Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 294 pp. ISBN: 9781107170650. £75 hardback.
A central character in Dan Simmons’ 2003 sci-fi novel Ilium is a sentient, space-faring robot, or ‘moravec’, called Mahnmut who is sent to Earth – many centuries in the future – to investigate the actions of an immensely powerful group of non-humans acting out a version of the Trojan War. In his intertextual recreation of the Iliad, Simmons deploys resurrected classical scholars to gauge how far their conflict will follow Homer’s original. Mahnmut is only too keen to tag along because of his eccentric interest in Earth’s ancient cultures, including the Sonnets of William Shakespeare. In fact, Mahnmut’s first appearance in the novel entails a close reading of Sonnet 116, a poem which he initially describes as ‘smarmy’ and ‘schlocky’[1] but which he comes to understand – by way of Helen Vendler, whose criticism has survived the ages – as ‘a violent refutation’ of the poet’s beloved’s shifting affections: a vitriolic charge of betrayal brimming with ‘anger, accusations, incriminations, lying, and…infidelity’.[2]
Neither Simmons nor Mahnmut feature in Jane Kingsley-Smith’s new study The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which is understandable but perhaps also something of a loss (to lovers of both Shakespeare and science fiction), because Ilium resonates with several key aspects of her argument. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, is the work that can be done by focusing on a single sonnet. As Kingsley-Smith makes clear, hers is not a study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets but rather of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which promotes the ‘history of individual lyrics’ and ‘responses to individual Sonnets’ rather than a putative ‘autobiographical narrative generated by the 1609 Quarto arrangement…with its seductive fictions about Shakespeare, the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth’ (1). Secondly, as Kingsley-Smith argues, these individual histories and responses are complex, shifting, and deeply embedded in a dense skein of historical and cultural exchanges and ‘circulat[e] through manuscript, print edition, anthology and literary allusion’ (1), even if these exchanges are often unknown to later generations of readers. It is instructive that the sentient robot’s understanding of Sonnet 116 in Simmons’ novel is shaped not only by his reading Vendler, but also by a popular understanding of the sonnet as expressing fidelity (‘the kind of thing humans had recited at their weddings way back in the Lost Age’, Mahnmut says, dismissively).[3] No reading is pure or original, and every encounter with the Sonnets is already mediated to some degree by surrounding cultural context. For Kingsley-Smith, the reception of the Sonnets – both individually and collectively – has thus often been shaped by interpretations that have slipped imperceptibly into unexamined critical orthodoxies. This is especially the case with the autobiographical psychodrama of the poet, the Fair Youth, and the Dark Lady which has exerted such a hold on readers of Shakespeare’s works.
Kingsley-Smith does a dynamic job unpacking the history that underlies many of the orthodoxies, lucidly tracing the intricate relationships that lay behind the early volumes in which the Sonnets first appeared in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century, as well as important subsequent editorial interventions through the eighteenth-century. She intelligently explores the Sonnets’ relative neglect during this early phase of their history, and adeptly tracks their fleeting appearances through the semi-private world of early modern manuscript culture that, if not quite so strange as futuristic poetry-reading space robots, can still seem impenetrably remote to twenty-first century eyes and ears. She is good, too, on the various cultural and critical frames that accrue to the Sonnets as they grew in cultural prestige, and on the ambiguities that inhere in these frames. She rightly highlights the role of Edward Malone and his 1780 edition of the Sonnets in establishing the conventional division of the sequence between the first 126 poems, ostensibly addressed to the Fair Youth, and the final 27 sonnets about the so-called Dark Lady – ‘critical orthodoxy so monumental in our time that it has only just begun to be dismantled’ (2) – but also acknowledges that the implicit autobiographical narrative ‘gave late eighteenth-century readers a new reason to seek the Sonnets out’ (98). As she notes, this helped to generate interest in the Sonnets for an eighteenth-century audience that was often sceptical of their value and indifferent to their existence. All of this is underpinned by a keen ear for literary echo and allusion, whether in seventeenth-century manuscript or twentieth-century anthology, and an appreciation for how the ostensibly mundane detail of a text can shape its meanings. As she demonstrates, the compressed and ‘claustrophobic’ layout of poems in the 1609 Quarto ‘may have hindered readers from engaging with lyrics individually and from inserting their own voices in and around the sonnets’ (39).
