Summary & Conclusion

LISTEN TO THE SONNETCAST
SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

In this, the – at least for the time-being – final episode of his podcast on William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sebastian Michael offers a brief summary of his findings and also takes the opportunity to examine in a little more detail the view held by some contemporary editors that the sonnets may not principally be about a Fair Youth and a Dark Lady – a contention that is largely based on a supposition that many of these poems "could be addressed to a male or a female" as one recent edition puts it – to see whether it stands up to scrutiny as we formulate any conclusion.​

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[AN INTRODUCTION: THE BACKGROUND AND OUR APPROACH]

​This is the last episode of this podcast in its current format. By the time this instalment is done, I will have recorded for you just about 77 hours worth of sonnets, their line-by-line translations, and my analyses and interpretations, with special episodes on the major topics of interest and several conversations with some of the world’s leading experts on Shakespeare and the sonnet as a poetic form.

So all in all, it is probably fair to say that most of what needs to be said on the sonnets has now really been said.

The Sonnets though, much as the other works of Shakespeare, are of course an inexhaustible source of reflection and inspiration and so I may well take the opportunity, if it presents itself in the future, to add sporadically to the discussion. There may be guest appearances that suggest themselves, or there may be new findings that are worth looking into.

Since I started this project a bit over three years ago, a new piece of research on an old piece of evidence has put forward the possibility that far from staying at home in Stratford-upon-Avon for all of her life, Anne, Shakespeare’s wife, may have joined him for a while in London and lived there with him towards the end of his time there; and as recently as September 2025 a tantalising new miniature portrait by Nicholas Hilliard has been discovered, which is widely believed to depict Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, one of our major candidates for the Fair Youth of the Sonnets. Painted onto thin vellum it was then pasted onto a playing card to give it support, as was quite common practice at the time, and, as was also not uncommon, the playing card used for the purpose was from the suit of hearts. What makes the find highly unusual and potentially significant is that the red heart on the card has been deliberately and comprehensively painted over with a black spade or spear, giving rise to much speculation about who did this and why, as a visual reference to Shake-speare seems likely.

So the last word on the Sonnets may not have been spoken, and my interest in the Sonnets most certainly hasn’t abated. If anything, the opposite. In the course of this exploration I have become closely acquainted with these Sonnets and through them with William Shakespeare, because not only have I been doing this podcast, I have also been learning them by heart – as of this moment I’m at number 134 – and I have been presenting them in live appearances, and with both these undertakings I mean to continue.

But I now want to bring this regular weekly series to a conclusion, and with this offer something resembling a summary.

When I recorded the Introduction to this podcast in September 2022, I told you that my approach would be – as it had been with my previous engagement with the Sonnets – to listen to what the words tell us about William Shakespeare and the extraordinary, complex relationships that are reflected in them.

The reason for wishing to do so and to largely eschew external sources and references is that when it comes to the Sonnets – again as with so much to do with Shakespeare – virtually everything is conjecture, except the words. Almost everything is debated and debatable, to a greater or lesser extent: right from the question whether these sonnets are based, as I strongly believe, in actual lived experience, or whether they are pure poetic inventions, or a combination of both, to the identity – if any – of the individuals who feature in them, to the putative dates of composition, right through to, of course, their several and joint meaning.

I felt certain then, before I embarked on this, my third and most intensive phase of study of the Sonnets that:

“A writer here has put his soul, his heart, his entire being into this writing. These Sonnets tell us more about William Shakespeare the man than any of his magnificent plays, let alone his long dramatic poems. […] The Sonnets – and this I find virtually impossible to doubt – talk about Shakespeare himself, about his love, his lust, his passion, his frustrations, his jealousy, his angst, his disgust, his anguish, his joy. There is no good reason to assume that that isn’t so.”

