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| Hearsay: |
Would Bill have published his sonnets? Not according to this. Apparently he was just doodling. And probably fawning privately over some sweet young thing. And back in those days, you didn’t really want that to get out. Luckily, the Judith Regan of the Elizabethan era got his filthy hands on things and fucked poor Willie over in the most non-iambic way possible. To our cultural benefit.
As Heylin tells it, publishing was a murky, anarchic business during the Elizabethan age. It wasn’t hard for an enterprising publisher to get his hands on a manuscript without the author’s approval, and Heylin believes that Thomas Thorpe, the man who published the sonnets, did just that.
“[Thorpe] was a man who lived on the very periphery of the London publishing world … who was constantly in trouble with the Stationer’s Company for publishing books that flagrantly breached the copyright of other publishers,” says Heylin. “This is somebody who, if he got his hands on Shakespeare’s sonnets, must have done so in some underhanded, slightly questionable way.”
But why was Shakespeare so intent on keeping the sonnets private? That gets to some of the most controversial questions about the poems.
Most of the sonnets are addressed to a “fair youth” whose identity has been the source of endless academic debate. Heylin believes it was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
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May 22nd, 2009 at 8:29 am
I heard the interview with this person on NPR and it just irritated the living crap out of me. Any Shakespeare scholar worth his doublet knows that we don’t have any earthly idea whether Shakespeare was “so intent on keeping the sonnets private.” In the period, it was common for young men (Edmund Spenser being a prominent example) to write chapbooks of sonnets and circulate them among their friends. They might even write such a book as a gift for a patron (see also, “The Faerie Queen”). If your book of sonnets circulated a bit among the wealthy, you might even get a new patron or a commission. It’s even possible that Shakespeare commissioned a small print run to make an extra couple of bucks, and all those are lost to the ages. Shakespeare was in a business, and he was very, very savvy. This is something we can conclusively know–the man worked in the theater and managed to buy the second-largest house in Stratford.
And PS, the William Herbert theory is not, by any means, controversial, surprising, or new. He’s been suspect numero uno since (roughly) the nineteenth century.
Having a Masters of Letters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in Performance from the American Shakespeare Center has done almost nothing for me except make news and pop-culture Shakespeare sightings *even* *more* *annoying*.