Inevitably, there are gaps and omissions. Although Kingsley-Smith refers intermittently to the history of the sonnet, especially in relation to its early abeyance and later revival in the eighteenth-century, she does not discuss how the form’s extraordinary profusion in the latter half of the twentieth-century has shaped contemporary perceptions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Kingsley-Smith’s relatively even-handed approach to periodisation gives more-or-less the same amount of space to each of the centuries that have passed since the Sonnets first appeared in print, which necessarily means overlooking a significant proportion of recent and contemporary engagement. By her own omission, Kingsley-Smith also makes only ‘limited forays’ beyond ‘literature written in English by British writers’ (9). But the real achievement of this book is not its capaciousness, although there is a wonderful array of illuminating detail, but in the quality of its examples and the way Kingsley-Smith explores them. The best, most compelling parts of the book combine cultural history and literary analysis to give a glimpse of how the Sonnets were experienced by their readers, or at least how they might have been experienced.
An early example of this is the Sonnets’ intersection with the personal histories of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his cousin and long-standing mistress Lady Mary Wroth. Writing of the dissemination of both the 1609 Quarto text and individual Sonnets in the early decades of the seventeenth-century, Kingsley-Smith finds their influence largely concentrated on Pembroke and his associates, who may at one time have numbered Shakespeare himself (Pembroke, of course, has a fairly strong claim to being ‘Mr W. H.’, the ‘onlie begetter’ of the Sonnets, according to the dedication in the 1609 Quarto text). Sonnet 116, Kingsley-Smith persuasively argues, is especially influential and she uncovers allusions in the writing of both Pembroke and Wroth. For Wroth especially the sonnet seems to be a vital creative resource in responding to tragic personal circumstances, with Kingsley-Smith noting that ‘the years 1614-16 had been traumatic, with the deaths of her husband and then her son (at that point her only child), as well as considerable financial pressures, and she might well have considered her beauty to have faded, with a resulting slackening of Pembroke’s affections’ (51). In this context, Kingsley-Smith writes, ‘Sonnet 116’s romanticisation of unrequited passion’ allows Wroth ‘to ennoble the suffering’ she has experienced (51). At other times, however, she approaches the poem more warily, hinting that Sonnet 116’s ‘idealism is a relic of her youth’ that is ‘painful to re-examine’ (51). The appeal of these readings is not only that they help us unravel possibly salacious early modern histories but also that they illuminate just how knotty those histories are, even or perhaps especially for those that lived them, and the importance of poems in responding to them. It is telling, for example, that Lady Wroth is able to re-orient Sonnet 116 as a rebuke to Pembroke, and thus attain a degree of power and agency, even as she frames the poem in largely melancholic and lachrymose terms.
A more public example comes later when Kingsley-Smith considers the reception of the Sonnets during and immediately after the First World War. This is another moment where Kingsley-Smith’s astute reading of historical context comes to the fore, and she examines the influence of the Sonnets on early twentieth-century literary culture. Tracking Shakespearean references across work by Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Virginia Woolf (among others), she highlights the popularity of anthologies such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse, and speculates that Mrs Ramsay reads Sonnet 98 from the Oxford Book of English Verse in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, arguing that ‘this specific anthology prepares the ground for a nostalgic view of the Sonnets’ (211-12) by identifying them with a gilded, pre-War historical moment. At the same time, nostalgia often gave way to its opposite, to loathing and disgust. The shattering experience of the War marked such a rupture with the past that those who experienced it both longed for what had gone before and despised it for leading to the catastrophe of the trenches. As a high-profile icon of a recently lost culture, Shakespeare’s Sonnets become a particular locus for these contradictory attitudes: ‘the unique function of Shakespeare’s Sonnets seems to have been to provoke nostalgia and contempt, often simultaneously’ (202).
