Published in 2010, I didn't think I needed another book on Shakespeare's sonnets. I was happy with Katherine Duncan-Jones and didn't know what more there was to say. Then I heard Wendy Cope on Poetry Please mention Paterson's reading of Sonnet 57 and thought I'd better investigate further. I'm glad I did.
Don Paterson's approach is a combination of high lit. crit., identifying for our benefit in Sonnet 10 a 'metaleptic double metaphor', and a contemporary demotic tone.
He has read closely and is never shy of finding fault either with the poems or previous commentators. In fact one has to remind oneself that from the outset he has said that all his verdicts are in the context of 'for Shakespeare', whose most ordinary work is well ahead of most other people's very best. Not only could one come away from this book thinking that the sonnets contained a lot of dud poems but it would be entirely possible to not want to see another line of iambic pentameter for quite some time.
In a useful appendix, Paterson has explained much about the attractions of the 14 line form as well as the five iambic feet. In one of many observations that betray a knowledge of or interest in neurological science, he points out that the three seconds it takes to read are a unit of 'what we can hold in our minds in an indivisible instant'.
However, most of his psychology is saved for what the poems are about, which is the progress of two difficult love affairs. We have been told in the introduction that there isn't any doubt about what's going on,
The question 'was Shakespeare gay?' is so stupid as to be barely worth answering but, for the record: of course he was.
He might have had a heterosexual side but 'his heart wasn't in it'. So, the story unfolds with Paterson interpreting, clearing up difficulties, explaining the obsession with numerology and comparing previous critics as the relationship goes from infatuation, through declarations of love, difficulties with jealousy and rival lovers until it goes bad and by Sonnet 124, love is an end in itself, severed from the young man. There are several convincing attempts at dating pieces when evidence allows, not only the suggestion of reference to contemporary events but textual affinites with plays that have established dates.
An interesting game can be played in which you read the sonnet before trying to anticipate Paterson's verdict. I improved at this as I went on but could never be confident of getting it right. But while his judgements are interesting, his interpretations trustworthy and his notes useful it is the way in which the sonnets are used as a basis from which to make broader observations on poetry that I found the most satisfying.
At various times he digresses to talk about the overly serious nature of so much literary criticism ('the extent to which the Scientific research model has infected the Humanities'), poetry in translation ('while a language's words might have rough synonyms in another tongue, its vast network of idiomatic collocation is wholly unique') or the old question of whether there could be such a thing as a 'good fascist novel'. Paterson calls the question 'whether one's reaction to a poem can be separated from its content'. And although you'd think that theoretically it might be, in fact it probably can't,
Who reads like that anyway, and would you want them round for dinner?
And it is good for Don Paterson, and makes me feel better, too, that I agree with him nearly all of the time.
Shakespeare as a person doesn't come out of it too well but that is the fault of generations of idolators who thought that a talent for writing embued the whole person with a saint-like virtue. I'm afraid all it does is allow one to write well and no further assumptions can be made. But surely one would need to have been human, with all the concomitant failings, to be able to write about them and so it shouldn't be a surprise that he was a moody, jealous, self-regarding queen full of self-disgust, good at nurturing hurt and agony.
Don Paterson has brought our understanding of these poems up to date most astutely and accessibly. He has added himself to the tradition of their interpreters, and emerged from the debt he began by saying that he owed them.
