Written by Helen Vendler. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 672 pages, $35.
Why has Helen Vendler, poetry critic and Harvard professor, written a book of more than 600 pages on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, which printed by themselves would fill a book only one-ninth the size of "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets"?
Because the sonnets are the last frontier in Shakespearean studies, or as Vendler puts it in her introduction, "since critics tend to dwell on the most famous 10 or 15 out of the total 154," the sonnets "represent the largest tract of unexamined Shakespearean lines left open to scrutiny."
In her introduction, Vendler cautions that her commentary "is not intended to be read straight through," but rather to be browsed in. This increasingly seems like good advice as one plunges into her intricate sonnet analyses, each of which runs three or four pages and often includes diagrams of structure or aesthetic shape, as well as the key words linking the concluding couplets to the three quatrains.
Particularly perplexing are her studies of wordplay in the poems. For instance, in her comments on Sonnet 20 ("A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted") she points out that the letters of the word h-e-w-s (the Quarto spelling) or h-u-e-s appear in each of the sonnet's 14 lines. She adds, "The high proportion (2.7 percent) of w's in the total of letters in this sonnet is also explicable by the necessity of making hew as often as possible."
Was this intentional on Shakespeare's part? Would his readers have detected the letters? In another context, Vendler makes the point that Shakespeare was obviously fascinated by the way words looked in print. And likely this was generally true of Elizabethans, for whom printing was a novelty. But to expect readers to search the text for anagrams to heighten their understanding seems a shade far-fetched.
But when you come upon any of the most famous sonnets ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" or "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"), Vendler's pages light up. Is this because they are so familiar? Perhaps, but then aren't they well-known because of their superiority? In any case, with these sonnets Vendler's commentaries grow deeper and less technical.
But for what audiences is this thick volume intended, with its compact disk of the author reading 65 of the sonnets because "the three readings available on tape are done by actors who, so far as I can judge, did not invest much time in studying the texts, and who therefore speak the lines with constant mis-emphases, destroying the meaning of many of the sonnets by not observing inner antitheses and parallels"?
Vendler writes that her book is for "those interested in the sonnets, or students of the lyric, or poets hungry for resource." Yet "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" is also for serious readers in general. Poetry demands the most active sort of reading. What works best is when you engage in a dialogue with the poem, "How does it work?" and "What kind of guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place?"
