A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets (review)

This volume of twenty-five wide-ranging essays represents the second large collection to be devoted to Shakespeare's sonnets within the space of ten years. The editor of the volume's predecessor, James Schiffer, has a guest spot in the current assembly, his topic pointedly being "The Incomplete Narrative of Shakespeare's Sonnets."¹ The answer to the obvious question—whether this new publication is necessary—is easily and positively given: the sonnets generate responses as infinite and varied as the study of chess openings, and Schoenfeldt's contributors, who do not overlap too much with Schiffer's, have some penetrating, and often inspiring, things to say.

The book covers the obvious and prevalent concerns of recent criticism: sonnet forms and sequences, literary predecessors (in particular, Petrarch), editing and biography, manuscript and print, and (more loosely) "Models of Desire," "Ideas of Darkness," "Memory and Repetition," and the sonnets in relation to the plays. Like Schiffer, Schoenfeldt bridges old and new by including three previously published essays by distinguished scholars: Stephen Booth's chapter, "The Value of the Sonnets," taken from his earlier book on the sonnets; Helen Vendler's resolutely formalist appreciation from her monograph; and Stephen Orgel's spirited "Mr. Who He?," published originally as a review article.² Booth and Vendler, who lead in the opening section, lay down a stylistic benchmark against which many of the subsequent contributions may be measured or from which they singularly depart. However, there can be no absolutes. Lars Engle, in a particularly engaging piece on the tension between formalism and intentionalism in Empson, adroitly demonstrates that not even Booth and Vendler wholly escape the fascination of biographical speculation.³

Thankfully, "no party line was followed" (8), and indeed some of these essays bump up against each other in interesting ways. Margreta de Grazia ("Revolution in Shake-speares Sonnets") writes a virtuoso piece (extending to a consideration of A Lover's Complaint) that proves that Shakespeare is a nothing-new-under-the-sun author: "revolution" equals recovery or return. This is an essay that puns its way skillfully along; gestation conceived as a trope kindles interest between the procreative sonnets and Sidney's comparison of composition and birth in the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella. Heather Dubrow probingly questions the Delian tradition of linking the sonnets and A Lover's Complaint in a bi- or tripartite fashion, correctly emphasizing the instability, because variable and volatile, of all sequential textual relationships.

On the bibliographical front, we find Richard Dutton, in the whimsical spirit of S. Schoenbaum, looking into accounts of the life of Shakespeare, and Colin Burrow, similarly in the manner of E. Talbot Donaldson, offering an especially engaging, informative, and witty account of the trials of editorship. Arthur F. Marotti conducts a survey of manuscript circulation in relation to the Sonnets, and Marcy L. North writes most persuasively on "The Sonnets and Book History."

Richard Strier makes a welcome bid to take on the Petrarchanism of the sonnets. This is always a thorny thicket and inevitably raises the question of meaningful connectedness. Strier shrewdly makes his approach via the inwardness of Petrarch's Secretum (the dialogue with St. Augustine). Nonetheless, the shifting nature and vast terrain of the Canzoniere make for special difficulty in pulling the two sequences together. Another commentator who makes use of Petrarch is Dympna Callaghan, deploying John Kerrigan's theory of changes in tempo wrought by the clock. Although Petrarch quite properly receives his due, it is curious that nobody refers to Michelangelo. These essays take a great deal of interest in the identity of the young man, above all his sexual identity, and one would have thought that Michelangelo's sonnets to Tommaso de' Cavalieri would have some bearing on the question.

Desire is treated variously by several contributors. Douglas Trevor insists that it is the poetry that principally compels Shakespeare's love: "his range as a writer . . . is here praised; not the beloveds who intermittently pass...