Blackwell Reference Online

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When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962)John Ford's infamous dictum about the American West aptly characterizes the way many biographers have approached Shakespeare's sonnets, about which there have always been far more myths than facts. My subject here is how recent biographers have repeatedly printed the legend (or rather, variations on several myths) in their attempts to read the sonnets into the poet's life, or the life into his sonnets. “Myth” here is meant to be a neutral term, denoting a narrative for which we have no empirical evidence: it is for you, gentle reader, to decide what myths are more plausible than others. I have rarely attempted to identify where particular myths originated, a topic that would take up at least an essay of its own: my focus has been on how they have been deployed, revised, discarded or resurrected.The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography points up differences between biographical treatment of the sonnets a century ago and today. Sir Sidney Lee in the 1897 DNB was discretion itself: “While Shakespeare's poems bear traces of personal emotion and are coloured by personal experience, they seem to have been to a large extent undertaken as a literary exercise” (p. 1301). He concedes that in the dark lady sonnets “a more personal note is struck” (p. 1302), but is unwilling to inquire about the biographical ... log in or subscribe to read full text