And in this, three years and nearly three months later, I find myself confirmed. It is impossible for me to put an exact number to it, but over the course of doing this podcast, I estimate that I have spent roughly two thousand hours with William Shakespeare and his Sonnets. And nothing in any of the conversations I’ve had, in any of the analyses I’ve read, in any of the few facts and copious opinions I’ve encountered has served to convince me otherwise. These Sonnets are the closest we can get to Shakespeare, the man. With them – to invoke William Wordsworth once more – he unlocks his heart for us. Of that I am as sure as I can be.


[A TENTATIVE SUMMARY]

It is tempting, of course, when delving into and presenting a literary work that has been around for more than four hundred years and discussed extensively, to search for new angles, for radically different readings, for groundbreaking interpretations. But through this encounter with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, I have come to appreciate: the reason a reading or interpretation has established itself and stayed the course is often – not always, but often – that it is by some margin the most plausible. I’ve said it often and I will gladly, to drive it home, say it one more time: virtually nothing about these Sonnets is certain, but in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend.

And so the – always tentative, as it has to be – conclusion that I come to at the end of this series is that William Shakespeare finds himself infatuated with the young Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, around 1592 and starts writing these Sonnets to and for him. Whether he starts with the Procreation Sequence and through them finds his voice when speaking to this young man who then becomes his lover, or whether the Procreation Sequence is in fact after all separate and comes later and is composed to someone else, is impossible to say for certain: what we do find is that the profile for the young man of the Procreation Sequence matches that of the Fair Youth and they both match the profile of Henry Wriothesley.

As his infatuation grows into a relationship with Henry, William Shakespeare also nurtures an impassioned, troubled, confused and confusing connection with, and lust for, the woman we refer to as the Dark Lady, of whom we are even less certain who she is than of the Fair Youth. The principal candidate here is and remains Emilia Lanier, nee Bassano, but the case for her is by some margin weaker than the case for the Earl of Southampton as the Fair Youth.

At some point Henry and this woman embark on a sexual relationship much to the unsurprising dismay of our Will, and at some point another poet muscles in on his territory by seeking and, so it would appear, receiving the favours of Henry.

These upheavals and crises notwithstanding, the relationship with Henry solidifies and continues, off and on over several years, in all likelihood right until and beyond Henry’s conviction for treason in 1601 for his involvement in the Earl of Essex Rebellion against the Queen.

Having circulated some of the sonnets, as was common practice, among his friends and his associates – this we know for certain, since they are mentioned to that effect in 1598 by Francis Meres – he finally sets about curating them into a coherent collection, maybe from around 1606 onwards.

Whether he actually means to get them published when they appear in 1609, we don’t know, but there are good reasons to doubt it, the principal one of these being the curious dedication that appears in the Quarto Edition of 1609, signed by the publisher Thomas Thorpe to a “Mr. W.H.” of whom we can only speculate who he is, but the most plausible explanation for whom would seem to be a Mr William Hall who may have procured the collection for Thomas Thorpe, bypassing William Shakespeare and not seeking his permission to advance them to publication.

That said, there is no indication that Shakespeare ever challenged or fought the publication of the Sonnets. But the original edition of 1609 did not go into any reprints, which suggests that it either wasn’t very successful, or possibly that the book did sell well, but Shakespeare put a stop to it and actively prevented it from being further disseminated.

Again, we don’t know which of these, if any, applies.

And if you want to know in detail why I settle on Henry Wriothesley as my most likely candidate for the Fair Youth and on Emilia Lanier as the Dark Lady, or why I think William Hall is the most likely dedicatee of the Quarto, you will hear me talk about each of these subjects at length in the corresponding special episodes which are all available now.


[A CAVEAT ON 'CERTAINTY']

You notice in all of the above again how much it is coached in the language of uncertainty. And if there is anything I have learnt from my engagement with these sonnets, it is that we just know very little, and that we need to treat what is out there – as much as what we ourselves put out there – with great caution and many a caveat.

In one of my conversations about these sonnets, someone I was talking to insisted that something they were putting forward, and that actually elsewhere they had described as “conjectural” was “a fact” and that a particular interpretation of one specific sonnet be “an excellent, undeniable reading.” The truth though is: excellent a reading may be, but it is far from undeniable, and the only fact we have really is that there are practically no undeniable facts.

