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    Sonnets to a Young Man
    Sonnets to a Young Man
    Sonnets to a Young Man
    Ebook133 pages57 minutes

    Sonnets to a Young Man

    By William Shakespeare

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    This volume of Shakespeare contains the 127 sonnets he wrote for or about his young male love. The introduction details the story of infatuation revealed by the sonnet sequence and places the sonnets in the canon of gay literature.

    By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, almost anyone in England who knew anything about Shakespeare knew that he had written his famous love sonnets to a beautiful adolescent male who was fifteen when the first sonnet was written. The debate was not about what gender the poems addressed but what specific young man had been the object of Shakespeare’s affection. Read in sequence, the sonnets tell a story. Shakespeare was instructed by his patron to try to get the patron’s son to marry and pass along his lineage and beauty. The first seventeen sonnets are therefore called the procreation sonnets because this is precisely Shakespeare’s message to the boy. Beginning with Sonnet 18, however, we see an abrupt turn: Shakespeare has clearly fallen in love with the fifteen-year-old. Furthermore—and this cannot have pleased his patron—Shakespeare suggests there is really no need for the boy to marry and procreate in order to live beyond his time, for Shakespeare is immortalizing him for eternity through the sonnets.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWatersgreen House
    Release dateNov 8, 2013
    ISBN9781311500007
    Sonnets to a Young Man
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare is the world's greatest ever playwright. Born in 1564, he split his time between Stratford-upon-Avon and London, where he worked as a playwright, poet and actor. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, leaving three children—Susanna, Hamnet and Judith. The rest is silence.

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      Book preview

      Sonnets to a Young Man - William Shakespeare

      SONNETS

      To a Young Man

      By William Shakespeare

      With an Introduction by Keith Hale

      © 2021 Keith Hale

      Watersgreen House

      All rights reserved.

      Black and White on White paper

      BISAC: Poetry / LGBT

      Cover art: Boy with an Oar by Henry Scott Tuke

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Purchase only authorized editions.

      Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, and contemporary fiction that is unusual, and provocative.

      Watersgreen House, Publishers.

      Typeset in Georgia.

      International copyright secured.

      William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

      By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, almost anyone in England who knew anything about Shakespeare knew that he had written his famous love sonnets to a beautiful adolescent male who was fifteen when the first sonnet was written. The debate was not about what gender the poems addressed but what specific young man had been the object of Shakespeare’s affection. Read in sequence, the sonnets tell a story. Shakespeare was instructed by his patron to try to get the patron’s son to marry and pass along his lineage and beauty. The first seventeen sonnets are therefore called the procreation sonnets because this is precisely Shakespeare’s message to the boy. Beginning with Sonnet 18, however, we see an abrupt turn: Shakespeare has clearly fallen in love with the fifteen-year-old. Furthermore—and this cannot have pleased his patron—Shakespeare suggests there is really no need for the boy to marry and procreate in order to live beyond his time, for Shakespeare is immortalizing him for eternity through the sonnets.

      Of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, the first 126 are addressed to the young man, and sonnet 144 features him as well. Most of the famous love sonnets are kept genderless by design, so that any person of any gender may recite the poems to any person of any gender without gender getting in the way. But it is clear from context that the object of the affection is the young man. Too, Shakespeare uses the masculine pronoun in a few poems and even refers to the youth as my lovely boy in Sonnet 126.

      The themes are repetitive: the boy is the most beautiful thing Shakespeare has ever seen, time is the great enemy, but not even time can take away the boy’s beauty because Shakespeare is capturing it forever in his verse. There are a few bitter sonnets in the mix, as another poet is vying for the young man’s affections and a jealous Shakespeare warns the youth not to betray his love. The scathing final couplet of Sonnet 94 is particularly remarkable. But Shakespeare wins out and returns again to praising the boy. As the boy ages from fifteen through eighteen in the sonnet sequence, Shakespeare tells his love that he will always see him as first he saw him. Two of the most moving love poems in the English language (or any other language, I imagine) are Sonnet 104, in which Shakespeare tells the young man that never in the history of the world had beauty reached its zenith until the young man was born, and especially Sonnet 116, in which Shakespeare gives his poetic definition of true, soul-intermingling love and stakes his reputation on it.

      So what of the famous dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets? She shows up in Sonnet 127 and is the object of interest for most of the remaining poems. Although Shakespeare admits she is not particularly beautiful and he therefore cannot write of her in the glowing poetic phrases he used to write about the boy, it seems that he loved her. Sonnet 130 provides a wonderfully humorous example of his honesty regarding her physical being but ends with a declaration of his affection. Still, when Shakespeare returns to London from a trip out of town and suspects his mistress has seduced his young man in his absence, it is she that gets the blame

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