An Elizabethan Enigma

The last thing William Shakespeare wants to be is predictable. Roughly halfway through his published collection of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, he frets that we may find it dull that he “write[s] . . . all one, ever the same,” producing one fourteen-line poem after another (76.5). He has reason to worry: he rarely allows himself to deviate from a strict iambic pentameter, and holds his verse to a rigid rhyme scheme, three ABAB quatrains and an ending couplet. The sonnets adhere to his characteristic style almost exclusively, in part, he divulges, because the use of an unvarying structure lends his poetry a certain recognizability: “[E]very word doth . . . tell my name” (76.7). In defense of his lack of “variation or quick change,” Shakespeare explains that “the sun is daily new and old, / So is my love, still telling what is told,” conjuring the image of a predictable universe, one in which nature and love carefully keep to cycles (76.2, 13-14). Shakespeare’s sonnet structure reflects that we are bound to paths governed by nature and time. The metaphors and similes he uses reflect our intended places within these cycles: light and dark, young and old, woman and man. Shakespeare emphasizes the importance of these binary classifications through his two opposing muses, his “better angel” and his “worser spirit” (144.3-4). The former is a beautiful and (usually) kind young man, the honoree of the first one hundred and twenty-six of his poems, and the latter is a “dark,” morally repugnant woman, the subject of the last twenty-eight (147.14). The Bard insists that these opposing lovers play opposing roles in his life, fulfilling his spiritual and sexual needs. Though he is deeply in love with the man, they seem to have a platonic connection. They care equally and totally for one another, but their relationship is not physically consummated. Though the man reciprocates his affection, Shakespeare urges his reluctant young subject to follow the path “natural” to his sex, pair off with a woman, and have children: “[Nature] carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die” (11.13-14). In Sonnet 20— a sonnet that breaks the mold with an extra eleventh syllable in each line—he