Everything is and remains conjecture. Partly because we don’t know, partly though because we are apt to mix our interpretations with the few snippets of factuality we have and then declare something as certain that isn’t.

Sometimes we are so keen on seeing something that we detect it even when it is not there, or inversely ignore evidence that doesn’t support our aim because it doesn’t. And such cases of poetic pareidolia or its inversion are all too common, even among highly respected scholars. And even the most highly scholars make mistakes: every single one of the editions I’ve consulted for this podcast, including the three excellent, currently leading ones – John Kerrigan’s New Penguin Edition, Colin Burrows' Oxford Edition, and Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Arden Edition – all contain errors.

And that is also something we simply have to bear in mind: we are all human, we all err.


[THE 'MANY INDIVIDUALS' FALLACY – WHY EDMOND MALONE IS MOST LIKELY RIGHT ABOUT THE FAIR YOUTH AND THE DARK LADY]

To this day, one of the most widely encountered points of dispute relating to the sonnets is the question of whom these poems are to or about. And you will find people saying things like ‘only x number of these sonnets are actually addressed to a man and only x number to a woman’, drawing from this the conclusion that the Sonnets could be written to or about more or less anyone.

I have spoken on this point on several occasions in this podcast, but since we are now drawing to an end I want to take this opportunity to enter in on it once more in a little more detail, because it matters fundamentally to how we understand these sonnets and how valid any conclusion, such as the one I just came to, can be considered to be.

It is true, if you read each poem in isolation and count as ‘addressed to a male’ only those that identifiably use a male pronoun or a term of address such as ‘sweet boy’ or ‘Lord of my love’, you arrive at a relatively small number. And the same applies to the Dark Lady Sonnets.

But doing so means doing two things:

1) Ignoring the certainly authoritative – in all likelihood authorial – hand that has put the collection together and grouped the sonnets into a section that from start to finish suggests and only ever positively mentions as a human addressee a young man, Sonnets 1-126, and a section that from start to finish suggests and only ever positively mentions as a human addressee a woman, Sonnets 127-154, or, leaving out the two final poems which aren’t really strictly part of the body of the collection, Sonnets 127-152.

Whereby both the Dark Lady Sonnets and the Fair Youth Sonnets make reference to each other – the Dark Lady Sonnets in the poems numbered 133 and 134, as well as 145 which directly says, “Two loves I have, of comfort and despair” and identifies these two as “a man right fair” and “a woman coloured ill,” and the Fair Youth Sonnets implicitly in the poems numbered 33, 34, and 35, and explicitly in those numbered 40, 41, and 42. This alone tells us that we are in all likelihood dealing with two principal figures.

2) But it also ignores the simple reality that as a poet you do not need or want to keep mentioning the person or the person’s gender whom you are writing to or about: it’s a series. The fact that you are my male lover is established as early as Sonnet 20. I don’t then need to keep reminding you or any reader or listener of this. Doing so would be beyond measure tedious: Imagine every single poem saying something like ‘my dear boy’, ‘oh mistress mine’, ‘my Lord’, ‘he, whom I love’, ‘she who stirs me to distraction’, ‘my heart is his’, ‘hers be my will’… – It would be unbearable. Our Will has way more sense and poetic judgment than that.   

But let’s take a closer look in these last remaining minutes of our investigation at this prevailing contention that so many of these sonnets could be “addressed to a male or a female,” as Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells, for example, put it in their edition of The Sonnets. And I am citing their edition here, because we spoke about it on this podcast: it pursues a line of argument that you will also encounter elsewhere, but of course with their standing in Shakespeare scholarship, their edition comes along with a certain degree of kudos and significance, which we should therefore pay attention to.

