Shakespeare’s Sonnets (review)

One of Dympna Callaghan’s aims in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is to move beyond “an undue degree of interpretive mystification especially by those who have been looking to decode a hidden meaning about Shakespeare’s life” (xi). Engaging with the Sonnets rather than with their author, Callaghan embarks on a well-guided and illuminating journey through the shifting emotional, psychic, and linguistic terrain of these poems. While the book does not purport to uncover any “secrets” of the Sonnets, it nonetheless charts a many-layered palimpsest of meanings, evoking enigmas of emotional complexity, even while it works to “elucidate and clarify the most significant interpretive ideas that have circulated around these complex poems since their first publication” (xi).

The book’s organization of six chapters covers some familiar themes, such as identity, beauty, time, love, and numbers. But in her readings, Callaghan frames the Sonnets within historically and politically nuanced questions that make us look afresh, for instance, at the aesthetic ideal of androgyny, both in the culture and in Shakespeare’s poems; the complicated sexuality often reminiscent of Ovidian rather than familiar Petrarchan conventions; and the shifting and gendered representations of time as they affect the “lovely boy” and the “dark lady.”

In chapter 2, Callaghan reconsiders the “problem of identity in the sonnets” (18), recounting and moving beyond the familiar critical “detective work” (15) regarding the historical identities of the young man and dark lady, as well as the sexual identity of Shakespeare. Instead, she productively demonstrates how the Sonnets deviate from literary conventions, specifically Petrarchanism, yet are “always conceived in relation to them” (18). Offering new readings of Sonnet 145, with its pun on “hate away” (Hathaway) (22–23), and Sonnets 135 and 136, with their puns on “Will” (24–25), Callaghan perceptively reads the biographical echoes to reveal their complex relation to Petrarchan and Ovidian traditions, while reminding us that “as readers of the sonnets, we simply have to learn to live with a considerable degree of ambiguity and uncertainty” (34). Here, Callaghan also recalls that sonnets pursue the elusive identity of the beloved whereby the “disjunction between the ‘actual identity,’ even where such an identity is explicitly assigned, and the lyrical construction of the beloved reveals the poet’s (and not necessarily the author’s) fantasy about the object of his adoration” (19).

Chapters 3 and 4—on beauty and love, respectively—explore Shakespeare’s treatment of these interlocking themes yet again, by perceptively charting the gendered inflections of the poet’s varying and shifting reflections on the young man and the dark lady. First, Callaghan analyzes the emotional imperatives of the opening seventeen Sonnets that urge the young man to marry in order to “‘breed’” (83) his own idealized likeness. She examines how the Sonnets intersect with biographical and cultural sources urging matrimony and procreation for young men in general and Southampton in particular. But ultimately more than unraveling the identity of the addressee, these opening poems, Callaghan demonstrates, are remarkable for their “emotional insistence” in wanting “the young man’s child, his copy in the world with an urgency of desire that is almost unfathomable” (42). What is at issue then is the endless desire of the poet-speaker, an “interesting twist on the unavailability of the love object in the Petrarchan tradition” (42).

Not only does the Sonnets’ meditation on beauty idealize the young man, and not the dark lady, but the irony is that associations between femininity and beauty are hallmarks of the poet’s praise of the “lovely boy”—associations replete with echoes from classical myth and literature. Callaghan further captures these complexities of the poet’s desire, observing how the “dark lady” Sonnets explore the problematic sexual magnetism of the woman, while both evoking and unsettling Petrarchan lyrical hyperbole. In charting this exploration, Callaghan also offers subtle analyses of the way in which evocations of the dark lady partake of cultural racial discourses on blackness.

Like beauty, the Sonnets’ treatment of love, as Callaghan...