The World of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Introduction (review)

Its secondary title suggests that this book is intended primarily for students who have not yet read Shakespeare’s Sonnets. So does its affable, freshman-lecture-like tone. In the preface, Robert Matz asks, “How did sonnets get written in Shakespeare’s day? Here’s one story” (1). The example ensues of Francis Bacon composing a couple of sonnets in the hope of reconciling Queen Elizabeth to her then-disgraced favorite, the Earl of Essex. Yet, like several such “courtly” anecdotes, it is oddly invoked here. Although he became a leading member of the King’s Men, and the majority of his Sonnets appear to be addressed to a youth of noble rank, Shakespeare was in no sense a courtier. Apart from the two strays in Jaggard’s piratical Passionate Pilgrim, his sonnets have not reached us in occasional ones or twos, but exclusively in the supersized sequence of 154 sonnets published in 1609. And as had become normal practice in the 1590s, the female-voiced “Lover’s Complaint” is appended. Extraordinarily, Matz never once mentions “A Lover’s Complaint,” even to dismiss it. Had he examined this poem, he might have found in it some slight but much needed moderation of the brutal misogyny that he identifies—rightly, I believe—as pervasive in the Sonnets proper. Such misogyny should not be seen as peculiar to Shakespeare, although Shakespeare’s delivery of it was especially subtle and masterly. As Matz cogently explains, “Even Renaissance sonnets addressed to women are, in effect, often addressed to men” (90). In the opening seventeen of Shakespeare’s he teases out the total marginalization of the supposititious young woman who, as the fair youth’s wife, may function as a “‘vial’” (127) for the breeding of male children. But Matz’s analysis of the deeply unattractive versions of heterosexuality reflected in later segments of the Sonnets, with “lust and revulsion reserved for women, love reserved for men” (112), would have been considerably enriched by a comparative glance or two at the maiden of “A Lover’s Complaint” and her continued emotional subjugation to her seducer.

Apart from this strange omission, the book is more ambitious in scope and original in approach than appears at first. Matz firmly rebuts the notion that the Sonnets are “timeless” (2, 18), quietly sidelining Helen Vendler’s approach to them—and to all poetry: “Vendler’s notion of the sonnets takes the idea of ‘literature’ for granted by assuming that it has always meant what it most often means to us today: a kind of writing that is playful or beautiful rather than written towards instrumental or material ends” (40). Matz, in contrast, considers it vital to be aware of Shakespeare’s world in a historical sense. His initial invocations of courtly contexts turn out, eventually, to be distinctly illuminating, despite some rather irrelevant-seeming accounts of codified table manners and the decline of chivalry. In one of his thirty-one short sections he argues, with well-chosen examples, that “same-sex love . . . was integral to some of the most cherished aspects of English cultural life” (71), such as feudalism and patron-client negotiations. Matz proves himself to be a sharp and subtle analyst of individual Sonnets, and he forges a workably convincing connection between the power relations of courtly love and—for instance—the “masochistic intensity” (88) of a poem such as Sonnet 57 (“Being your slave”). He is also clever, and convincing, in teasing out the essential offensiveness of virtually all of what he calls the “black mistress sonnets” (7), including some of those that have generally been found more pleasing, such as Sonnet 128 (“How oft when thou, my music, music play’st”). As he lucidly observes, “Shakespeare” (as he calls the speaker throughout) “wouldn’t talk sexually to the young man in the way he talks to the black mistress” (116). Here, as elsewhere, the speaker’s “teasing tends to slide from playful...