The greatest English poet and playwright William Shakespeare, in addition to genius plays, created several poems and 154 sonnets. They are unlikely to be autobiographical, although the temptation to find episodes of the poet's personal life in them has always been very great. Most of the sonnets are addressed to a certain friend who is not named.
In his sonnets, Shakespeare tells the dramatic story of the relationship between three people - a lyrical hero who is often identified with the author, his friend and lover. From the sonnets it is clear that the friend is significantly younger than the poet and, apparently, occupies a higher social position. The most widespread version is that the earl of Southampton was his prototype, to whom the poet also dedicated other works.
The image of a friend in Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare draws attention to the appearance of his young friend: he is fair-haired and femininely beautiful. Among a certain circle of researchers and readers, there is a temptation to interpret the poet's attitude towards him as a kind of love. Meanwhile, the outstanding Shakespeare scholar Alexander Abramovich Anikst is absolutely sure that it was a deep and sublime male friendship. The fact is that the ideal of friendship was cultivated among the humanists of the Renaissance. Artists and philosophers, studying the cultures of antiquity, now and then found examples of great friendship, an example of which was Orestes and Pylas, Achilles and Patroclus and other mythological characters. It was believed that the love of the most beautiful of the ladies could not be compared with the devotion of a friend.
Blond friend and dark lady
However, the friendship between the poet and the blond youth was tested more than once. The most serious of them turned out to be the appearance of a dark lady - the author's mysterious lover. Back in the Middle Ages, the tradition of serving the cult of the beautiful lady arose. Renaissance poets created beautiful sonnets that celebrated the beauty of a real or fictional beloved. They described the appearance of a certain beautiful angel with eyes shining like stars and an airy gait.
Shakespeare creates a description of the external appearance of the beloved, based on the denial of conventional clichés. At that time, blond or golden hair color was in fashion, and the poet's beloved was a brunette. Her eyes are not like stars, her lips are like corals, and her gait is the step of an earthly woman, not a goddess walking on the clouds. The last lines of the sonnet contain an ironic attack on those who are prone to pompous comparisons. The real woman described by the poet is in no way inferior to idealized images.
Unfortunately, the dark lady is by no means ideal morally, and the poet is well aware of this. However, fate prepares him a terrible blow: his beloved cheats on him with a friend. It is quite obvious that the poet experiences the loss of a friend much more than the betrayal of his beloved. He knew perfectly well her frivolity and inconstancy, and faith in a friend was truly boundless. Ultimately, the friends made up.
Perhaps the sonnets were not at all based on the real relationship of three people. In addition, it is quite possible that the young man whom the poet convinces to marry in the first 17 sonnets and the friend to whom the subsequent works are addressed are different persons. In any case, most of Shakespeare's sonnets are a spiritualized hymn to pure and beautiful friendship.
