Sonnet 1 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence.
Introduction
Sonnet 1 is the first in a series of 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare and published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe.Cheney, Patrick. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print, pg.127. Nineteenth-century critics thought Thorpe might have published the poems without Shakespeare's consent, but modern scholars don't agree and consider that Thorpe maintained a good reputation.Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. New York, W. W. Norton, 1997, p. 444.Cheney, Patrick. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print, pg. 127. Sonnet 1 is the first of the "Fair Youth" sonnets, in which an unnamed young man is being addressed by the speaker.Cheney, Patrick. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print, pg. 128. Patrick Cheney comments on this: "Beginning with a putatively male speaker imploring a beautiful young man to reproduce, and concluding with a series of poems – the dark lady poems – that affiliate consummated heterosexual passion with incurable disease, Shakespeare's Sonnets radically and deliberately disrupt the conventional narrative of erotic courtship".Cheney, Patrick. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print, pg. 128 Sonnet 1 serves as being a kind of introduction to the rest of the sonnets, and may have been written later than the ones that follow.Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1997. Print, pg. 47. The "procreation sonnets" (sonnets 1 – 17) urge this youth to not waste his beauty by failing to marry or reproduce.Matz, Robert. The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Introduction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2008. Print, pg. 6. Joseph Pequigney notes: "the opening movement give[s the] expression to one compelling case... The first mode of preservation entertained is procreation, which is urged without letup in the first fourteen poems and twice again".Pequigney, Joseph. Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985. Print, pg. 7.
The identity of the "Fair Youth" is not known; two leading candidates are considered the “W.H.” mentioned in the dedication of the 1609 quarto: "Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton (1573–1624), or William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke (1580–1630)".Crosman, Robert. "Making Love out of Nothing at All: The Issue of Story in Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets". Shakespeare Quarterly 41.4 (1990): 470-488. Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington University. Web, pg. 477. Both were patrons of Shakespeare but at different times – Wriothesley in the 1590s and Herbert in the 1600s. Though the idea that the Fair Youth and the W.H. are the same person has often been doubted, the Fair Youth may be based on one person in the first 17 sonnets and based on another person in the rest.Shakespeare, William. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Bloomsbury Arden 2010. . p. 55.
See: Identity of "Mr. W.H."
In Sonnet 1 the speaker engages in an argument with the youth regarding procreation.Bennett, Kenneth C. Threading Shakespeare's Sonnets. Lake Forest, IL: Lake Forest College, 2007. Print, pg. 2. Scholar Helen Vendler sums up Sonnet 1: "The different rhetorical moments of this sonnet (generalizing reflection, reproach, injunction, prophecy) are permeable to one another's metaphors, so that the rose of philosophical reflection yields the bud of direct address, and the famine of address yields the glutton who, in epigram, eats the world's due".Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1997. Print, pg. 46.
Context
Shakespeare's sonnets do not exactly follow the sonnet form established by the Italian poet Petrarch. According to Robert Matz, "Shakespeare transforms the sonnet convention".Matz, Robert. The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Introduction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2008. Print, pg. 77. Shakespeare brings in topics and themes that were unusual at the time. Shakespeare's audience would have interpreted such an aggressive tone as entirely improper encouragement of procreation.Herman, Peter C. "What's the Use? Or, the Problematic of Economy in Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets". Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays. Ed. James Schiffer. New York: Garland, 1999. Print, pg. 263-279 In fact, the other sonnets of the time revered chastity. However, Shakespeare "does not engage in stock exaltation of the chastity of the beloved, but instead accuses the young man of gluttonous self-consumption in his refusal to produce a 'tender heir' who would continue his beauty beyond the inexorable decay of aging".Schoenfeldt, Michael. "The Sonnets". The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print, pg. 125-143. Sonnets are often about romantic love between the speaker and the beloved but Shakespeare does not do this. Instead, Shakespeare urges the young man to have sex and procreate with a woman in marriage.Matz, Robert. The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Introduction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2008. Print, pg. 78.
