Heylin is likely correct in suggesting that the sonnets published in 1609 were bootlegs, their printing not authorized by Shakespeaere himself but rather by someone who came into possession of the poems and, the enforcement of copywright law at the time being about as effective as Canal Street crackdowns on pirated DVDs, had them printed simply to make a few bucks for himself. The sonnets had been around for awhile, having been praised in writing by Shakespeare's contemporaries as early as 1598, and with public demand for Shakespeare's work very robust they must have sold well.
Heylin's explanation for why Shakespeare did not publish the sonnets himself is suspect, though, and his ideas hinge upon the assumption that these poems are of an intensely personal nature. As many others have speculated, Heylin finds in the sonnets evidence of the poet's presumed homosexuality. Anti-homosexual sentiment in the Early Modern era makes Proposition 8 seem kindly by comparison (but only by comparison!), so it is natural that if the sonnets were private poems detailing Shakespeare's love for another man he would want to keep them private.
A great number of the sonnets are addressed to a "fair youth," a young man who is praised extensively for his beauty and for whom the poet vociferously declares his love. I would say "profound and abiding" love, except that the love expressed here often bears with it a strained sense of hyperbolic exaggeration--that kind of excessive flattery reflective of what we might call brown-nosery today. In other words, I find many of these sonnets unconvincing as works of art, and the theory that Shakespeare wrote them as an attempt to secure patronage is as sensible an explanation as any--at least as sensible as the assumption that Shakespeare wrote the sonnets for the purpose of expressing his genuine feelings toward the fair youth. The fair youth in question here may well have been Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, a handsome enough fellow, to judge by his portrait.
Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (both book-length poems) to Wriothesley, and many scholars have reasonably suggested that Shakespeare relied on Wriothesley's patronage at a time when London theatres were closed due to an outbreak of the plague. Because many of the sonnets concern themselves with attempting to persuade the fair youth to marry and thus make copies of himself, it is also possible that Shakespeaere may have been hired out by the young man's family members, who presumably wanted the very narcissistic Wriothesley to marry and who were willing to resort to employing a hired poetic gun in their attempts to persuade the young Earl to not be so stuck on himself. The notion, as expressed in the sonnets, is that the fair youth has such intense beauty that it were mere selfishness to keep it to himself and not share it with all the world by producing significantly beautiful offpsring that bear his very own features.
Is this the argument of a gay lover, or even of a would-be gay lover? It is possible, but if so we are dealing with a defeated lover here, one who knows that the odds are not good. Add to this the fact that a sizeable portion of the sonnets are addressed to a "dark lady" and involve a high degree of complex (but often crude) male-female sexual imagery, and the responsible reader can, in sum, come to only one conclusion: we simply cannot rely on the sonnets in our attempts to paint a single, clear, and consistent portrait revealing who Shakespeare really was. If these poems are personal and not persona-driven or written in hopes of securing patronage, we have no power to prove it today. We have to look elsewhere to find out about Shakespeare himself, but the trouble with doing so is that there is nowhere else to look. Shakespeare, for all of his many pretty words, is a cipher to us. Is this necessarily a bad thing? It forces us to look very carefully at those words themselves because the author himself gives few clues as to what they mean.
If the sonnets are works of genuine self-expression on Shakespeare's part, they are clumsily so. One comment made by a scholar during a program I attended at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, has stuck with me over the last several years: if these poems had been written by anyone other than Shakespeare, we would not be reading and discussing them today, or, if so, we would consider them the work of a minor poet. Despite a few utterly brilliant moments in this lengthy collection of poems, the sonnets are not Shakespeare's best work.
