespeare was still at school. PAUL EDMONDSON: But I would also add to that, Stanley, that the two translations are themselves very sophisticated translations, and although they may have their roots in a schoolboy exercise, I think it's a schoolboy exercise that Shakespeare is working up over time. But we place them first in our chronological approach, really to kind of draw attention to something bold and original and to say, look, he's been interested in the sonnet form probably since he was at school. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, the improving may have been done, I think, at the behest of a schoolmaster. I see a schoolmaster saying, yes, that's quite good, William, but do a bit better and therefore rearrange it. That's why there are two different versions of the same sonnet. Well, these are two different interpretations. It all shows how open to interpretation the whole thing is, doesn't it? PAUL EDMONDSON: It's a fact that the Sonnets were not written in the order in which they were published. Well, I mean, surely to goodness, this is obvious, because he’s, he's not writing them one after the other. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Except that there are times when I think he is: there are these what I called mini-sequences, and I think the first 17 do form a mini-sequence, and that they were written not necessarily half hour after half hour, but they were written within a limited period. PAUL EDMONDSON: If you admit that Shakespeare's writing sonnets, at least from his school days, or at least from the early 1580s, and continuing to write them throughout his career, then it throws the door open onto when any of them were written. And yes, those 17 could have been written close together in time or over about thirty years, and then ordered into that first 17. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Two of the sonnets can be fairly confidently… – at least they have a terminus ad quem, they have a date by which they must have been written, because they appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1598. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, and about the last two in the original edition, in the Quarto Edition, they remind one of exercises of copia, don't they, of like the rhetorical exercise of taking a text, translating it, yes, writing it again, writing another version: I think the suggestion that these are writing exercises strikes me as almost evident, and also the fact that they are not, very clearly, lived experiences. Am I right in thinking – because you emphasised this point a moment ago so very strongly, Paul – am I right in thinking that the notion that they were not published in the sequence they were composed is quite generally accepted? Or is this still controversial today? PAUL EDMONDSON: I'd say it was pretty much generally accepted. But what do you mean by generally? Only among Shakespeare scholars? Shakespeare scholars who happen to be most interested in the Sonnets? Maybe to a general reader this is not apparent, this is not thought about very much. But our book, because of the chronological approach, really does set out the suggestion, which we think is compelling, that Shakespeare cannot leave the sonnet form alone. He keeps going back to it over about thirty years. It's in the plays; he’s revising the 1609 collection. Well, we don't know that he wasn't revising all of it until 1609. I mean, how do we know that wasn't the case? So he's writing sonnets over a long period of time. The form clearly meant a lot to him. Therefore, he identified with it personally. Even after the time it was fashionable. He wasn't just writing the form because it was fashionable. SIR STANLEY WELLS: And he was using it for a variety of purposes, sometimes intimate personal reflections. In at least one case, there is a religious sonnet, Poor Soul, the Centre of My Sinful Earth. We believe that some of them are letters possibly addressed to a patron, possibly to the Earl of Southampton. It's a very varied collection. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: May I hook into this particular name, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton: I lay my cards on the table here and say that in my understanding of the Sonnets, he's been one of my favourites for at least one of the addressees. We know, because you state it so categorically, that you want to get away from the Fair Youth / Dark Lady dichotomy, if that's the right word to use, but because you mentioned the name there: do you think he has a role to play in there? Do you think he is the addressee of some of these sonnets? Do you think that he may be, for example, the addressee of the Procreation Sonnets? Or do you not want to be as specific as that? PAUL EDMONDSON: I wouldn't want to be as specific as that, because we can't be as specific as that. And all the evidence of the Sonnets points in another direction, which is that there are only 13 likely to be addressed to a male, and 14 which are definitely addressed to a male out of 154. And there are only seven actually addressed to a female, and only two more which might be, out of 154. The rest are wide open. And of those, you know, 'male sonnets', if you will, the forms of address change in their degree of intimacy and in relation to social status. So these sonnets are multi-directional. It's simply not the case that the first 126 are addressed to one