This is not to say that Kingsley-Smith reads the Sonnets merely as extensions or reflections of their historical context. She is also alert to those moments when the Sonnets are out of step with the cultural apparatus through which they have been read and understood; indeed, these moments are usually vital pressure points in the history of the Sonnets’ reception, when old interpretations are challenged, and a new understanding develops. Intriguingly, she claims (in relation to Woolf) that ‘the fact that Mrs Ramsay reads the Sonnets in an anthology rather than a Sonnets edition or volume of Shakespeare implies the sacrifice of male authorial ego, at the expense of female readerly pleasure’ (212), arguing that ‘at the heart of Woolf’s own creative engagement with the Sonnets in this novel is the refusal to consider them as an edition or a collection or a narrative: the single lyric allows the expression of a female experience that “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” would potentially overwhelm and destroy’ (213). The anthology that frames Sonnet 98 as the relic of a lost age is also the same text that enables Woolf to articulate a feminist vision of reading. This feminist reading is neither ‘nostalgia’ nor ‘contempt’ and does not look back to the pre-War world but rather forward to an incipient feminist politics. In a similar vein Kingsley-Smith attends to moments of instability in nineteenth-century readings of the Sonnets. She explores the complex – and sometimes convoluted – interpretative moves by which nineteenth-century audiences tried to re-fashion Shakespeare’s intense articulations of desire into their own image, but also notes where these moves come up short, or even come apart. Writing of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for example, she observes that ‘where Sonnet 116 becomes transgressive, in a way that Tennyson may not have been able to control, is its assertion of the persistence of homoerotic desire, outside of social convention, outside of time’ (172). Although Tennyson might try to conjure the Sonnets as a model for intense homosocial bonds, Shakespeare’s homoeroticism complicates In Memoriam’s meanings in unexpected ways, so that there seems to be something resistant or recalcitrant about the Sonnets, something that even evades assimilation into existing cultural frameworks. In this way, Shakespeare’s Sonnets emerge not just as a vehicle for expressing the desires and anxieties of any given cultural moment, a screen onto which historical pre-occupations can be projected, but rather a prism through which those pre-occupations can be refracted and re-directed.
In his book The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge argues that ‘literature’ and ‘the literary’ are not separable from the non-literary. Poems and other literary texts, he says, are not only concerned with ‘finding new ways of constructing sentences or managing verbal rhythms’ but are embedded in ‘nexuses of meaning and feeling, and hence deeply rooted in culture, history, and the varieties of human experience’.[4] And because these nexuses of meaning and feeling are not static but comprised of contradictions and uncertainties, they are open to change, to what Attridge calls ‘the new arrangement of cultural materials’ and ‘fresh possibilities of meaning, feeling, perceiving, responding, behaving’.[5] Indeed, for Attridge it is a central feature of literary texts that they bring out this new arrangement of cultural materials – even if on a small-scale – and that they do so not only within the cultures in which they are written but also in which they are read. Even when, or perhaps especially when, a poem or novel or play is centuries old, it remains ‘literary’ to the extent that it can actively participate in the culture around it. In one sense these theoretical ideas are remote from Kingsley-Smith’s study, which does not present itself in these terms and which are anachronistic to almost all of the time-periods the book explores. But in important ways, Attridge’s ideas describe the kind of reading that Kingsley-Smith undertakes in The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Not only does she restore great swathes of ‘culture, history and the variety of human feeling’ to the ‘nexuses of meaning and feeling’ articulated in the Sonnets, but she also explores those moments when the Sonnets are part of a ‘new arrangement of cultural materials’, when they are caught up in moments of crisis and change, as during the First World War and its aftermath. In doing so, Kingsley-Smith offers a rich, detailed exploration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the histories that have shaped them, and also a powerful example of how to read poems.
Stephen Grace
University of York
51.3.7
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