Paul Hammond’s comprehensively introduced, lightly annotated, original-spelling edition of the Sonnets is a boon to readers who appreciate the poetry as a dramatic performance of unfolding ambiguities — verbal, psychological, and situational — while welcoming straightforward clarifications of early modern vocabulary, rhetorical punctuation, and literary precedents. Hammond derives his text from five published facsimiles of Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 quarto, carefully compared against three copies of the original. While spelling, punctuation, and capitalization follow Thorpe’s, Hammond makes the text accessible to today’s readers by employing a modern typeface and by citing on every facing page pronunciation guides and relevant OED definitions, as well as some standard emendations and parallel phrases from the plays. Other editors, who silently modernize Shakespeare’s spelling, necessarily impose interpretations in their efforts to smooth out equivocal expressions, whereas Hammond justifies multiple possible meanings and invites readers to choose one or entertain all.
Hammond’s prefatory essays explain the Shakespearean sonnet and its variations on Petrarchan conventions established by Wyatt, Surrey, and Tottel’s Miscellany, explored by Philip Sidney and Richard Barnfield, and codified by George Puttenham. The frustration, for example, that Sidney’s Astrophil portrays in assaulting Stella’s goodness grows more strained as the Sonnets explore the questionable goodness of “the Woman” or “the Poet’s” ambiguous desire for “the Boy,” as the Sonnets name these figures. Illustrating his observation with explications of comparable poems, Hammond shows that Shakespeare’s sonnets are “less direct in voicing desire [than Sidney’s] and less idealizing in their portrait of the beloved” (43), but more tortured than “Barnfield’s pastoral fantasies” for a young man (45), while altogether more earnest and plausible than either. Above all, they are not autobiography, but deliberately dramatic works of art.
Verbal ambiguity, Hammond demonstrates, conveys emotional intensity while obscuring the precise nature of the emotions. Sonnet 87, for instance, (“Farewell thou art too deare for my possessing”) conceals the nature of the possessing the Poet contemplates, the reasons this possession proves impossible, and its probable past existence. Besides meaning “beloved,” deare also means “expensive” and thereby introduces unlovely calculations of financial worth. Original punctuation causes ambiguity: the possessive apostrophe, for example, does not exist, and commas indicate emphatic pauses rather than sentence grammar. Hammond confronts situational ambiguity in the Sonnets’ homoeroticism and maintains that even in Sonnet 20 (“A Womans face with natures owne hand painted”) the Poet demurs as much as he asserts, and the Boy — altogether voiceless — neither approves nor scorns his admiration. Finally, the Sonnets’ tone is ambiguous. The Poet’s relationship with the Boy is unequal, uncertain, and the occasion for both praise and chastisement, sometimes simultaneously as in Sonnet 94 (“They that haue power to hurt, and will doe none”), which both hints at the Boy’s vices and excuses them. Regarding the Woman sonnets, 127–52, Hammond focuses on ambiguous depictions of “the triangle of Poet, Boy, and Woman,” raising unanswerable thematic questions, as in Sonnet 144 (“Two loues I haue of comfort and dispaire”): “Who, or what, are these two loves? … male and female? … platonic and sexual? … Which offers comfort and which offers despair?” (84–85). The edition revels in uncertainties that resolve, if at all, only in performance.
Hammond balances ambiguity with transparent instruction in conventional sonnet strategies of eloquence and Shakespeare’s variations on them, including the sonnet’s tradition of disparity between lover and beloved and its reliance on paradox. He instructs readers in the sonnets’ orality, including the complex signals of emphasis found in early modern rhymes and in iambic pentameter with its elisions and unexpected syllables. He explains conventional phrasing. Using Tilley’s Dictionary of Proverbs, for example, he glosses Sonnet 19 (“Deuouring time blunt thou the Lyons pawes”) with T326, “Time devours all things,” matching Shakespeare’s originality against what first readers found familiar. In “Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Figures” he shows how a sonnet’s argument is structured and illustrates a range of figures from alliteration to syllepsis (“using one word while suggesting two meanings” [435]), as in “And your true rights be termd a Poets rage (17.11),” where rights includes rites. In this thorough, scholarly edition, Hammond teaches readers to recognize and admire the Sonnets’ power to portray and evoke complex, contradictory, and intense human feelings through masterful language.