Shakespeare's queer 'Sonnets' and the forgeries of William Henry Ireland - William Shakespeare

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Michael Keevak

To be fair, when Chalmers's hypothesis is placed beside the vast legion of fantastic, ridiculous, and lunatic theories in the long and varied history of Shakespeare criticism, and that of the Sonnets in particular, his conclusion might seem rather tame and perhaps even arguable.(20) It certainly ranks higher than George Elliott Sweet's contention that Elizabeth was "Shakespeare,"(21) but even Sweet's position could be said to grow out of the very same set of biographical problems that have plagued all readers. Chalmers simply offers another version of the "story" behind the poems' composition: essentially that Shakespeare was attempting to praise his monarch after the example of Spenser (who was quite successful in obtaining preferment in this way), and that one should read the first seventeen poems--the "procreation sonnets" which urge a young man to marry and reproduce --as in fact rhetorical proposals to the Virgin Queen. So far so good, perhaps, but Chalmers will have to perform a lot of verbal gymnastics in order to prove that all the poems are addressed to only one person, and that the rest of the sequence, especially the markedly denigrating poems in the "dark lady" group, are also designed to appeal to the Queen.(22) As a matter of fact Chalmers has little to say about these final poems.

But it is vital to understand that Chalmers does not claim that the Ireland forgeries are authentic; rather, he offers an "Apology for the Believers" in the documents, which is to say an attempt to explain why he and others had been fooled, and why the documents had made sense as new evidence relating to the life of the bard. Chalmers's real target is not the forger at all but Malone's recently published Inquiry, which in Chalmers's view was too sarcastic and snobbish in its demonstrations. "If Mr. Malone had written, instead of his Inquiry, a pamphlet in plain prose," writes Chalmers in his preface, "stating his objections without irony, and submitting his documents without scoffs; ... no one would have answered what few would have read; since a cheat exploded is a cheat no more" (A iii). Chalmers endeavors to show just how many times this (as he felt) self-proclaimed authority was misleading or mistaken. Perhaps he does manage to correct Malone on a few occasions, but there is also an overwhelming pointlessness to most of Chalmers's 628 pages, since, although he begins by admitting his own gullibility, he has to spend so much time proving how it might have been possible, and the tedious legalistic paragraphs which open the book concerning the distinctions between possibility and probability are hardly enlivened by the bitter attack on "the public accuser" that follows. What is really the difference if Malone's detection has turned out to be "right by chance" rather than "convincing by argument" (A 123)?(23)

Let us recall that the monarch's letter is actually rather modest when compared with some of Ireland's more reckless creations to come. Moreover Chalmers's treatment fills only the first ninety or so pages of his book, and his theory regarding the Sonnets soon gives way to other considerations. But this does not lessen the importance of that theory for the history of Shakespeare criticism, despite the fact that ridicule was both immediate and potent. For Chalmers continued to assert that the poems were addressed to the Queen even after he admits that her letter itself is spurious. In some sense, then, his reading of the Sonnets must have existed before the letter was even forged. At first glance this might seem far-fetched or illogical, since is it really likely that Chalmers could have "guessed" beforehand that Elizabeth is the poems' true addressee? Isn't it clear, in other words, that the forged letter produced the theory rather than the other way around? Perhaps his reading had not been fully or even explicitly formulated before the letter actually appeared, but there were undoubtedly certain "problems" regarding the meaning of the poems that had been bothering readers ever since the 1609 text was restored (also by Malone) in 1780. Ireland's letter, that is, merely served as a convenient means (or an excuse or a justification) to explain or unravel a particular mystery already in place, and we have begun to see that many of the forgeries themselves represent similar kinds of "solutions." Chalmers's theory, in a word, is really a response to something other than the debate over Elizabeth's letter; the main issue, then as now, is the (apparently undeniable) fact that most of the 154 poems are addressed to a man. This has always been the Sphinx's riddle of Sonnet criticism. Was Shakespeare really a sodomite, the term regularly used before the invention of "homosexual" identities in the nineteenth century?(24) On these grounds George Steevens had refused to publish the Sonnets at all, stating that "the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service."(25)