Written to a man. Yes, the most famous of sonnets is a man writing to another man.
‘And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,’
The sonnets, most importantly, were published without Shakespeare’s permission so is generally believed to be the best way of understanding the Bard behind the words.
Sonnet 18, and 125 of the other poems, are written directly to a man described as the ‘fair youth’.The others are directed to a ‘dark lady’ and are far more sexual and intimate in nature.
The first 126 urge the fair youth to have children to pass along his beauty to another generation. The sonnets become progressively broody, lonely, and almost bitter that the man prefers another poet.
Originally published in 1609, they would have been lost to obscurity if it wasn’t for John Benson in 1640. But Benson, eager to sanitize Shakespeare’s work, changed many of the male pronouns to female. This is still occasionally done in modern schools. Thankfully, most editions of the sonnets work from the original rather than the bastardized version.
2. ‘I give unto my wife my second best bed…’
What can we know about Shakespeare’s relationship to Anne Hathaway, an older woman, who he married and had three children with?
Well, very little. The two married when Shakespeare was 18, she was 26 and already pregnant with their first child Susanna.
Most famously, when he died, Shakespeare gave her only one thing – the second best bed.
This is viewed by many as a slight and a claim of how he had come to dislike her, viewing the marriage as a trap away from his free life in London.
To explain this, the ‘second best bed’ in Elizabethan times was the marital bed. The ‘best bed’ went to the guest.
Some critics have suggested this to be a show of thanks to his wife, for bearing him his children, and of little else. Others consider it to be romantic.
In the rest of the will, the majority of Shakespeare’s possessions went to his daughter Susanna. Hamnet, his only son, died at the very young age of 11. It is believed Shakespeare’s other daughter Judith got very little in the will so as to avoid it going to her husband, a man who had got another girl pregnant.
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