A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 6 (The Golden Age of the Elizabethan Sonnet)

 From the Vantage point of the 21st century Shakespeare matters for several reasons as a sonneteer, for his use of rhymed iambic pentameter, for his rhyme scheme, and for his use of the volta and the final couplet to telling effect, for writing sequences, but most of all for his, seen in retrospect, overthrowing of the ideas of classicism regarding what to write of, and moving off from the Italian sonnet sequences not just as a Renaissance man, in his subject matter, bringing in realism predictively, the move to modernity and romanticism as well as a tough and tempered psychological scrutiny of his subjects, which are what make him more significant to me than Spenser with his Amoretti or Sidney with his Astrophel and Stella or even Michael Drayton, as he foreshadows even a John Donne with his metaphysical conceits and puns and is neo-classical, form-wise,  quite the stick of dynamite in other words, except for his inability to understand what Tolkien called "faerie". When he enters that world he often seems more a dabbler, his goblins and fairies and elves and creatures like Ariel never take on the convincing stature of the ones in Beowulf or in Coleridge or Tolkien, for someone like me, there is something airy and not substantial about them even at their most charming or delightful, as in the case of Puck, who may be the one exception that goes to prove the rule. But I am going away from the sonnets which are my prime quarry. Let us take another of his sonnets that matter in this regard of theme and content.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)

William Shakespeare - 1564-1616

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My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

I have a particular reason to take this sonnet as it runs directly counter to the previous one I studied in Chapter 5 where the fair youth shines brighter than the sun but here Shakespeare inverts the entire argument by saying that the dark lady's power is just the opposite, that the sun's light outshines her but does not in any way diminish her or his love for her. In deconstructing, again, the simile, and ideas of beauty and love, and the trope of the sun as central metaphor it is a highly nuanced poem that bespeaks and celebrates feminity far before the arrival of feminism and this is remarkable considering his day and age, the time and place in which it was written. It is also a robust realism and an unmasking of poetic duplicity and tearing down of the kind found in the idealism of Dante, with his Bice, Michaelangelo, Rafael, Petrarca, and Cavalcanti whose women never, unlike the scatological Swift's Celia, defecate or urinate, as well as Shakespeare's protest against how what was once beautiful in poetry becomes justcliché and needs to be laughed at and dethroned so that poetry can ever have a fresh voice, and be constantly original, innovative, inventive, unique, creative and progressive.

To come finally to the question of why Shakespearean sonnets still matter to me, the reason is that when we discuss the latest trends in literary theory, whether of trauma (due to the betrayal faced by the narrator, betrayed by the dark lady), or disability, or ethnic studies or affect studies or queer studies and psychoanalysis with themes like betrayal, deconstruction or linguistic and philosophical analysis with is neologisms and views on time - all of these theories can still be applied to them, which is rather startling, don't you think?

1. https://poets.org/poem/my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-sun-sonnet-130