man, which is the traditional story. And, you know, so many readers’ minds are just locked into that and they can't break out of it. We've broken out, you know, we're telling a different… – we're not telling a different story: we're taking, we're changing the conversation about Shakespeare’s Sonnets because you have to. SIR STANLEY WELLS: It goes back to Malone, Edmond Malone, in 1790, who said that the first 126 are addressed to a male and the others to a female. That's an excessively broad generalisation, but it's been accepted, unthinkingly accepted, until really until we acted on our beliefs and rearranged the Sonnets. PAUL EDMONDSON: There's one sonnet which I personally think might be addressed to the Earl of Southampton. That's Sonnet 26, which begins “Lord of my love,” because that is the social status and the form of address that Shakespeare would have used and thought about in relation to an Earl. SIR STANLEY WELLS: But even then, 'Lord' could be metaphorical rather than biographical. PAUL EDMONDSON: The other reason for Sonnet 26 is it seems to be a sonnet letter accompanying another piece of writing, and it has been suggested that this might be Venus and Adonis or Lucrece, both of which were dedicated to Southampton. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: This is another interesting aspect that I would like to jump in on here, which is that to me it feels – it has to be said, it's a sense, of course, because we don't have any evidence – that some of these sonnets, such as especially 26, because it so clearly says “To you I send this written embassage,” that some of them seem to be a part of a communication of which we lack the responses. Do you think that's a fair assessment, that not only this particular one – but this one seems to almost… because it comes so hard on the heels, well, it comes directly after Let Those Who Are in Favour with Their Stars, and he says, “Then happy I that love and am beloved | Where I may not remove nor be removed.” And then it's almost like backtracking on that and saying I spoke too soon. I boasted of my love for you, and the fact is that I need to become a better poet before I can do so. In other words, what I'm trying to get at is: is it fair to say that some of these sonnets may be part of an exchange of which we do not have the counterpart? PAUL EDMONDSON: I think it is fair to say that, Sebastian, and I… – obviously it doesn't apply to all of the sonnets in the collection. Another sonnet letter is Sonnet 77, and, you know, we've said that, it's often said, there's no correspondence by Shakespeare which survives. Well, there is, and it's in sonnet form, times two: 26 and 77. 77 is an epistle which accompanies the gift of an almanac. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, up to 72 I know them by heart. 77 not yet, but I'll get there very soon. But yes, to me that's very fascinating that we say we have no correspondence of Shakespeare's, but we have sonnets that may be part or take the form of a correspondence. Can I go back a little bit? Would you be able to expound a little more, explain a little bit more, the methodology for timing, for dating, the composition of these sonnets. You already mentioned some key dates in Shakespeare's life in relation to what I refer to as the Anne Hathaway Sonnet, because I can't remember its number, and we know about the last two. Would you be able to explain a little bit more how you then arrived at your dating in your edition? SIR STANLEY WELLS: We do depend to a considerable degree on the scholarship of MacDonald P Jackson in this. He has done a lot of very serious work on the dating of the Sonnets, and we largely follow him. But at the same time, we do have our own ideas about, as we've just said, about, for example, about the two that are translations being possibly schoolboy exercises, which means that they were written, well, we don't know when he left school, but certainly before he was eighteen. PAUL EDMONDSON: MacDonald P Jackson's been studying the chronology of Shakespeare's Sonnets in relation to the plays for over thirty years, and he's looked at stylometrics across the canon, especially the use of key words which are only used, I think, once in some of the plays and then again in some of the sonnets. So it's that level of tying up plays which can be dated – and of course, not all the plays can be – with stylometrics across the Sonnets. So we are following his considerable scholarship and liaised with him about this, and he himself is the first to say this is not a precise science, although he's come up with, as it were, bands of chronological possibility for chunks of the collection. He knows that's putting it crudely, and that the whole probability is that it's much more nuanced than that. But in terms of starting a conversation about the chronology of these poems and setting them out in a way that we just haven't acknowledged before as readers of Shakespeare for four centuries, that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to say, this is not the final answer, future generations will work out different ways of analysing these poems stylometrically in relation to Shakespeare's other works. But this is what it looks like when you try to do this. Isn't that interesting? SIR STANLEY WELLS: We're the first people to try to rearrange the sonnets chronologically. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: How was this received by other Shakespeare scholars? Your ordering of the Sonnets? PAUL EDMONDSON: Well, quite a lot of scholars whom we know were very excited about the book. Some scholars whom we expected to say things about it remain silent, possibly because they haven't engaged with the book. We feel very much that we've changed the conversation about Shakespeare's Sonnets, and that it should be probably impossible to discuss the Sonnets without acknowledging some of the things we've put over in this edition. We hope we've removed the troublesome story of young man and woman, which is overly simplistic and takes far too much for granted, and just doesn't read the poems closely enough. It's just not a good reading of the 154 poems published in 1609. SIR STANLEY WELLS: It doesn't sufficiently acknowledge the variety of the collection. PAUL EDMONDSON: Even before you start to think about its ordering, even before you start to do that, it's not good enough. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Which leads me into one of the for me, most fascinating questions, which is: I know because you say so in your Introduction that you strongly advocate a non-biographical reading, and you said so several times now in this conversation as well. You also say that they are deeply personal poems written out of Shakespeare's own experience, which I certainly also feel and sense that I get this impression. I go with Wordsworth on this: I think they are a key to understanding Shakespeare's soul. Now, for me as a writer – and this is where my background as a writer comes in – for me, one of the most fascinating questions is how do we reconcile this? How do we reconcile personal, experienced, lived relationships with saying that the Sonnets are not biographical? And I know this is a really important point because you emphasise it very strongly. You're not the only ones, other scholars have, as far as I'm aware, since the 1970s, thereabouts, argued very strongly we should not read the original collection as biography, and I would concur with that, certainly not in a simplistic way. But how do we manage this reconciliation between personal lived experience and saying that they are not, at least in part, biographical. PAUL EDMONDSON: Well, it's quite simple. We wouldn't say you can't read them biographically. We'd say that the story which has been brought to them is incorrect. And that story is a biographical one, so that you can hear the difference. We're not saying these are not personal poems. We're saying many of them are. And all of them relate closely to Shakespeare in some way. But he's not setting out ever to tell a story about his own life in a sequential way. And the fact that readers over centuries have done that has established a biographical sense of the poems. What we're saying is, even when you remove that, these are still personal poems, ergo, their personality is even stronger and more apparent and far more interesting with the old story removed. Maybe a difference between autobiography and biography is helpful here: we are reading the poems autobiographically, rather than bringing a story to them in order to tell a story from them, as Malone and others have. SIR STANLEY WELLS: And they're just snapshots of Shakespeare's life, aren't they? They're not a film, a sequential film. There’s snapshots of different periods, sometimes as we’ve said, it's sequential and therefore a little stretch of film, as it were. But it's not a long film. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: This is immensely helpful because this clarifies this greatly in my mind. An interesting example for me, if we take these snapshots, if we take these personal experiences, is Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed Such seems your beauty still, three winter's cold Have from the forests shook three summer's pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green. And in your mini translation that you furnish these sonnets with, you say pretty much what I think we all read, that you never seem any older to me than when we first met three years ago, even though I know time does not stand still. Now, the question that – this is an example – the question that interests me to hear your opinion on, is if we hear Shakespeare say to somebody that they have known each other for three years, should we wonder who this person is? Or do you think we are going down the wrong rabbit hole, even if we accept that maybe it's not the same person as some other sonnets are written to. In other words, are we justified in wondering, if Shakespeare writes so many sonnets, who might be these individuals? Or do you think: not really. That shouldn't interest us. PAUL EDMONDSON: Of course, we're justified in thinking that. I want to know to whom that sonnet was addressed. Of course I do. Who is it? What was the nature of the relationship? It's a ‘you’ rather than a ‘thou’. Which might be telling. Its gender is not clear. It could be addressed to either a male or a female. So we have no objection to imagining that this was an occasion to a real friend in Shakespeare's life. Why couldn't it be? SIR STANLEY WELLS: But we've got to say, we don't know who that friend was. No reason why we shouldn't try to find out if there are any biographical clues. PAUL EDMONDSON: And two things strike me, the earliest reference to Shakespeare's sonnets among his private friends. Francis Meres, [1598]. So poems about friendship, because of friendship being written by Shakespeare and in circulation among those friends – plural. And also that one of the reasons we're thinking about Shakespeare's sonnets as many of them being profoundly personal and, yes, secret poems, is because they are so very different from other sonnet sequences, and that their originality is very, very marked. There is no other sonnets by his contemporaries that are anything like some of the sonnets in Shakespeare's collection, not least because of the extreme sexuality in some of the sonnets. So there are many reasons why the collection is compellingly original, and that that originality is to do with Shakespeare's own personality. