The Tradition of Shakespeare'sSonnets

Abstract

This essay is a meditation on Sonnets 1–129 and the relationship between Shakespeare's poetry and the Reformation. It asks what kind of truth Shakespeare believed his art could transmit during an era of lost innocence, when tradition, as an archive of given truths communicated from time immemorial, fell into disrepute and doubt. Shakespeare's sceptical perception that poetic traditions are human inventions rather than divine teachings reveals a similarity between his doubts and doubts about tradition that prompted Luther, Bacon and Descartes to reform theology, natural science and philosophy. However, the essay suggests that whereas Luther, Bacon and Descartes proceed from doubts about tradition to increasingly dogmatic assertions about the truth of their reformed disciplines, Shakespeare comes to imagine poetry not as a method for establishing new certainties but as an art of coping with the downfall of tradition and the dubiousness of all human endeavours that this calamity revealed.

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