Why Lyrics Last

Brian Boyd

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674069190
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Why Lyrics Last, the internationally acclaimed critic Brian Boyd turns an evolutionary lens on the subject of lyric verse. He finds that lyric making, though it presents no advantages for the species in terms of survival and reproduction, is "universal across cultures because it fits constraints of the human mind." An evolutionary perspective— especially when coupled with insights from aesthetics and literary history—has much to tell us about both verse and the lyrical impulse.Boyd places the writing of lyrical verse within the human disposition "to play with pattern, " and in an extended example he uncovers the many patterns to be found within Shakespeare's Sonnets. Shakespeare's bid for readership is unlike that of any sonneteer before him: he deliberately avoids all narrative, choosing to maximize the openness of the lyric and demonstrating the power that verse can have when liberated of story.In eschewing narrative, Shakespeare plays freely with patterns of other kinds: words, images, sounds, structures; emotions and moods; argument and analogy; and natural rhythms, in daily, seasonal, and life cycles. In the originality of his stratagems, and in their sheer number and variety, both within and between sonnets, Shakespeare outdoes all competitors. A reading of the Sonnets informed by evolution is primed to attend to these complexities and better able to appreciate Shakespeare's remarkable gambit for immortal fame.

From Sonnet to Sequence

4

Love

The Mistress

After encountering a few of the greatest sonnets one at a time, modern readers may be tempted to turn to the sonnets as a whole. They often find themselves taxed, disappointed, and perplexed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets may be the most successful collection of secular lyrics in at least the Western tradition, but readers far more often begin the volume than end it. The sequence can be demanding line by line and sonnet by sonnet, and it remains famously riddling as a whole.

The most successful works of art, like Shakespeare’s greatest sonnets, can and often do stand on their own. More problematic cases often need an explanation of their background. To understand the Sonnets as a collection I think we need the deep background of evolution as well as the immediate background of Shakespeare’s work and world.

Shake-speares Sonnets starts with sperm trying to meet eggs—and not just with John Shakespeare’s meeting Mary Arden’s. “Reductive,” you might think. Or “Eggs? What about the Fair Youth?” Wait and see.

Shake-speares Sonnets

All Shakespeare’s known sonnets, except those embedded in his plays, were published together in 1609. Scholars still debate whether the book advertised on its title page and throughout the volume as Shake-speares Sonnets was prepared by Shakespeare, or at least approved by him, or whether it was pirated and printed without his knowledge and overseeing. Scholars still do not agree when in his compact literary career he wrote the poems, whether he wrote them in a single sustained effort, or in several such efforts, or more or less piecemeal, and only afterward placed them in the sequence we now have, or whether indeed it was he who determined their order. One index of the challenge the sonnets’ sequence poses is that over the last two centuries many have tried to reorder them, usually “to create a more intelligible ‘story,’ ”1 but no new sequence has won general acceptance.

Nevertheless, evidence about order and date has accumulated and converged over the last half-century. The majority of those who have worked most intensely on the sonnets have moved from the earlier consensus that they were amassed and printed by an unscrupulous and piratical publisher to the conclusion that the whole volume, sequence and all, was designed by Shakespeare to work within, against, and around the convention of sonnet sequences so popular in England in the early 1590s (see especially the work of MacDonald P. Jackson and of Katherine Duncan-Jones).2 Recent evidence also shows it is unlikely that, as once thought, Shakespeare wrote all his sonnets in the early years of his career. He now appears to have written some in the mid-1590s, others late in the decade, and still others up until about 1604. He may well have continued to revise until shortly before publication, and seems to be responsible for the final order.3

Love, Sonnets, and Sexual Selection

Since Shakespeare’s time, poets have written sonnets on many subjects, from John Milton’s “On His Blindness” and Keats’s “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” to Carol Ann Duffy’s dramatic monologues (“Human Interest,” a knife-killer’s lament; or “Anne Hathaway,” a surprising view from that second-best bed—of which, more later). But Shakespeare’s initial audience thought of sonnets, most often, as love poems.

One of the readiest evolutionary explanations for sonnets, or for any of the arts, is sexual selection. The logic of reproductive specialization into female and male leads to one sex’s producing resource-rich eggs and the other’s producing massive numbers of cheap but highly motile sperm to increase the chance that some will reach the far fewer available eggs. Sperm is cheap and eggs are dear: one man produces enough new sperm every month to fertilize in theory every woman of reproductive age in the world.4 Not only do females produce vastly fewer eggs than males, but once an egg is fertilized, they may have to commit weeks or months to its gestation. Females therefore have reason to be highly selective in accepting males as partners. As a result males need to compete against one another for females, and do so either head to head, literally, like stags and stag beetles, by knocking out the competition, or, as it were, head to heart, by competing to appeal to the available females more than other males do. In this latter case males need to display—to demonstrate their desirability to females, in the hope of being selected by at least one of them. In many species in which intersexual selection operates, that can lead to the hypertrophy of a single suite of features, like the peacock’s tail or the male bowerbird’s compulsion to build bowers taller and more tasteful than those of his rivals. In the human world, where we have discovered the power of specialization, there may be many routes to success and therefore many avenues for male display. Among those we prize most are the intellectual and the creative, and their combination. Steven Pinker makes the case vividly: “the impulse to create art is a mating tactic: a way to impress prospective sexual and marriage partners with the quality of one’s brain and thus, indirectly, one’s genes. Artistic virtuosity … is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake, and widely prized. Artists, in other words, are sexy.”5 Today young male comics artists frequently explain their art as a way to attract young women who might otherwise ignore them as physically unprepossessing or socially unconfident.

