Today marks the 400th anniversary of the release, by publisher Thomas Thorpe, of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A new book by Clinton Heylin, called So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, questions whether the marvelously crafted poems were ever meant for a wider audience. NPR’s article and audio piece, Did Shakespeare Want To Suppress His Sonnets?, shows how Heylin’s book explores the possibility of Shakespeare’s homosexual relationships and argues that many of the sonnets’ narrators are the Bard himself. On Paper Cuts, the NYTimes book blog, William S. Niederkorn seems to agree, wondering: “Why do exalted Shakespeare scholars want us to think the Sonnets are purely imaginative invention?” However, in his Times of London article, Jonathan Bate states: “We simply do not know whether the sonnets are dramatic performances written out of sheer imagination or poetic reimaginings of real figures and events.” Historians doth protest too much, methinks.
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