What do The Sonnets teach us about Shakespeare?
No, I don’t mean about Shakespeare’s life, I mean about his writing. I believe The Sonnets may have been Shakespeare’s first exercise in dramatic writing because they tell a dramatic story. There’s a tempestuous relationship between two men, complicated by a love triangle with a married woman who is not treated very well by either man. It turns out badly for everyone. As in the plays, we find parts with strong emotion alternating with quieter passages. There’s also comic relief. And there’s the same technique of starting off in the middle of a conversation to build interest. And, of course, every sonnet ends with a couplet. Many of these serve the same purpose as the clinching couplet at the ends of scenes in the plays, summarizing the sentiment of what has come before.
All this just shows how similar The Sonnets are to Shakespeare’s dramatic writing. Most important is that they are a concentrated example of what Samuel Johnson calls his “diction,” i.e., the way he uses language to express himself. The sonnet is a very constrained form that requires the poet to get his ideas across in just fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. In the plays, the ideas can be expressed more leisurely, but occasionally, the same kind of compression is necessary, especially when dramatic intensity is required and especially in those occasional instances when he uses rhymed verse in the plays.
This is where it becomes useful to be familiar with Shakespeare’s diction as he uses it in The Sonnets. Once you understand how he plays with words and twists his phrases around, it’s easier to untangle his more difficult phrases. Very commonly, he places words and phrases in unexpected places. And there’s one device pointed out by an editor of The Sonnets George Wyndham (1898) not often noted by editors of the plays, the parenthetical development. This is the interruption of a main idea by one or more other ideas. An interesting example is the beginning of Sonnet 11: “As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st / In one of thine, from that which thou departest.” The main idea is “As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest in one of thine.” Tacked on the end is a parenthetical development that would usually interrupt the main idea in the middle: “As fast as thou shalt wane, from that which thou departest, so fast shalt thou grow in one of thine.” Instead, that phrase is moved to the end of the line to suit the meter and the rhyme (where it’s a bit confusing if you’re not prepared to look for phrases that move around all over the place.) This juggling of words and phrases into unusual places in a sentence is key to understanding many difficult passages in Shakespeare. It’s common in The Sonnets and if you read them enough, you get used to it and they get easier to understand.
That’s my two cents for now.