The claims of the Scarry book (from the back cover)
The traditional understanding of Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets.
Elaine Scarry says we now know the name of the young man Shakespeare wrote the first 123 sonnets for and about. 1
The traditional explanation for the sequence is that Shakespeare was hired by the Earl of Southampton to persuade his son to marry. The sequence begins with witty and formal arguments to that effect.
From fairest creators we desire increase
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die – [Sonnet 1]
Look in the glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another – [Sonnet 3]
Though the arguments are propositions, formal and abstract, so abstract they feel the way Elizabethan scrollwork looks, lines wound around themselves in air, continuing, unanchored and centreless, there are phrases so sound they are still striking. “The world’s fresh ornament” – structured like a cliché but still singular; “thy youth’s proud livery” – so simultaneously abstract & concrete it could never become the pedestrian clothed in youth; perfume, “a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” – so exact you can see the glint on the edge of the bottle. Wit and argument condense to single lines: “Oh change thy thought that I may change my mind.” “You had a father – let your son say so.”
The first seventeen sonnets can be difficult or abstruse. It’s the syntax, it’s the language changing: four hundred years of empire and social and scientific revolution. But even as Euclydian as they are, as apparently supportive of the old tale as they seem, the first seventeen of these poems also document – one step forward, half-step back – the social and personal distance between the poet and the young man diminishing. Shakespeare is coming closer.
Any overview of the sonnets will always group the first seventeen together. This is because the eighteenth breaks style and subject completely: neither distanced nor impersonal nor general nor abstract; not designed to be harmless if overheard or presented in public; it’s intimate, unguarded, direct, electric.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
After number seventeen, there’s no more talk of sons.
1. Scarry, Elaine, Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2016.
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