Take Sonnet 39, for example. About this, they say, in those words, it “could be addressed to either a male or a female,” but the sestet, consisting of the third quatrain and the closing couplet, reads:

O absence, what a torment wouldst thou prove
Were it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave
To entertain the time with thoughts of love,
Which time and thoughts so sweetly dost deceive,
       And that thou teachest how to make one twain
       By praising him here who doth hence remain.

Clearly and unambiguously referring to a man.

This is an actual oversight where a direct reference to “praising him here who doth hence remain” was simply missed: it’s the kind of mistake that is easy enough to make.

Some cases depend rather more on interpretation: Sonnet 62, for example, which they and others similarly classify as possibly being written to a man or a woman:

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for myself mine own worth do define
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me my self indeed,
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read:
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
       Tis thee, my self, that for myself I praise,
       Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

The whole poem is about a poet seeing himself reflected in the mirror and discovering what he truly looks like, realising that his self-love is conceited: what he is actually admiring in himself is the beauty of his lover. True, this could, in theory, just about also be a woman, but not only does the sonnet clearly play on a recognition by the poet of himself in a younger man, it also – and more tangibly compelling as evidence – sets the context for the next poem, Sonnet 63, which picks up on that very same thought:

Against my love shall be as I am now,
With time's injurious hand crushed and oreworn,
When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles, when his youthful morn
Hath travelled on to age's steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life.
       His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
       And they shall live, and he in them still green.

And this poem that says I am here with this poetry forestalling against my love being just as I am now and as I have just a moment ago in the previous sonnet described myself, is clearly, unambiguously, about a man.

Sonnet 110 similarly gets classified as a poem that could be addressed to a man or a woman, but in it, William Shakespeare speaks of his lover as “an older friend,” as compared to the “newer proof” with whom he has “gone here and there,” and then he calls him “A god in love, to whom I am confined.”

Shakespeare in the Sonnets consistently distinguishes between his male lover, whom he calls ‘friend’ and his female lover whom he calls ‘mistress’. He also calls both of them ‘love’, but he never refers to his mistress as ‘friend’ and it would be a rare lover and poet indeed at the time who referred to his mistress as ‘a god in love’, when he could call her ‘goddess in love, to whom I am confined’.

Of Sonnets 100 to 103 Edmondson Wells correctly state that they all belong to a group about the poet’s Muse and poetic writing, but for Sonnets 100, 102, and 103 they purport that these could be written to a man or a woman, even though Sonnet 101 clearly – as they also acknowledge – is about a man. Thus they allow for the other three sonnets in the quartet to be to someone else, which is possible again in theory, but really not at all likely for any reason in practice.

Still, how closely these four sonnets are connected and how much one being addressed to a man signifies that the others therefore too are addressed to him is debatable. Not so with Sonnets 5 & 6. Sonnet 6 directly continues the argument of Sonnet 5 and with it forms a closely linked pair: these two have to be read together to make sense. Yet Sonnet 5 they leave out from their count of sonnets that are about a young man even though of Sonnet 6 they acknowledge it is “likely to be addressed to a male.”

Worth noting in this context is that very few people indeed seriously doubt that all of the first 17 Procreation Sonnets are to and about a single young man, since they are all so closely thematically linked.

Similar inconsistencies occur in the Dark Lady Sonnets too. Of Sonnet 150 they say it “could be addressed to a male or a female,” which in theory it could, but the sonnet says:

O though I love what others do abhor,
With others thou shouldst not abhor my state:
       If thy unworthiness raised love in me,
       More worthy I to be beloved of thee.   

This makes direct reference to Sonnet 131:

Yet in good faith some say that thee behold,
Thy face hath not the power to make love groan,

and of course the first of the Dark Lady Sonnets too speaks of the world’s traditional disdain at the time for women of a darker complexion, with black hair and black eyes:

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.

So context really matters.

The mini-sequence 78 to 86 is a good case in point. These are the Rival Poet Sonnets and in theory all of these could be addressed to a man or a woman: none of them makes direct, explicit reference to the sex of the person they talk to.