Aside from the somewhat unconvincing emotional content of many of the sonnets, Heylin's claims are further complicated by another key aspect of the sonnets' context: namely that, despite the pervasive anti-homosexual sentiment of the time, men in Shakespeare's era could express love for their male friends without generating anything like a scandal. Renaissance society was not strictly "homophobic" in the sense that we understand the term; homophobia requires a consciousness of homosexuality and its presence in society, whereas homosexuality simply did not seem to be on the cultural radar screens of Early Modern. Men at this time could and did refer to their male friends as "lovers" without evoking suspicions of behavior that was at the time legally punishable by death. We forget that living in an age of relative openness regarding sexuality has changed the way people talk to each other about love; the downside of this new openness is that expressions of other kinds of love can be confused for expressions of romantic love, and, given that expressions of male-male closeness are often derisely labaled as gay behavior, this has diminished the options for male emotional expressiveness. A pervasive homophobia has been part of our culture for so long that the Elizabethan context of male relationships does not make sense to those of us who are conditioned to assume that only gay men would ever express love for each other. We cannot apply modern-day sensibilities to four-hundred-year-old texts and come up with valid readings, yet Heylin's argument seems to depend upon doing exactly this.
Furthermore, the fact that Shakespeaere did not authorize the publication of the sonnets is not so especially compelling in context. Shakespeare seems to have had no interest in publishing anything that he wrote, and Heylin's explanation that Shakespeare did not publish the sonnets because he had something to hide loses some momentum with this consideration. Other playwrights and poets of the era (cf. Shakespeare's university-trained, academically minded competitors, the "university wits") did desire to see their work in print. Their motives perhaps included the prestige of publication, the highest payoff in the social milieu of academics. Shakespeare was a businessman and a professional who likely never spent a day at the university except to put on a performance there, and publications of his work during his lifetime were almost entirely bootlegs. In withholding his works from publication, Shakespeare probably wanted to protect his work and to keep his words away from rival theatre companies, who could use them to stage their own productions of Shakespeare's plays and thus draw revenues away from the Globe. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, once a writer's words got printed, they were easy prey for a host of shameless opportunists, such as Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of the sonnets. Shakespeare might have had other motives to suppress the publication of his own works. Ultimately, though, any theory on why Shakespeare did not want his sonnets published is, like so many contextual details of Shakespeare's life and work, speculative.
I do not mean to suggest here that we should rule out Heylin's argument as an impossibility. It's quite possible that Shakespeare was gay, but if he was we will never know. Stephen Booth, the UC Berkely professor who edited the Yale edition of the sonnets (1977), remarks with acerbic wit in his appendix that "William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter." Booth also reasonably suggests that the sonnets "probably reflect a lot that is true about their author, but I do not know what that is." This I consider to be responsible scholarship. Once we get all of that business out of the way, we can go on to readings the poems and the plays, concentrating on what they have to say. Although I'm not a big fan of the Death of the Author approach to literature, I do have to say that this situation highlights the limitations of relying too much on the author's intentions in interpreting literary texts. In Shakespeare's case, we have no ideas what his intentions were. We have to look primarily at the texts, making reasoned observations based on what is there and based on what we know to be influences that led to the production of the words printed on the page.
It is a suspect enterprise to determine readings of the text based on rank guesswork, and yet there is a whole industry devoted to this kind of thing these days. Really, we just don't know, but addicts that we are of Shaekspeareana we cannot stop ourselves from hashing over the latest theories in a centuries-long tradition of making up stories about the man. Witness the recent to-do over the unveiling of a portrait that may--or may not--be the only portrait done of Shakespeare during his lifetime. The evidence for the man in the portrait being Shakespeare himself is so slim, so coincidental as to be almost ludicrous, and yet the portrait garnered a vast array of headlines when it hit the press. Regardless, I suspect that most people will continue to hold dear to the Martin Droeshout engraving that adorns the title page of the First Folio, the famous bald-topped gent whose detached-seeming head hovers (like one of the witches' apparitions in Macbeth) over a starchy Elizabethan collar.
And there we have him, the mysterious figure in the Droeshout portrait (itself a document of questionable validity!--a theme emerges ...) who, like Mona Lisa's cousin, bears a hint of a smirk on his face. What was the man thinking? Read the sonnets; see if you can figure it out yourself.
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