The Perfect Ceremony of Love’s Rite: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint” (review)

Robert Montgomery’s short study, more handbook than monograph, takes a close and balanced view of the 1609 Sonnets. Montgomery accepts what is often assumed: Sonnets 1 to 126 are to a young man; sonnets 127 to 152 engage in one way or another with a mistress and are followed, after two sonnets of neoclassical preciosity, by “A Lover’s Complaint” of disputed authorship. He lays out the disagreements over such matters clearly and cites some, if not all, of the dissenting scholarship; he gives due attention to commentary in the editions of the Sonnets by Stephen Booth and Helen Vendler; and he is at ease with the homoeroticism that made too many earlier critics retreat into blushing denial. Not all statements receive the explanation he might offer—some readers might want to know, when Montgomery mentions the liturgical shape of Spenser’s Amoretti, that this pattern took modern scholarly ingenuity to rediscover—but on the whole, students will find here many invitations to explore further.¹

The introduction establishes the author’s assumptions and notes the debates over the possible subdivisions of the sequence. Montgomery thinks it a true sequence, without a narrative but paradoxically centered on a divided and indeed scattered speaker. He calls it Shakespeare’s own rime scelte (after Petrarch’s scattered rhymes), although one might object that Petrarch gathers his famously scattered rhymes into a complex and sequential calendrical shape, like a garland of laurel leaves, perhaps, and that Shakespeare’s lines and self remain dispersed. The next chapter, “Poet and Speaker,” explores the speaker’s consciousness, including his pressured illogic and his mixture of compulsion and desire. Montgomery is struck by the absence of the young man’s voice, and while nearly all addressees in lyric poetry are similarly silent, or largely so (for that is the nature of lyric), the silence here is particularly profound and must be deliberate. Even Laura speaks a little, as Montgomery notes, if most frequently after her death, and Sidney’s Stella can at least cry “No, no.”

The third chapter, nicely entitled “The Rhetoric of Sincerity,” begins with Petrarch, to whom Montgomery is a little cool, saying that “he must have offered much that readers and poets alike found compelling” (35). (In fact, many of us still do.) He then moves to explore how the sonnets relate the language of sincerity to a fairly ironic, even bleak, view of identity, integrity, and constriction. The fourth chapter is largely on time, praise, and the speaker’s uncomfortable relation not so much to the past as to a future of certain decline and problematic fame, for Montgomery finds in the sonnets a good deal of anxiety in their ambivalence and their ironic evasions. The fifth chapter, on the Dark Lady sonnets, again stresses the speaker’s sense of compulsion: for a poet to remove the beloved’s chastity from the Petrarchan mixture need not mean escaping Petrarch’s generative poetics of loss and inward division. The mistress may acquiesce, but at least the lover can hate himself in the morning. A conclusion takes up “A Lover’s Complaint,” which follows the two final but inconclusive sonnets figuring Cupid—palate cleansers with parallels in a number of Renaissance English sonnet sequences that likewise pivot on tonally distinct lyrics and then append a longer complaint—and considers its generic allegiances, locating some thematic ties to the sonnets and largely affirming Shakespeare’s authorship.

This book’s value lies less in startling speculations or fresh research than in its humane intelligence and its understanding, not always exaggerated, of the poetry’s darkness. It is a meditation, valuable to specialists largely because Montgomery’s opinions are by now worth attention, being the product of much thought and experience. Some of his claims seem problematic, to be sure. To call Sonnet 104 (“To me, fair friend...