Poet, Friend, and Poetry: the Idealized Image of Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets emerged from an age when, as W. H. Auden noted, poets “were not given to writing their biographies or to ‘unlocking their hearts.’” Shakespeare's sonnets are therefore “astonishing” for “the impression they make of naked autobiographical confession” (1, p. xxxiv). The confession is not naked in the historical sense; for as C. L. Barber has said, the sonnets “do not oblige our curiosity about circumstantial facts” of Shakespeare's life. Rather they are confessional in that they “express a personality” (2, pp. 299-300), the inner reality of someone who, if he is not Shakespeare, seems closely akin to him. I will refer to him as the Poet in order to distinguish him from Shakespeare the historical person. To interpret this inner reality, to recover the character structure underlying the sonnets’ rich psychological detail about the perceiving, writing Poet, we need the power and subtlety of Horneyan theory.

The sonnets tell the story of two relationships. The first, the focus of sonnets 1 through 126, is that between the Poet and a Friend, a young man of much higher social rank. In about three-fourths of these poems, the Poet is apparently contented in the relationship, finding in it what he needs and extolling the Friend's wonderful qualities. Minor anxieties may strike the Poet, for example, when the two of them are separated or when another poet also addresses poems to the Friend; but these setbacks do not cause profound disturbance for the Poet. The remaining sonnets to the Friend, by contrast, show a conflict-ridden, deeply painful side of the Poet's experience in this relationship. He may reproach the Friend for failing to appreciate his love and to pay adequate attention to him; he may accuse the Friend of fickleness, coldness, inconsideration; then he may suddenly begin to reproach himself for being jealous, or he may immediately and profusely forgive the Friend at the slightest sign of repentance. At times he castigates the y