A passage from Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, published in 1598, refers to "honey-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c." The passage has persuaded scholarship that most if not all of Shakespeare's known 150 or so sonnets were in existence by the latter part of the 1590s, which would mean they were composed when he was by a few years either side of 30. They are uneven in quality and remind us that Shakespeare, who died within a few days of his 52nd birthday, was something of a late bloomer: had he been dead at 30, as was his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, literary history would likely regard the two as approximate coequals. Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth all belong to a 5- or 6-year period coinciding roughly with the second half of his fourth decade of life.
Since he is perhaps the leading cultural icon of western civilization, and knowledge of his biography is mainly limited to documents as colorless as church records and real estate conveyances, there has naturally been a lot of interest in anything that might inform us about his private life. The sonnets have been in this regard a fertile and possibly over-farmed field. It's possible to detect two groups of poems: those numbered 1 to 126 concern a young man, the poet's admired friend and social superior, who is encouraged to marry and have children--though it is not always apparent that the subject is the same man, or even a man. Several of these poems allude to a rival poet who also praises the friend. The remaining 25 or so sonnets concern the famous "dark lady" and an unusual love triangle. The dark lady--the ideal Elizabethan beauty was a blonde ("snowy breasts" being a cliched term of praise)--is beautiful, promiscuous, and, to the poet, irresistible, though she also arouses in him feelings of disgust with himself. In #144 ("Two loves I have, of comfort and despair"), the dark lady has seduced the trusted friend, and the poet's reaction is not anger over the double betrayal but concern for the welfare of the friend. The poem, like many of those involving the dark lady, is overtly sexual: in #144, for instance, it is not hard to tell what the poet means when he imagines "one angel in another's hell" (the trusted friend penetrating the dark lady), the proof arriving in the well known symptom of a venereal infection ("Till my bad angel fire my good one out").
The temptation has been to regard these poems as veiled or even coded autobiography, and the reaction to the speculating succumbers to temptation has been to declare all such inquiries irrelevant. If the author of Macbeth was not himself a mass murderer, then the sonnets, too, are an exercise of imaginative projection. Hallet Smith, in his introduction to the sonnets in The Riverside Shakespeare, concludes that agnosticism is the responsible position on this question. Perhaps, but what of our fun? If only murderers could write of murder, then the literature of murder would be slight; the situation may however be different with love triangles. There is a sense in which the sonnets often seem quite personal--when the poet, for example, more than once puns on his first name. Last gossipy comment: when Shakespeare was 18, he married a woman 26; they had three children, a boy and two girls, but seem to have lived apart, Shakespeare of course in the theatrical world of London and his wife back at Stratford, through the better part of two decades; and Shakespeare, in his will, famously left to her his "second best bed." It requires a quality of mind akin to negative capability to remain agnostic about the possible meaning of these details without flying to wild conclusions about how they may fit together with the sketchy "story" told by the sonnets.
I said that the sonnets are uneven. Shakespeare is Shakespeare, but it has to be said that more than half are tangled, boring webs that would never be read if he hadn't written them. One can find fault even with some that are justly famous. Of #29, for instance, it seems fair to ask how, if the mere memory of his love elevates him from despair to "heaven's gate," he could nevertheless avoid thinking of her (or him) long enough to get so despondent in the first place. Keats complained of the "pouncing rhymes," and indeed the concluding couplet lends itself to chimingly cheap endings. Shakespeare rarely appears to have labored to avoid this pitfall--besides #29, see #12, #30, #60, and #130, all of which conclude gimpily after memorable starts. I think the best of the lot are #71, #73, #116, and #138, though others will have favorites that I have maybe slandered. We could still agree that his best sonnets are among the very best short poems in the language.
Discussions of Shakespeare's sonnets, if they take up The Autobiographical Question, invariably relate the anecdote of Wordsworth's remark that Shakespeare, in his sonnets, "unlocked his heart"--to which Browning retorted, "Then the less Shakespeare he." I take Browning to be saying there's bigger game in the Shakespearean forest. If you are interested in his biography, and have clicked through the links above, you will have noticed that what the sonnets are more than anything else about is: impermanence, the levelling power of time, the transience of life. A characteristic emotion, and phrase, concerns "precious friends hid in death's dateless night." The author of these poems is the author of Macbeth, whose hero denigrated life by comparing it to "a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more." For all the infinite variety, the theme goes right through the center of his work. Toward the end of The Tempest, the late play often called "Shakespeare's last word," Prospero expresses it one last time:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-clapp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
