THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate -
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
The assurance of the boy’s love may pierce the poet’s gloom with an intense joy in sonnets 29 and 30, their courtship
may be accompanied with feelings of exhilaration and poetic triumphalism, but the relationship remains chaste and
non-sensual. Compared to Marlowe’s thrilled imaginings of the naked Leander, Shakespeare’s young man remains as
purely aesthetic as he is
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anonymous. As many of the earlier sonnets suggest, however, all hopes of human perfection and human union are
riven by uncertainties and doubts and glancingly overshadowed by guilt and restlessness (lilies fester in sonnet 94,
sonnets 109-112 fret about falseness and scandal, and sonnets 118-120 are marked by metaphors of drugs and
disease). Insecurity, sexual vulnerability, and self loathing burst out with an uncommon violence in sonnet 129, the
account of an unspecified, but traumatic, spiritual disturbance. The old idealized love has now been swept away by a
torrent of revulsion:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is Iust in action, and, till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust ...
As this poem suggests, Shakespeare’s Sonnets do more than revise the conventions and then reject the courtliness or
the mythological paraphernalia of the sonnet sequences of the 1590s. They throb with a new metrical energy, they
explore a new emotional range, they wrestle with the implications of a new language, and they enact new dramas
within their exact, fourteen-line structures. Above all, they suggest that the faults which make and mar human
buoyancy lie not in the stars, nor in a particular unattainable star, but in ourselves.
Theatre in the 1590s: Kyd and Marlowe
The widespread prejudice, which has held sway since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, that Elizabethan
literature was dominated by the drama would not have been one that was shared by Shakespeare’s educated
contemporaries. If the fiction of the period was systematically marginalized by subsequent generations of readers and
critics, and if perceptions of its poetry were clouded by a predisposition for lyric verse, the work of its playwrights has
long been seen as reflecting something of the glory of the steadily read, readily performed, and much eulogized
Shakespeare. To the select, but substantial, audiences who first saw Elizabethan and Jacobean plays performed on the
London stage, or perhaps acted outside town during provincial tours by the London companies, Shakespeare himself
must have seemed one gifted metropolitan dramatist amongst many, while his dramatic enterprise, like that of his
rivals, would probably have been viewed more as entertainment than as high art. Published play-texts purchased for
domestic study or private diversion were sometimes pirated from illicit copies or, as was the case of the ‘bad’ Quarto
of Hamlet of 1603, clumsily assembled with the aid of the erratic memories of members of the cast. In most cases, the
title-pages of published plays bear the name of the acting company for whom they were written rather than the name
of the author. The relatively prolific Shakespeare, who prepared
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his narrative poems for publication in the early 1590s and who probably authorized the appearance of his Sonnets in
1609, may well have sought to protect the rights of the companies with which he was associated by reserving the
majority of his play-texts for their exclusive use. The first Folio, published posthumously in 1623 by two fellow ‘actorsharers’
(shareholders) in the company known as the King’s Men, contains thirty-six plays of which eighteen
appeared in print for the first time. Ben Jonson, who boldly printed his poems, plays, and masques in 1616 as his
Works, went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that his plays were to be considered as serious literature and that