Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
by
Nivedita Basu
Two Loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two spirits do suggest me still
The better angel is a man right fair
The worser spirit a woman colored ill” (144)
I draw on this particular sonnet of Shakespeare to introduce the bipartite division, not of a particular
sonnet, but of the sequence as a whole, which is going to be the focus of my paper. I examine the
critically fraught drama of two loves played out by the speaker especially in the ‘dark lady’ sequence.
It was Edmond Malone who divided the Sonnets into two groups by restricting them to two
addressees in his 1780 edition. By introducing a break after sonnet 126, he argued that the first group
is addressed to a man “right fair” and the remaining are directed at a “woman colored ill”. In 1790,
he revised the sequence and printed it along with Shakespeare’s other Plays and Poems in a collected
volume. Malone’s edition is said to have begun the modern history of the sonnets.
Even though there is no linear development of a story or a plot in the Sonnets, drama is created by, as
says G.K.Hunter: “the setting up of a system of tensions between forces represented as persons”
(154). The tension that is embodied in the sonnets is voiced by the speaker-persona. Though the
youth and the dark lady dominate the speaker’s thoughts, they do not function as active participants
within the sonnets. Except for the fact that the young man is attractive and the lady is dark, we
hardly know anything about them. Unlike the main characters of other sonnet sequences, they are
never assigned names, even in poems that refer to them in the third rather than the second person.
On the rare occasions that the words of the beloved are recorded, they are presented in a form that
distances us from these statements. It is the speaker who reports what the beloved has said or is likely
to say. For instance, in Sonnet 138, the poet reads: “When my love swears that she is made of truth/I
do believe her, though I know she lies”.
Two Loves in the Dark Lady Sequence
Sonnet 127, the first of the dark lady poems, signals a direct and intentional violation of literary
convention: “In the old age black was not counted fair/ Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name; but
now is black beauty’s successive heir/ And beauty slandered with a bastard shame”. The ‘now’
demarcates the novel aesthetic that the poet articulates here. This sonnet leaves behind the “ould age”
of the previous 126 sonnets and rings in a new extolling of unconventional beauty. The woman here
is set apart from the fashionable, painted beauties that the speaker deplores for “fairing the foul with
art’s false borrowed face” (127.6). However, the inclusion of the woman is not to say that her point of
view is expressed or that we are in a position to know anything about her. She does not come across
as a subject of consciousness. In fact, as Sedgwick puts it, the dark lady is perceptible mostly as a pair
of eyes and a vagina (15). As sonnet 130 “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” also confirms,
the central concern here is not to establish the identity of the mistress but rather the display of
ingenuity of the speaker. Yet, in spite of her fragmentary representation, the woman disrupts the
earlier vision of heterosexuality.
The introduction of the woman to the scene brings in taxonomy of emotional suffering and disorder.
In Sonnet 129, for instance, the speaker charts out the unstable and disorienting dynamics of love in
action: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action; and till action, lust / Is perjured,
murd’rous, bloody, full of blame / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; / Enjoyed no sooner but
despised straight;”. This poem does not refer to a specific addressee, rather it evokes a generalized
though fraught experience of consummation. In the opening lines, lust is negatively marked-“the
expense of spirit” implies that to expend oneself sexually and emotionally is “a waste of shame”.
Throughout the sequence, love, desire, fear, anger, obsession, pleasure, self-hate and despair all jostle
with one another to reveal suffering in its varied manifestations. Sonnet 147 continues to identify
erotic desire as a sexual disease that destroys its carrier: “My love is a fever, longing still/For that
which longer nurseth the disease, /Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill/ The uncertain sickly
appetite to please”.
Lawrence Stone’s analysis of early modern English society as somewhat lacking in strong passionate
and affective ties, helps us in locating the emotional topography of the sonnets with respect to the
normative emotional regime as articulated in the political, social, and religious orthodoxies of the
time. Stone recognizes that “romantic love and sexual intrigue were certainly the subject of much
poetry of the 16th and the 17th centuries and many of Shakespeare’s plays”. But he believes that
romantic love was “a reality which existed in one very restricted group…that is the household of the
prince and great nobles”. Early modern English society was based on a restrictive emotional regime
whereby “romantic love and lust were strongly condemned as ephemeral and irrational [especially] as
grounds for marriage” (225).
This may explain the poet’s disorientation, which is further compounded by the duplicity of the lady.
She is alternately praised and blamed for being what she is not. As an image of something which is at
once fair and foul, the lady and her darkness acquire erotic charge. The speaker says, “When my
love swears that she is made of truth/I do believe her, though I know she lies” (138). In Sonnet 131,
the poet acknowledges that the lady is also foul in her behavior: “In nothing are thou black, save in
thy deeds/ And thence this slander, as I think proceeds”. Sonnets 133 and 134 reveal her “foul deed”.
The dark lady has seduced the speaker’s friend. The hysterical repetition of the word “Will” acts out
the poet’s disorientation: “Will will fulfill the treasure of thy love/Ay fill it full with wills and my will
one” (136). By the promiscuous pun on the fact that the poet’s first name can also designate sexual
desire and even sexual organs, the word play simulates the proliferation of the women’s lovers and
conjures a scene of erotic betrayal. They signal the poet’s erotic anxieties and reveal his fears about
the promiscuity of the beloved. The speaker is an hysteric reduced to hating his submission.
