Halfway through his new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Don Paterson quotes W.H. Auden. Auden was one of Shakespeare’s great commentators and he firmly warned against reading the sonnets as simple statements. ‘It is also nonsensical,’ Auden wrote, ‘to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless and uninteresting.’
Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are dazzling puzzles, rich and strange, and they have often been met with manic speculation in the place of reasoned literary criticism. Critics have sought to explain who the Dark Lady is, and who these apparent love poems are addressed to; they have mined the sonnets for proof of Shakespeare’s homosexuality.
Paterson’s book sensibly insists that these are foremost poems, and the strongest parts of his commentary are those in which he unpacks the poetic tricks and styles used by Shakespeare. He has a refreshingly commonsense tone. Some of the sonnets are among the finest poems in the English language; others, as Paterson convincingly argues, are almost deliberately strained and obscure.
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