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The speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets is, above all, a poet who believes in the power of verse. Frequently throughout this long sequence, the speaker remarks on how poetry can rescue objects of desire from the ravages of time and grant them immortality. This belief in poetry’s permanence might initially suggest that the speaker is a conventional love poet. After all, many poets both before and after Shakespeare have imagined themselves capable of using verse to protect their beloveds from time’s otherwise inevitable degradation. But there are several ways in which Shakespeare’s speaker is an atypical love poet. As a point of comparison, consider the typical speaker of a Petrarchan sonnet. This type of speaker is deeply in love with and devoted to his beloved. Yet because he is also perpetually unable to connect with his beloved in the way he wishes, what results is a poetry whose predominant tone is one of despair. In the case of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the speaker is similarly unsatisfied with the attention he receives from his love objects. However, instead of residing solely in despair, this speaker explores a range of emotional responses, including lust, shame, pride, disgust, delight, and fear, among others.
Among the most notable aspects of the speaker is the apparent openness of his sexuality. Indeed, his desire isn’t limited by age or gender, as evidenced by the fact that of the two objects of desire who occupy him in the sonnets, one is a young man and the other is a mature woman. His clear attraction to both the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady indicates that the speaker is what today we would identify as bisexual. Although that term wasn’t available in Elizabethan England and is therefore ahistorical, many critics have found it useful for discussing the speaker’s sexuality. Furthermore, many critics have used the speaker’s sexuality to link him directly to Shakespeare, who is widely believed to have been sexually attracted to men as well as women. However, it’s important to avoid conflating the poet with the speaker, who is more properly understood as a formal construct created by the poet.
Arguably more important than the speaker’s sexuality is his mind, which exhibits a restless curiosity. The speaker uses a wide range of metaphors and conceits that far exceed the typical love poet’s dependence on the beauty of the natural world. In addition to figures of natural beauty, the speaker also invokes love through imagery related to courts of law, economic accounting, property rights, contracts, patents, prisons, and even rotting flesh. It’s also notable that as a writer of carefully constructed poems, the speaker longs to present a rational and carefully composed front. Yet the various agonies and jealousies brought on by his relationships to the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady also cause him emotional and psychological instability. Additionally, the speaker shows himself capable of holding double standards when it comes to accepting the infidelity of the Fair Youth but castigating that of the Dark Lady. He can also resort to cattiness and sarcasm. Taken together, the speaker of the sonnets comes across as a fully realized figure whose psychological complexity rivals that of another great Shakespearean creation, Prince Hamlet.
