Dolly Walker-Wraight - The Shakespeare Sonnets

The Shakespeare Sonnets

The methodology in her book "The Story that the Sonnets Tell" was to divide the sonnets of Shakespeare into different categories according to their meaning, to come closer to the solution of their mystery. She approached the problem by assuming that what the poet himself wrote is as close to the truth as one can get. According to her belief, the basic mistake committed by many interpreters of the Sonnets was that they have assumed that there is only a single young man (the "Fair Youth") to whom most of the sonnets are addressed. She claims to have identified at least three.

The first one is Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, whose seventeenth birthday the first seventeen sonnets were commissioned by Lord Burghley to commemorate. Their intent was to inspire him to marry Burghley's granddaughter.

The second young man of the Sonnets is a certain "William Hatcliffe", one of several candidates to be the Mr. W.H. of the dedication. In this identification she follows the arguments of Leslie Hotson.

The third man is Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe's friend, who stood him by as he was unjustly dishonoured and forced into exile, for which constancy the poet was indebted to him for the rest of his life, and which the sonnets might illustrate.

According to Walker-Wraight, the order of the sonnets in the original 1609 edition probably was arranged by the poet himself, adopting a form like a five act play. She believes that the poet himself could never have envisaged that his sonnets would be rearranged in the pattern she devised.