Context for Sonnet 1
This sonnet is the first one of the collection of sonnets published in the 1609 quarto. According to Helen Vendler, this sonnet can be “as an index to the rest of the sonnets",Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print, pg. 47 mainly because it brings "into play such a plethora of conceptual material; it seems a self-conscious groundwork laid for the rest".Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print, pg. 47. Vendler says that because of the "sheer abundance of values, images, and concepts important in the sequence which are called into play" and "the number of significant words brought to our attention" in this sonnet, that it may have been composed late in the writing process, and then placed first "as a 'preface' to the others".(Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print, pg. 47.) Philip Martin says that Sonnet 1 is important to the rest because it "states the themes for the sonnets immediately following and also for the sequence at large".Martin, Philip J. T. Shakespeare's Sonnets; Self, Love and Art. New York City, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Print, pg. 20. To him, the themes are announced in this sonnet and the later ones develop those themes. Joseph Pequigney says that Sonnet 1 may be "a befitting way to begin the least conventional of Renaissance love-sonnet sequences".Pequigney, Joseph. Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985. Print, pg. 9. It provides a "production of metaphorical motifs that will recur in the upcoming sonnets, particularly in the next fourteen or so; it gives the concepts of beauty and time and their interrelationship, as also the emblem of the rose, all of which carry the weight in the other sonnets; and it shows the theme of reproduction, to be taken up in all except one of the sixteen ensuing poems".Pequigney, Joseph. Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985. Print, pg. 9.
Donald A. Stauffer says that the sonnets "may not be in an order which is absolutely correct but no one can deny that they are related and that they do show some development some 'story' even if incomplete and unsatisfactory".Crosman, Robert. "Making Love out of Nothing at All: The Issue of Story in Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets". Shakespeare Quarterly 41.4 (1990): 470-488. Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington University. Web, pg. 470.
Form and structure
Sonnet 1 has the traditional characteristics of a Shakespearean sonnet—three quatrains and a couplet written in iambic pentameter with an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets also reflect the two-part structure of the Italian Petrarchan Sonnet. In this type of sonnet (though not in Sonnet 1) "the first eight lines are logically or metaphorically set against the last six [and] an octave-generalization will be followed by a particular sestet-application, an octave question will be followed by a sestet answer or at least a quatrain answer before the summarizing couplet".Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1997. Print, pg. 50.
In lines one through four of this sonnet, Shakespeare writes about increasing and references memory. Here, Shakespeare chooses to rhyme "increase" and "decease", "die" and "memory" and then proceeds to use "eyes" and "lies", "fuel" and "cruel" as rhymes in the second quatrain (lines five through eight). In lines five through twelve, Shakespeare shifts to famine and waste. Carl Atkins highlights Shakespeare's inventiveness in the second quatrain, where the sonnet takes on a less-regular rhythm: "We note Shakespeare's consummate ability to mimic colloquial speech so that the sonnet sounds personal and conversational, rather than sententious. Rhythm has an important role here. Thus, we have the triple emphasis produced by the final spondee of line 5, so effective after the regular iambic pentameter of all that precedes it. This is then followed by the flowing trochee-iamb that begins the next line, a combination that will be repeated frequently".Atkins, Carl D. and William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007. Print, pg. 32.
In the third quatrain, the key rhyming words given by the speaker are: "ornament" and "content", and "spring" and "niggarding"; additional images are presented in this quatrain, such as "fresh", "herald", "bud", "burial", and the oxymoron "tender churl". Other words and themes the speaker uses are explained by Helen Vendler: "The concepts – because Shakespeare's mind works by contrastive taxonomy – tend to be summoned in pairs: increase and decrease, ripening and dying; beauty and immortality versus memory and inheritance; expansion and contraction; inner spirit (eyes) and outward show (bud); self-consumption and dispersal, famine and abundance". Shakespeare uses these words to make "an aesthetic investment in profusion".
The sonnet ends with a couplet: two consecutive rhyming lines. Each line contains ten syllables, and the second line is composed only of one-syllable words. Some scholars attribute the monosyllable closing line of the poem as a tribute to 16th century poet, George Gascoigne."The Sonnets - 1." Shakespeare's Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary. Ed. Carl D. Atkins. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont and Printing, 2007. Print, pg. 31-32. Gascoigne is quoted as saying, "The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seemed, and the less you shall smell of the Inkhorn".