Conventional romantic love is thus reduced to an undifferentiated series of sexual appetites.
In the sonnets addressed to the fair youth there is plenty of dissonance, doubleness and self-division.
As the psychomachia played out in Sonnet 144 suggests, both the youth and the lady have ability to
deceive the speaker. Yet, there is an anticipatory forgiveness, and the poet is rather divided against
himself in his effort to understand and excuse the supposedly simpler youth. In viewing him, the poet
feels old and responsible. He says to the youth in Sonnet 35: “Authorizing thy trespass with
compare/Myself corrupting salving thy amiss/Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are; /For to thy
sensual fault I bring in sense”. Sedgwick pertinently remarks: “To be self divided in loving fair youth
felt like being stoical but being self divided in loving the dark lady feels like becoming ruined” (16).
Adultery and promiscuity were serious charges in Shakespeare’s England. Lisa Jardine uses the
available ecclesiastical records from the early modern period of England to point out profuse
examples of cases in which women believed their reputations had been harmed by the imputations of
unchastity (25). Ritual sexual banter including lewd mocking was an acceptable part of social
practice. But there was a point at which it was understood that lewd talks became defamation—that
is, when the accusation, circulating publicly, endangered the individual’s reputation. If we are to
believe Francis Meres, the one to refer first to the existence of the sonnets of Shakespeare, these
sonnets were primarily circulated among a selected group of friends. Even if we assume that the
sonnets do refer to a real person (for whom candidates vary from Lucy Morgan, Mary Fitton and
Emelia Lanier), the sequence would count as a substantial case of defamation.
The Dark Lady sonnets are informed by a deep anxiety and fear regarding female sexuality and
especially in its power to evoke men’s sexuality. Sonnets 135 and 136 act out how promiscuous
women can threaten the social order. “Whoever hath her wish, Thou hast thy Will/And Will to boot
and Will in overplus; / More than enough am I, that vex thee still/ To thy sweet will making addition
thus. / Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious, Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine? Shall
will in others seem right gracious, / And in my will no fair acceptance shine?” As De Grazia puts it,
Dark Lady is marked by an “indiscriminate womb” where not only proper nouns lose distinction;
even distinctions of blood are maintained no more. Through her capacity to contaminate blood lines,
the dark lady has the potential to destroy the hierarchical patriarchal social formation.
In contrast are the first 17 sonnets of the sequence, generally referred to as the procreation sonnets,
where the speaker urges the youth to marry and beget a son for the preservation of the aristocratic
family line. "Fair”, in this context is not simply a physical or spiritual virtue, rather it’s a signifier of
fair values of the dominant social order. The origin of this set of sonnets has been traced back to the
pedagogical materials like Erasmus’s "Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage", which
was used to prepare young men to assume social position to which high birth entitled them. Booth
adds further, that the speaker’s commendations to procreation involve hardly any reference to the
pleasures of marriage and cross-gender intercourse. The speaker envisages an instrumental and
rather coarse role for the woman: “For where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage
of thy husbandry? (3). Lovemaking with her is figured as a kind of usury and agricultural
management. This interaction is clearly informed by misogyny on the part of the speaker. But more
importantly, there is a clear reversal here. As De Grazia puts it, the speaker’s love for the youth “right
fair” which tradition has deemed scandalous and shameful actually promotes the social programme
of the dominant culture while the speaker’s love for the woman colored ill, actually threatens to
annihilate it.
Finally, I would like to end by pointing out that Malone’s bipartite division lends itself readily to the
modern distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality. But in the world sketched in the
Sonnets, there is no equal opposition posited between the two institutions. The first 17 sonnets present
male-male love that is set within the structure of institutionalized social relations carried out via
women, i.e. marriage, name, loyalty to posterity - all depend on the youth’s making a particular use
of women that is not seen as opposing or detracting from his bond with the speaker. Women are only
necessary for the continuity of the existing dominant culture. One constant attitude presumed in the
youth towards women is indifference and even active repulsion. As a number of studies on the history
of sexuality have shown, the binary division of sexual appetites into normative heterosexual and the
deviant homosexual is a very recent invention. Neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality existed as
categories for the Renaissance mind. Indeed, the very idea that sexual preference constitutes categories
- that people can be identified according to what kinds of sex they enjoy - and that such categories
are exclusive ones - is largely in keeping with the sexual preoccupations of the eighteenth century
rather than the sixteenth. It is symptomatic of a much later emphasis on sexual differentiation, in
which reproductive biology is constructed based on absolute rather than relative difference. Malone’s
division of the sonnets may be best understood in the context of this reorientation.
Works Cited
Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.
---. Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.
Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982.
Grazia, Margreta de. The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Shakespeare’s Survey 46. 1996.
Jardine, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare Historically. London: Routledge, 1996.
Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York:
Columbia UP, 1985.
Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage, London: Weidfeld and Nicolson, 1977.
pursuing her MPhil, and works as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at University of Delhi. Her
areas of interest include Renaissance literature, the nineteenth century novel, and cultural studies.
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