Archive for May 1999

Writer’s & Company (CBC) 9 May 1999; Park Honan discussing his biography Shakespeare: A Life

Eleanor Wachtel You say the Sonnets is the extant that they are autobiographical approach his identity uneasily, as if he were taking the lid off a jar of worms. What do you mean by that? What is revealed in the Sonnets?

Park Honan You know, the Sonnets you could say are divided into two groups, the first – there are over a hundred in the first group – are about a poet who is in love with, or anyway enamoured of, a beautiful young man, probably slightly above him in rank, and when I say ‘in love with’ I don’t necessarily mean a homosexual relationship, I think this is a homo social culture, many a sonnet had been written in praise of Gwyneth Paltrow, as it were, the blue eyed and long blond haired woman, you know, and this is getting rather tiresome. Shakespeare is exploring love, and so he’s having a man praise another man, and this is a very good kind of love. We don’t know that they’re in bed together, the poet loved the young man.

In the later Sonnets, there are fewer in this set, we have a different kind of love, which is a very sensual kind, the poet now is having an affair probably with a married woman, who herself has affairs with various other people, a so called Dark Lady, and is absolutely enslaved and driven mad with this relationship. He wants to detach himself, he cannot, he goes in for more, the disease that agonizes him, he calls the lady at one moment, you know, ‘a bay where all men ride,’ she’s whorish with her cosmetics, but he’s enslaved by sex. So that these two kinds of love, in between as it were, while talking about these, or giving us pictures of these two love affairs as it were, Shakespeare portrays his poet, his speaker, and I think it’s impossible to get away from the idea that Shakespeare is drawing on himself, again and again.

Who is this, what is this poet like? Well, he’s a person who is easily hurt, who cannot get used to the betrayal of a friend, to losing a friend. It’s a person who has a good deal of self doubt about himself, who feels that he’s being inefficient and losing time, that he’s not very interesting himself. That he exists to praise. Also he’s depressed and confused as soon as he gets entangled very closely in a relationship, and I think this probably is true of Shakespeare and you could support it in other ways, that he’s an observer, he’s keeping himself remote from society outside of the actors society, he’d by and large in London although he has some outside friends, chiefly among the immigrant class in London – but basically he is an observer who loves, or feels while observing.

When he becomes too close to someone else, he begins to get terrible doubts about himself, terrible feelings of inadequacy. I think all in all we’re getting a very delicately done and complex picture of a Shakespeare in the Sonnet speaker, in both of these situations. He may be drawing on a number of aspects of his relationships, he undoubtedly has had some experiences of adultery, he seems to know a great deal about it. He’s also horrified by it.

I just must add though about the sonnets: that in the sonnet vogue, the vogue of writing sonnets in the 1590s, you know, you made up characters and made them seem real – none of the poets really are putting real persons into these poems. So you know all the characters I just mentioned, the Dark Lady, the beautiful young man, even the poet himself are conglomerates, you know, they’re made from different sources.

But I still am saying that the voice in the sonnet is so unusual that he’s giving us a picture of this not very socially confident, observing, self-doubting, almost masochistic Shakespeare.