Sonnet 144: Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair
SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, RelivedShow Notes
With his exceptionally explicit and startlingly revelatory Sonnet 144 William Shakespeare addresses head on the fact that his mistress and his lover are certainly friends, and that he suspects – rather strongly, we get the impression – them to be so with benefits.
By identifying the man as 'right fair' and contrasting him with a woman who is 'coloured ill', he confirms what we have long thought to be the case: this is a constellation that has turned triangular, and it involves these precise three individuals, the poet, his younger male lover, the Fair Youth of the first 126 sonnets in the collection, and the Dark Lady around whom 25 of the remaining 28 sonnets revolve.
This rather puts paid to the suggestion espoused by some scholars that these sonnets can or let alone should be read in isolation, that no narrative of any kind should ever be deduced from them, or that they may have been written to and about any number of lovers of any gender over the period of their composition. What Sonnet 144 shows beyond anything that might still be considered reasonable doubt, and much in line with Sonnets 33 through 42 in the Fair Youth section and Sonnets 133 and 134 in this, the Dark Lady section of the collection, is that these two groups of poems overlap, that they concern themselves with the same 'two loves' of Shakespeare's, and that our poet is profoundly disturbed by the fact that, as he sees and presents it, his mistress has seduced his young man.
More from SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived
In this, the – at least for the time-being – final episode of his podcast on William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sebastian Michael offers a brief summary of his findings and also takes the opportunity to examine in a little more detail the view held by some contemporary editors that the sonnets may not principally be about a Fair Youth and a Dark Lady – a contention that is largely based on a supposition that many of these poems "could be addressed to a male or a female" as one recent edition puts it – to see whether it stands up to scrutiny as we formulate any conclusion.
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Sonnet 154 brings to a close William Shakespeare's collection of sonnets, and it does so hand-in-hand with Sonnet 153, of which it is not a continuation, but a reiteration.