Autobiographical Interpretations
Michelle Burnham adopts the nineteenth century theories, that Shakespeare’s sonnets contain autobiographical information about him, in order to explore the novel Ulysses. Through her examination into Joyce’s use of the poems, the reader can discover the mindset of the nineteenth century Shakespeare reader. Burnham affirms that critics of the past believed that Shakespeare was caught in a love triangle between a fair boy and dark woman in her article, ““Dark Lady and Fair Man”: The Love Triangle in Shakespeare’s Sonnet and Ulysses” Stephen Booth reinforces this argument by stating that in line 7 “my saint” “is in the courtly love tradition, in which poets customarily spoke about their beloveds in the manner and language of... worshipers to, or about, saints.” Harvey Stanborough claims that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 144 discusses, not a bisexual relationship between the author and “a man right fair” and “a woman coloured ill,” but rather it reveals Shakespeare’s internal conflict as an artist. He proposes “that it was actually addressed to a much broader, general audience and is an attempted explanation of his own artistic mind.” To him, the two loves in the sonnet embody two passions which pull at Shakespeare’s mind in opposing directions: “the speaker is explaining that he has two passions: a passion (desire) for comfort, and a passion (need) for despair” He uses a less edited version of the sonnet to assert that the first line of the poem makes a clear distinction between passions rather than lovers. He uses “Two loves I have, of Comfort and Despaire” to show that the separation of the comma “contend that the two loves he mentions are not people at all, but the two sides--light and dark--of his creative personality.”
Stephen Booth argues that the editing of the comma “has no effect on the logic of the line.” Stanborough furthers his argument by “argu that he is introducing us to the good side of himself, the side that psychologists call the ‘presenting self,’...Being a male, he naturally describes the "better Angell" as masculine; he also describes it as ‘right faire,’... to signify the light of goodness.”
To explain the presence of the “dark lady,” Stanborough asserts that she is the good self’s exact opposite: “The first was masculine, so this one is necessarily characterized as feminine; the first was ‘faire,’ or light, so this one is ‘colour'd ill.’” The entire argument is based in the fact that Stanborough believes that, in order to have creative insight, artist’s mental divisions between depression and joy. Booth exposes the underlying sexual nature of the poem in line 12 where it states “one angel in another’s hell.” He talks about the work of Ingram and Redpath when they discuss the meanings used for hell in the time Shakespeare was writing. They wrote that “several meanings appear to be present: ... such a position was often used as a pretext for a sexual tumble; ‘hell’ is probably also... the female sexual organ” in which case “‘one angel’ is the man, and ‘another’ is the woman” clearly engaging in sex.
Clara Longworth de Chambrun writes, “None who hears the cry of remorse and anguish in Shakespeare’s poems can doubt that their author traversed an period of great moral suffering. The serene atmosphere of his later work seems to attest that he came through the fire tempered and ripened. The facts also sustain this hypothesis and explain his Life’s Philosophy. ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither, ripeness is all,’” De Chambrun describes how the W.H. theory originated. Thomas Thorpe, a “pirate publisher,” published a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets with the following inscription, “To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets, Mr. W.H.,”. De Chambrun criticizes the initials and she does not believe in following the Herbertist (William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke in 1623) theory, rather she writes of “graver critics” seeing the letters standing for Will Hall, a trafficker of manuscripts and a favorite of Thorpe, the “Piratical Publisher” De Chambrun continues, if the Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert, was Mr. W.H., then the critics who believe the dark lady to be Mary Fitton (known mistress) would be incorrect, because Mary Fitton was a blonde.
Read more about this topic: Sonnet 144