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Compellingly, but also enigmatically. There's so many puzzles, which is one of the reasons why they're endlessly fascinating. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I think Stephen Regan, when I spoke to him, called both – he talked about two principal addressees – that they are not idealised loves, but flawed loves. They have character flaws. They behave in ways that are not laudable, they clearly are very different, these sonnets, to other and more traditional sonnets. PAUL EDMONDSON: I mean, I'd want to, of course, to disagree with Stephen Regan. There are two addresses mentioned in Sonnet 144, Two Loves I Have of Comfort and Despair. And that's very much a poem about a triangular relationship. But there are two other moments of triangular relationships in the collection. And there's no way of knowing that those are the same addressees being written about on the two other occasions. So, you know, one arrives back at our thesis, which is there are many individuals being addressed in these sonnets, not only, definitely not only two, and not all the sonnets are addressed to somebody. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, some are a personal meditation. PAUL EDMONDSON: So only 121 are addressed to people, 85 of which could be either to a male or a female. And then there are two sonnet letters. Seven sonnets are addressed to abstract concepts, such as to the muse or to the soul, or to love. And 25 are personal meditations. So sonnets that for years have been assumed, ‘oh, it's to the Dark Lady’, Sonnet 130, for example, My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun, well, it's not addressed to a person. It's about a person. And there's a world of difference in that. And that's how careful one's got to be. And then, yes, two are translations, as we've said earlier. So it's a very diverse collection. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Eclectic collection. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: What we haven't really talked about yet is the other sonnets. The sonnets that were not in the original collection, the sonnets that come from the plays. We know, of course, because they are there, that he incorporated sonnets in plays, and you've included them in your edition. How, if at all, do these other sonnets that you for the first time brought together with the original collection differ and how well do they fit, if you like? SIR STANLEY WELLS: He finds the sonnet form useful for a variety of purposes in the plays, sometimes rhetorically, for example, in direct address in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet. The sonnet can be used for soliloquy, In some of the plays. Cressida speaks what's virtually a sonnet when she's meditating. The sonnet form was a useful unit for him to make speeches within some of the plays. PAUL EDMONDSON: I know, Stanley, you're especially interested in Beatrice when she steps forward after having overheard being tricked into believing that Benedick is in love with her. Yes, and she speaks a sonnet: What? Fire Is in Mine Ears. Let me quote it: [What fire is in mine ears.] Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much? Contempt, farewell, and maiden pride, adieu. No glory lives behind the back of such. And Benedick love on; I will requite thee, Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand: If thou dost love my kindness shall incite thee To bind our loves up in a holy band. For others say thou dost deserve. And I Believe it better than reportingly. Shakespeare clearly finding the sonnet form useful for soliloquy and audience address in this case. PAUL EDMONDSON: And especially striking is it's the only lines of verse she speaks in the play. It's a play which is dominated by prose. So it's an extremely startling moment, and it's as if Shakespeare is using the form in order to put a spotlight on the characters' emotions and inner life, as his inner life was also mapped onto the form. But it's different rhetorically because it's a dramatic utterance, not a personal poem. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I didn't know that, and that I find particularly fascinating point to highlight that he gives somebody a sonnet as a speech, effectively about themselves. PAUL EDMONDSON: And there’s a play, Edward III – isn't there, Stanley – when he dramatises the writing of a sonnet. SIR STANLEY WELLS: A play which has only recently been accepted into the Shakespeare canon: Edward III includes the king asking help to write a sonnet to his mistress, to the woman that he is wooing. A fascinating little example of Shakespeare portraying dramatically the writing of a sonnet. PAUL EDMONDSON: And again, to go back to Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick is trying to write a sonnet at one point, and then at the end of the play, both Beatrice and Benedick have written sonnets to each other, and we don't hear them. We only can imagine them, but we see them as props because they're given each other a sonnet to read and therefore to see their own confessions of love: personal poems to each other. