Metaphysics of the biography. How many parts to Shakespeare’s <i>Sonnets</i>?

Abstract

The two-part structure for the sequence of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was suggested by its first editor Edmund Malone at the end of the 18th c. and proved to be a long-standing tradition. Recently not a few attempts have been made to clarify the logic practiced by the Renaissance sonneteers in whose context Shakespeare’s lyrical narration is problematized. This article joins to ascertain the boundaries of inner cycles within the sequence in order to follow the denouement of its plot. The author argues that the Renaissance sequence, much unlike the narrative logic in the novel, does not present a consistent love story but rather the sessions of sweet silent thought (sonnet 30), reflective in the sonnet and growing more and more metaphysical in Shakespeare, both in diction and metaphor. Certain biographical allusions in the sequence (some of them advanced by the author) support that it was written between 1592 and 1603–1604 to the Earl of Southampton as its addressee.