Different Types of Romantic Love
Modern readers associate the sonnet form with romantic
love and with good reason: the first sonnets written in thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century Italy celebrated the poets’ feelings for
their beloveds and their patrons. These sonnets were addressed to
stylized, lionized women and dedicated to wealthy noblemen, who
supported poets with money and other gifts, usually in return for
lofty praise in print. Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to “Mr.
W. H.,” and the identity of this man remains unknown. He dedicated
an earlier set of poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape
of Lucrece, to Henry Wriothesly, earl of Southampton, but
it’s not known what Wriothesly gave him for this honor. In contrast
to tradition, Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets to an unnamed
young man, possibly Wriothesly. Addressing sonnets to a young man
was unique in Elizabethan England. Furthermore, Shakespeare used
his sonnets to explore different types of love between the young man
and the speaker, the young man and the dark lady, and the dark lady
and the speaker. In his sequence, the speaker expresses passionate
concern for the young man, praises his beauty, and articulates what
we would now call homosexual desire. The woman of Shakespeare’s
sonnets, the so-called dark lady, is earthy, sexual, and faithless—characteristics
in direct opposition to lovers described in other sonnet sequences, including Astrophil
and Stella, by Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary of Shakespeare,
who were praised for their angelic demeanor, virginity, and steadfastness.
Several sonnets also probe the nature of love, comparing the idealized
love found in poems with the messy, complicated love found in real
life.
The Dangers of Lust and Love
In Shakespeare’s sonnets, falling in love can have painful
emotional and physical consequences. Sonnets 127–152,
addressed to the so-called dark lady, express a more overtly erotic
and physical love than the sonnets addressed to the young man. But
many sonnets warn readers about the dangers of lust and love. According
to some poems, lust causes us to mistake sexual desire for true
love, and love itself causes us to lose our powers of perception.
Several sonnets warn about the dangers of lust, claiming that it
turns humans “savage, extreme, rude, cruel” (4),
as in Sonnet 129. The final two sonnets of
Shakespeare’s sequence obliquely imply that lust leads to venereal
disease. According to the conventions of romance, the sexual act,
or “making love,” expresses the deep feeling between two people.
In his sonnets, however, Shakespeare portrays making love not as
a romantic expression of sentiment but as a base physical need with
the potential for horrible consequences.
Several sonnets equate being in love with being
in a pitiful state: as demonstrated by the poems, love causes fear, alienation,
despair, and physical discomfort, not the pleasant emotions or euphoria
we usually associate with romantic feelings. The speaker alternates
between professing great love and professing great worry as he speculates
about the young man’s misbehavior and the dark lady’s multiple sexual
partners. As the young man and the dark lady begin an affair, the
speaker imagines himself caught in a love triangle, mourning the
loss of his friendship with the man and love with the woman, and
he laments having fallen in love with the woman in the first place.
In Sonnet 137, the speaker personifies love,
calls him a simpleton, and criticizes him for removing his powers
of perception. It was love that caused the speaker to make mistakes
and poor judgments. Elsewhere the speaker calls love a disease as
a way of demonstrating the physical pain of emotional wounds. Throughout
his sonnets, Shakespeare clearly implies that love hurts. Yet despite
the emotional and physical pain, like the speaker, we continue falling
in love. Shakespeare shows that falling in love is an inescapable aspect
of the human condition—indeed, expressing love is part of what makes
us human.
Real Beauty vs. Clichéd Beauty
To express the depth of their feelings, poets frequently
employ hyperbolic terms to describe the objects of their affections.
Traditionally, sonnets transform women into the most glorious creatures
to walk the earth, whereas patrons become the noblest and bravest
men the world has ever known. Shakespeare makes fun of the convention
by contrasting an idealized woman with a real woman. In Sonnet 130,
Shakespeare directly engages—and skewers—clichéd concepts of beauty.
The speaker explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for
hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, and pale lips. He
concludes by saying that he loves her all the more precisely because
he loves her and not some idealized, false version.
Real love, the sonnet implies, begins when we accept our lovers
for what they are as well as what they are not. Other sonnets explain
that because anyone can use artful means to make himself or herself
more attractive, no one is really beautiful anymore. Thus, since
anyone can become beautiful, calling someone beautiful is no longer
much of a compliment.
The Responsibilities of Being Beautiful
Shakespeare portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility
in the sonnets addressed to the young man, Sonnets 1–126.
Here the speaker urges the young man to make his beauty
immortal by having children, a theme that appears repeatedly throughout
the poems: as an attractive person, the young man has
a responsibility to procreate. Later sonnets demonstrate
the speaker, angry at being cuckolded, lashing out at the young
man and accusing him of using his beauty to hide immoral
acts. Sonnet 95 compares the young man’s
behavior to a “canker in the fragrant rose” (2)
or a rotten spot on an otherwise beautiful flower. In other words,
the young man’s beauty allows him to get away with bad behavior,
but this bad behavior will eventually distort his beauty,
much like a rotten spot eventually spreads. Nature gave the
young man a beautiful face, but it is the young man’s responsibility
to make sure that his soul is worthy of such a visage.
