The Sheila Variations

The traps in Shakespeare's sonnets

Yet another good review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World is a new literary analysis of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, which has been getting universally interesting reviews. I am very excited to read the book. I linked to another great article about it a while back.

I especially found this section of the Chronicle review interesting, the one that discusses how Greenblatt deals with those pesky sonnets people have been speculating about for centuries:

Though Mr. Greenblatt's carefully argued suppositions bridge many gaps in his narrative of Shakespeare's life, his approach to Shakespeare's 154 sonnets is more restrained. These poems have aroused the most fevered speculation about Shakespeare's life for centuries, as literary sleuths have attempted to glean Shakespeare's sexual preferences and the identity of his lovers from the poems.

"I'm reckless in many places in the book," says Mr. Greenblatt. "But I'm careful with the sonnets because that's where I think he's setting the most traps." Some of the sonnets, he says, may have been written to persuade Henry Wriothesley, the young earl of Southampton, to marry against his personal inclination not to do so. The story behind other sonnets remains hidden behind what Mr. Greenblatt calls "a translucent curtain."

Mr. Greenblatt says that reading the sonnets as sexual autobiography is "the great temptation. This is the place in Shakespeare's work in which he uses the word 'I' and uses the word 'Will.' But it's precisely here that Shakespeare is at his most elusive, guarded and cunning in terms of how much he's willing to reveal and how much he's holding back. The closer we get to the word 'I,' the more concealed he appears to be."

Mr. Wells [Stanley Wells, another Shakespearean scholar and author]also points to the dangers of reading too much of Shakespeare's life into the work. "In the absence of some of the documents we would like to have" in writing about Shakespeare's life, he says, "we turn to the work to try to discover things."

The problem is trying to grab hold of biographical certainties in works of art that are so creatively oppositional. "Shakespeare had, supremely, the ability to hide himself," says Mr. Wells. "To enter into the minds of the persons in his plays and to present, sometimes, absolutely conflicting points of view."

Fabulous. Shakespeare had the ability to hide. To reveal as well as obscure. To grab hold of "certainty" seems pointless - can we not just revel in what he accomplished with his pen?

MUST. READ. THIS. BOOK.