Although males produced far more sonnets in the English Renaissance than did women,6 and the same holds for rap music now, sexual selection seems a woefully insufficient explanation for art, especially when both sexes engage in art long before puberty and long after peak reproductive years and when art can serve communal and even religious functions. As I write elsewhere, sexual selection may provide an extra gear for art, but not its engine.7 Even if sexual selection amplifies male artistic energy, especially in public art, the drive need not be consciously linked with sex. Yet at the end of the sixteenth century sonnets were insistently, comically, associated with love and male pursuit. In what may be Shakespeare’s first comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus urges Thurio:

You must lay lime, to tangle her desires

By wailful sonnets, whose composed rhymes

Should be full-fraught with serviceable vow.… (III.2.69–71)

In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio produces the proof that Benedick loves Beatrice:

And I’ll be sworn upon’t that he loves her,

For here’s a paper written in his hand,

A halting sonnet of his own pure brain,

Fashion’d to Beatrice.

Hero continues:

And here’s another

Writ in my cousin’s hand, stol’n from her pocket,

Containing her affection unto Benedick. (V.4.85–90)8

Shakespeare has Romeo and Juliet signal their perfect suitedness in love from the start by exchanging their first words in sonnet form. And in the Sonnets themselves, in his proudest boast of the immortality of his verse, Sonnet 55, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments,” Shakespeare concludes: “So, till the judgment that yourself arise, / You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.” Lovers, he assumes, form the natural readership for sonnets.

Sonnet 1 … 45

Shakespeare’s own surviving sonnets appear to have begun with an instance of pure sexual selection: with a Stratford teenager appealing to a Stratford twenty-something by writing her a sonnet, the very type of the love poem in their time. Although Shakespeare, as coy about self-disclosure as ever, did nothing to announce it, he has allowed readers to deduce—eventually!—that Sonnet 145 was written for Anne Hathaway.

Composed in iambic tetrameter rather than the normal iambic pentameter, with a much thinner texture than the other sonnets, and conspicuously different from its neighbors in tone, content, and imagery, Sonnet 145 was often considered of doubtful authenticity. But it has now been recognized as a wooing sonnet, a male display of playful intelligence:

Those lips that love’s own hand did make,

Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”

To me that languished for her sake;

But when she saw my woeful state,

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue, that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom,

And taught it thus anew to greet:

“I hate” she altered with an end

That followed it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,

From heaven to hell is flown away.

“I hate” from hate away she threw,

And saved my life, saying “not you.”

As Andrew Gurr first noticed in 1971, and as almost all commentators have accepted since, “hate away” in line 13 puns on “Hathaway.” The whole sonnet labors rather creakily to reach the reversal delayed until the closing couplet: if “she” agrees to accept his suit, she throws her “hate” away along with her “Hathaway” name (in Shakespeare’s day th could often be pronounced as t, as in the pun on “noting” in the title of Much Ado about Nothing), while in this context “And” in the next line puns on “Anne”: “Anne saved my life” by turning her “hate” away into love.9 Evidently the sonnet itself, or the creative intelligence it required for a young man to compose such a thing, worked: Will Shakespeare appealed to Anne Hathaway enough to win access to her, to marry her, to have children by her. Desire, nature’s “proximate mechanism,” allowed Will S. and Anne H. to reproduce, to fulfill nature’s “ultimate function,” to beat death in nature’s way.

We can easily see Sonnet 145 as Shakespeare’s own “halting sonnet” of his pure young brain, from its first weakly similar abba rhymes (make/hate/sake/state), through its insipid diction and its flabby filler, to its mundane comparison, “as gentle day / Doth follow night.” Yet if Shakespeare was only eighteen at the time, he had already mastered sonnet structure enough to toy with it. A sonnet’s volta, its switch or turn in thought, if present, usually comes at the start of line 9. At that point here, the woman’s second “I hate” teasingly echoes the “I hate” at the start of the poem, as if to repeat rather than rebuff the initial danger. In fact the countermovement has already begun, unusually early indeed, with the “But” starting the last line of the first quatrain. Yet line 2’s “hate” still reverberates, and at the start of line 9, in the place of the usual volta, it seems to have recurred, even if these very words will end by saving the poet-lover, at the last possible moment, when we reach the final two words of the poem. (As we have seen, Sonnet 30 plays, much more subtly, on the last-minute reprieve.) Like Shakespeare’s inventiveness of structure, the fondness for contrasts that saturates his mature sonnets (“with old woes new wail,” “Fairing the foul,” “Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate”) also announces itself already here, in “day-night,” “heaven-hell,” and especially in the charm of the contrast between “love” and “hate” that shapes the whole poem.10

Beyond Sexual Selection

But not even the young Shakespeare’s efforts, at eighteen or so, could reach great heights. Until the playful allusions to “Hathaway” and “Anne” were noted in print almost four hundred years later, Sonnet 145 had often been considered non-Shakespearean, because so evidently inferior in quality and complexity to the much maturer remainder. Sexual selection can explain neither Shakespeare’s eventual high achievements as a sonneteer nor the particular form he chose to work within. While ardent Elizabethan youths may have written sonnets as love poems, the sonnet sequences that became so popular in England in the 1580s and 1590s were less the product of youthful ardor than of specialized craft by poets highly informed by literary tradition—although that impulse to achieve status through specialization might well itself in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• Introduction: Story and Verse
• LYRICS UNLINKED
• FROM SONNET TO SEQUENCE
• BEYOND LOVE
• SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS, 1609
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index