‘My name is Will’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

The first-person speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets is, as with his illustrious predecessors, Petrarch and Sidney, both lover and poet. His sonnet sequence, like theirs, masquerades, if only at the moment in sonnet 136 when the lover-poet names himself as Will, as a version of the author’s own story. In this chapter I shall explore the first-person subject constructed through Shakespeare’s sequence and consider ways in which its presentation of the ‘I’ as authorial, and in some sense autobiographical, develops themes and ideas apparent in earlier texts but takes them in unprecedented directions. It is often said that modern subjectivity is first given expression in Shakespeare’s work, particularly in the character of Hamlet. Francis Barker, for example, writes that ‘Hamlet utters … a first demand for the modern subject. In the name … of the secular soul, an interior subjectivity begins to speak here.’1 Anne Ferry in her detailed study of the language of ‘inwardness’ in sixteenth-century verse, associates what she sees as the innovation of Hamlet’s inwardness with the writing of the Sonnets: ‘both the nature of poetry about inward experience and the notion of what is in the heart rendered by it changed radically between Wyatt’s lifetime and about 1600, when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet and shortly after he is thought to have written his sonnets.’2 Joel Fineman, in his study of subjectivity in the Sonnets, describes the sonnets particularly those that come late in the sequence as ‘something new … developing … a new poetic persona at odds with its self’.3