(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
146
Shakespeare characterizes the sonnets to the young man as “The barren tender of a poet’s debt” (83.4), pieces to be sent to their addressee to maintain the patron-client relationship. When the poet apologizes in Sonnets 83, 100, 101, 102, and 103 for a drop in the rate of composing and sending such encomiastic pieces, chiding his “truant muse” (101.1) for the “poverty” it “brings forth” (103.1), he assumes that he owes his patron regular poetic tributes, having enjoyed his favor, as Sonnet 104 indicates, for some three years. Sonnet 26, an epistolary poem, assumes that the patron’s receptivity to such tributary verse is a precondition for its production...
...the poem is presented as literarily incomplete until it is perfected by the patron, who clothes its nakedness with the “good conceit” of a receptive reading, an act resembling a feudal lord’s literal clothing of his vassal.... By connecting the clothing metaphor of the addressee’s “good conceit” with the “apparel” the speaker hopes to be put on his “tottered loving,” he suggests that it is not merely from a “star that guides his moving” that he hopes for prosperity but from the patron...
The Passionate Pilgrim and the Circulation of the Sonnets in Manuscript
150
...1590s among Shakespeare’s ‘priuate friends,” as Francis Meres stated ...more likely to have been those from the “dark lady” section ...than from the young-man... Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) contains versions of two poems from the “dark lady” ...no poem from the young man...
155
The whole collection of poems in Thorpe’s 1609 Quarto does not really constitute a sonnet sequence in the way that, say, the poems Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Spenser’s Amoretti do. They do not, like most other contemporary sonnet collections, tell a love story, but seem, in fact, to resist doing so. Like Greville’s Caelica, the separate poems of which were evidently designed for coterie manuscript circulation rather than print, Shakespeare’s sonnets are a heterogeneous collection. It is obvious that the poems written in the context of patronage belonged to a socioliterary situation distinct from that of the miscellaneous poems found in the “dark lady” section of the collection... ongoing relationship with a benefactor... timeless ... The only potentially narrative aspects of the young-man sonnets are the addressee’s affair with the poet’s mistress and the rival-poet episode... in the sonnets following the rival-poet poems in the Quarto, the poet resumes the strategy of praise (albeit with a stronger sense of the young man’s imperfections...
156
...17of the poems of this section define the “dark lady” as addressee, 9 others, including the thematically general Sonnets 129 and 146, exist outside this rhetorical framework... Anacreontic final two poems... alternate renditions of the same material...
...Thorpe... strong probability that the arrangement poems is... his. ...conventions of published sonnet sequences... Anacreontic tailpieces and the appended “A Lover’s Complaint” ...
157
... new editions of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece ... “Mr. William Shak-speare his true chronicle historic of the life and death of king Lear and his three daughters” (1608), “The late, and much admired play called Pericles prince of Tyre. By William Shakespeare” (1609)... Romeo and Juliet (1607)... “Shake-speares Sonnets .. Neuer before Imprinted” should have been hot literary property.
171
37 By contrast, of the first 126 sonnets, the vast majority, some 12 poems, seem clearly addressed to the young man. Five poems have a problematic addressee: 21, 25, 94, 116, 121. Nine others refer to the young man in the third person: 19, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 100, and 101.