But they don’t need to: the person is established, as is the relationship Shakespeare has with him. By the time we get to the Rival Poet sequence we already have a clear, strong profile of this young man. Leaving aside the tone of these sonnets – which is of course wide open to interpretation, although to me it sounds entirely congruent with them being addressed to a man – right in the middle of the group, in Sonnet 82, Shakespeare refers to himself as “thy true-telling friend,” which again would be extraordinarily odd if it were suddenly and unexpectedly to mean friend to a mistress, or some random patroness.


And one more thing we should pay attention to. Sonnet 78, the first of the Rival Poet group starts with:

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse

confirming what we already know: so many of these sonnets are about you, the same young man.

Sonnet 76 just before then makes this most explicit of them all:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
       For as the sun is daily new and old,
       So is my love still telling what is told.

So when Edmond Malone – the man who rescues the Sonnets from oblivion and restores them to their original order and text in 1790 following the messed around and reshuffled edition by John Benson of 1640 – identifies the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady as the two people these sonnets are principally about he is not randomly inventing things. He discerns a pattern that is obvious to spot. He sees and recognises the context these groups of sonnets stand in and he is alert to the fact – and I call this now consciously and deliberately a ‘fact’ – that a poet does not need to furnish each and every one of his poems in a collection with an identifier to make it clear to us that they are addressed to the same person.

We do well to honour that. Not least, because thus we honour the poet.

Because no matter what we believe, or how we interpret these sonnets, or what words we allow to be specific enough to refer to a person’s gender, what is fact and what is undeniable is that the original 1609 Quarto Edition comes with an organising principle by which the explicit identification of the addressed or spoken about person’s gender, when it is present, is always male in Sonnets 1-126. Sometimes there is none, but never is there an explicit identification of a woman in these first 126 Sonnets, and that very strongly suggests that the person who organised it, in all likelihood Shakespeare himself, deliberately and consciously grouped them together because they belong together.

Similarly, 127-154, are all to or about a woman: never once – with the exception of 144 already mentioned, Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair – is there a man positively identified as the addressee or as the subject of the poem, and that includes Sonnet 145 which would strongly appear not to be about the Dark Lady but about Anne Shakespeare, nee Hathaway, and of which we cannot know the reason why it sits there, at that particular juncture in the collection.

But since we are talking about certainties, and without wanting to go into any detail here – the detail is discussed of course in the episode about that poem – even the contention that the Anne Hathaway Sonnet 145 ‘must’ be an early work – as you will find posited widely and often and by highly prominent people – is pure conjecture: there is zero proof of that; it is simply one of at least two possible ways of reading the poem. Another way being that Shakespeare deliberately chooses a different form, a simpler, more direct style, to talk to and about his wife at that particular point in his life, when he has good reason to seek and, when he gets it, appreciate her forgiveness for his many years of conducting affairs with other people, both male and female, particularly and principally the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady.

Everything is conjecture. Except the words.

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[A CLOSING NOTE]

But the words are wonderful. I also said this in my Introduction:

“The language is glorious. It is sometimes maybe a bit taxing because you don’t always understand everything immediately, but the Sonnets can all be understood, and if there is one desire, one wish I have with this whole project, then it is to make the Sonnets maybe even just a tad more understandable, a bit more directly accessible to somebody. So if only one or two amongst you out there think, ah this has helped me to understand and enjoy a Sonnet more than I would have done otherwise, this has encouraged me to spend a bit more time with this Sonnet, or this has given me an entry point to the Sonnet, then my job here, such as it is, is done. That’s all I want to do, and I want to share the Sonnets because I love them so much.”

And now that this is done, I leave it to you to decide whether the ‘mission’, such as it was, has been accomplished, and if so to what extent.

For me, this has been and will remain – and of course I know this is a cliche, but it’s actually true – a journey of discovery, and more than anything I sense that although I have acquired a great deal more familiarity and understanding, the best I can – and therefore shall endeavour to – do, is to continue to approach these exquisite poems with love, humility, and wonder.

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