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The Sonnets' Mysteries

154 poems, one cryptic dedication, and three centuries of detective work. What we actually know about Shakespeare's most personal book.

In 1609, the stationer Thomas Thorpe published Shake-speares Sonnets — “Neuer before Imprinted” — 154 sonnets followed by the long poem A Lover’s Complaint. The book arrived with a dedication that has generated more speculation per word than any paragraph in English literature. Almost everything about the Sonnets’ circumstances is uncertain; the poems themselves are the one solid fact.

The publication

On 20 May 1609, the Stationers’ Register recorded Thorpe’s claim to “a booke called Shakespeares sonnettes.” The poems had circulated privately for years — Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia (1598), had already praised Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets among his private friends” — but 1609 is their first printing. Whether Shakespeare authorized it is unknown: the dedication is signed “T.T.” — Thomas Thorpe — not Shakespeare. The book may have been printed with his cooperation, his indifference, or behind his back; scholars argue all three.

The dedication

Set in a famous triangle of stops, it reads (in modern spelling):

TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE ENSUING SONNETS MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESS AND THAT ETERNITY PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH. T.T.

Every noun is contested. “Begetter” could mean inspirer, procurer of the manuscript, or dedicatee. “Mr. W. H.” has never been identified. The leading candidates:

The honest summary: the dedication is Thorpe’s, not Shakespeare’s, and “Mr. W.H.” may be someone Thorpe, not Shakespeare, wanted to flatter. The poems themselves never name their addressees.

The Fair Youth (Sonnets 1–126)

The first 126 sonnets address a young man of high rank and great beauty, urging him (in the first 17, the “procreation sonnets”) to marry and reproduce his beauty in children, then tracing an intense, jealous, erotically charged friendship through absence, betrayal, and reconciliation. If the poems are autobiographical, they are the most intimate record Shakespeare left; if they are dramatic fictions in the Petrarchan tradition, they are a virtuoso performance. Both readings have serious defenders. The youth has been identified with Southampton, with Pembroke, and with nobody at all — “the fair youth” may be a composite, or a convention.

The Dark Lady (Sonnets 127–152)

Then the sequence turns: to a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, desired and despised in the same breath — “my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (Sonnet 130). She is married to another; the poet and the young man both pursue her; the triangle ends in recrimination. Proposed identifications include Emilia Lanier (1569–1645), the court musician’s wife and first Englishwoman to publish a volume of original poetry — proposed by A. L. Rowse in 1973 — and a dozen others. None has evidence beyond circumstantial fit. The “dark lady” is a literary fact; the woman, if there was one, is lost.

The Rival Poet (Sonnets 78–86)

A cluster of sonnets complains of a rival — a more learned, more fashionable poet winning the young man’s favor. George Chapman (Homer’s translator) is the usual candidate; Christopher Marlowe has been proposed. The poems give no name, and the episode may be pure convention: the “rival poet” is a stock figure in sonnet sequences.

One certain thing

Whatever the circumstances, the sequence contains some of the most famous lines in English, and their text is secure. Sonnet 18 opens:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

No dedication needed: the poems survived the mystery. Four centuries of readers have found their own Fair Youths and Dark Ladies in them — which may be exactly what the sequence was built to allow.

Source notes

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