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I'd like to move to two more general questions. There is a school of thought, I believe it's Roland Barthes who is one of the names associated with it, that the author is… – I think I'm simplifying somewhat – the book that is written is not so much the author who writes it, it's the reader who understands, reads the story they want to hear, or understands the meaning they want to understand. To what extent would you agree or disagree with a view that would say, each generation reads into Shakespeare, reads into the Sonnets what they want to hear? So when gender politics becomes big, it's gender. When it's sexuality that’s big, it's sexuality. When it's philosophy, it’s… – in other words, to what extent do you think we are prone to hearing and reading what we want to hear and read? PAUL EDMONDSON: All readers are culturally determined to some extent, aren't we? We can't escape our own time and culture. We can, I think, develop an informed perspective within our own time and culture, which is informed from close study of, you know, previous scholars and readers. So it's an extremely nuanced lens through which we encourage readers to read Shakespeare's Sonnets, whilst at the same time acknowledging that that particular lens probably wasn't possible fifty years ago for cultural reasons. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: This is a particularly important point, because the question, of course, that has agitated readers of these sonnets for centuries is, well, to what extent is there a sexual component in a relationship between Shakespeare and another man? And I think the point that we do need to be aware of is that up until very recently, it was simply not acceptable for Shakespeare to have had a sexual interest in other men. I think that is an important point to be aware of, that the cultural framework informs our reading of anything, but in the context of these sonnets, this would strike me as very significant. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, well, that's true that some people don't want to read the sonnets as autobiography. Some people would like to read them as fiction, as if Shakespeare is projecting himself through another character. But we are more inclined, I think, to believe that Shakespeare is speaking in his own person in most of the sonnets, if not all of them, and that these are deeply personal utterances. PAUL EDMONDSON: So to take that to the question of sexuality, it seems pretty clear when you do that that Shakespeare is what we have called for many years ‘bisexual’. But that's not been the case in sonnet reading. SIR STANLEY WELLS: People haven't found it easy to acknowledge this. PAUL EDMONDSON: He's either kind of gay and ashamed of being gay, but to say that he's bisexual is very distinctive, actually. SIR STANLEY WELLS: But it's absolutely the theme of the sonnet beginning “Two loves I have, of comfort and despair:” a man and a woman, both simultaneously. Isn't it? SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Of course, and they have a relationship with each other. They are “both from me and both to each friend” and “I guess, one angel in another's hell.” So yes, the term ‘bisexual’ – our term, this is a modern term, of course – comes closest to how one might describe Shakespeare's sexuality, and I think I would agree with that. I think our understanding of sexuality is simply not applicable to Renaissance England, or indeed to Renaissance society, because they had no word ‘homosexual’. I don't know whether even there was an understanding of sexuality as we understand it. I think that is certainly helpful for us to get away from our conception of 'gay, straight, bi, trans'. I think our categories are simplistic in relation to… PAUL EDMONDSON: Well, I think also we perhaps beat ourselves up a bit too much about terms and how they didn't have terms and language. Human behaviour has never changed very much. So whether you have the language for a particular kind of behaviour or not is sort of irrelevant to human emotion and feelings across time. And it seems to me that Shakespeare's period was probably quite tolerant of men having close relationships with other men and having mistresses and so on. SIR STANLEY WELLS: And of course, there is one sonnet sequence, Richard Barnfield’s, which is very clearly about a homosexual relationship. The sonnet sequences of the 1590s are almost all addressed to a woman, to a named woman, often in very artificial terms. But Richard Barnfield is clearly very cheerfully writing about his love for a man, his sexual love for a man. PAUL EDMONDSON And dressed up in classical phrasing and classical names. So he's masking it at the same time. That is not Shakespeare's project. Shakespeare is much more open than that. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I don't want to keep you longer than I said I was going to keep you – I could continue this conversation all afternoon here – but one question I did want to ask you, and you may choose to enter in on it or not, because I think for some people it simply doesn't merit discussing, but what do you make of the theories that abound as to who Shakespeare was or wasn't? What I'm hearing from you is that you think of Shakespeare as a man who lived and wrote from his own experience. But how do you view people, very serious people, people who we respect very highly in the world of theatre, who quite strongly believe that Shakespeare didn't write his own works, for example? I have heard quite far-fetched theories about who Shakespeare may or may not have been, I'd be interested to get your take on this. PAUL EDMONDSON: It's something we've written a lot about and thought a lot about. The response can be quite short. The Shakespeare to whom the plays and poems are attributed was born and lived partly in Stratford-upon-Avon, and any other suggestion has to refute all the evidence for Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon before it can start even thinking about anybody else. And it never does that. It just says, oh, I think this. Well, anyone can say what they think without authority. So in thinking about this, it might be helpful for listeners to read our free online e-book called ShakespeareBitesBack.Com which is a seven thousand word co-authored polemical essay which tells you quite a lot that you might need to know or want to know about this very discussion. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, and more recently in my book, which has only just been published, What Was Shakespeare Really Like?, I have a whole chapter on the Sonnets there, and what do the Sonnets tell us about Shakespeare? And I go into this sort of thing there too. PAUL EDMONDSON: So, you know, with respect, the fact that some actors and readers want to believe this doesn't make it in any way true. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: You can tell that I'm relieved to hear you say that, although I didn't expect anything else; I, of course, concur quite wholeheartedly. Before we wind this up, is there anything that you think, Well, if this man is going to do a podcast on the Sonnets of Shakespeare and he's inviting us onto his podcast, why weren't we asked this question? Or how is it that I have not been able to say this? In other words, is there anything you feel should be said? PAUL EDMONDSON: The only thing that we might say in addition would be as follows: In thinking about Sonnets in relation to Shakespeare's inner life, one of the aspects of our edition was to write a paraphrase of every single sonnet, which is a very difficult thing to do. And, you know, listeners, please write your own paraphrase versions. Better ours, you know, improve ours, if you will. But it's a very difficult thing to do. But when you read the paraphrases as quite literal prose – we were trying to write literal paraphrases in order to keep the oddness of expression of the poems themselves – there is a sense in which you have prose workings out of Shakespeare's inner thought. So that's like another place to go to, the paraphrases, to think about how Shakespeare himself was thinking through his emotions and sentiments. SIR STANLEY WELLS: We try to give the sense without the poetry, don't we? In doing that, we try to follow the workings of Shakespeare's thought rather than the workings of his poetic imagination and creative powers. Because we acknowledge the difficulty of these poems, some are much more difficult than others. Some are very simple, and those are the most popular ones, understandably, but some are cryptic, because, I think, they're so deeply personal, because he was addressing them to people who would know things that are not made explicit for the outside reader: they’re internal poems, they’re private poems, some of them, some much more than others. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: That is maybe a point that is worth emphasising that in the society in which Shakespeare writes and where these sonnets either are read or recited or even circulated among his private friends, people would have known each other and would have understood references and would have got puns and wordplay that to us are almost meaningless because we don't know the characters involved. SIR STANLEY WELLS: Yes, that’s true. I mean, for example, the sonnet Were’t Aught to Me I Bore the Canopy is clearly a topical allusion, isn't it? Who bore the canopy? What canopy was it? It could be to do with a royal occasion. And therefore you might link it with the Earl of Southampton or some other noble person. But ultimately it remains enigmatic. PAUL EDMONDSON: Another one that springs to mind is Sonnet 86, which includes the enigmatic lines: “… nor that affable, familiar ghost, | Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.” SIR STANLEY WELLS: Very cryptic. Mysterious. PAUL EDMONDSON: Many, many enigmatic lines across these poems. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: The words that you just said there, ‘enigmatic’, ‘cryptic’, and ‘mysterious’, they are a beautiful note on which to end this conversation. Paul Edmondson, Sir Stanley Wells, I'm so grateful to you for your time and for your insight. Thank you very much for being on Sonnetcast. |
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To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!