Who was Shakespeare thinking of in his sonnets? The cover carries a dedication to Mr W.H., which is no help at all. Scholars tell us that sonnets 1-126 are addressed to a ‘Fair Youth’, a young man with whom Shakespeare was infatuated romantically and erotically. Critics can still get a bit shy about this (‘probably a very modern reading of a classical text’) but c’mon, Sonnet 20 is frankly unambiguous. Later sonnets see him shifting his object of desire to an unnamed ‘Dark Lady’, with a similar lack of clarity about what, if anything, he managed with her.
Who were they? Don’t know.
Still, there is one sonnet - sonnet 18 - where the object of his admiration is put forth both plainly and also cryptically. I can reveal here, for the first time, that in Sonnet 18, - ‘Shall I Compare Thee . . . ‘ the object of his veneration is . . . . one William Shakespeare of Stratford.
The sonnets were published in 1609, when Shakespeare was hitting 45 years old, and had only seven years to live. It’s a love song to himself, giving himself deep reassurance as he gets older, his hair thinning, his never-heart-stopping beauty abandoning him. Alas. . .
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May and
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
and
. . . every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:
Still, there is this wonderful consolation - his own undying talent:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
he tells himself:
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Really, there is no mystery here, no need to seek after a mysterious Fair Youth, unless that Fair Youth is Shakespeare’s memory of himself. The message is plainly written in the narrative of the sonnet.
It’s also written in its rhythm. Read in iambics (de-dah, de-dah, de-dah, de-dah etc) it’s right there in the first line: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day. Notice the stress falls wholly on the ‘I’, whilst the ‘thee’ is skipped across, unstressed, un-noticed, unimportant. How easily he could have written ‘Shall I compare me to a summer’s day’. Indeed it disrupts the poem not at all to substitute ‘thee’ for ‘me’ and ‘thy’ for ‘my’ throughout. Try it. As for ‘Thou art more temperate’ . . . this is a man communing with himself.
I promised that there’s some cryptic evidence too. Cross-word solvers, take a look at: ‘Shall I compare thee’. Notice anything? You should, because it’s an anagram of:
‘O mi Shacespeare’, or ‘I om Shacespeare’.
Coincidence? Well, whatever else he was, Shakespeare was a man in love with the magic of words, and not overly fussy about spelling. Do you really think he didn’t notice?
Am I just having some fun here? Well, maybe. But let me confess that this reading of the poem, this cry and consolation of a man confronting his aging, moves me far more than a simple love song to an unnamed ‘Fair Youth’.