The fair friend

The general opinion is that the first 126 sonnets are written to a young man, often called: “the fair friend”. It is possible that this man is the one that the sonnet cycle is dedicated to, “Mr. W.H.” We do not know for sure who these initials belong to. Possibly it is Henry Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare had dedicated other poems.

Within these 126 sonnets, the first 17 sonnets are also often sees as a group. In sonnets 1-17, the speaker tries to persuade the young man to marry and to have children, because this will be a way to be remembered, to “live on” after death.

And nothing ‘gainst time’s scythe can make defence Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence.(sonnet 12, l.13,14)

“Breed”(children) can defeat time. The young man himself may not be able to live forever, but through his offspring he can.

The sonnets also mention another way in which the young man can become immortal; through verse, through the sonnets. Time is an important and recurring theme in the sonnets. In sonnet 19 the speaker addresses time as if he is talking to someone, the speaker personifies time. He calls him: devouring time, time is someone who eats up / swallows up all the things on this earth. And then the speaker says: But I forbid thee one most heinous crime: O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen. Him in thy course untainted do allow For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men. Yet do thy worst, old time; despite thy wrong My love shall in my verse ever live young.

The speaker doesn’t want time to have any influence on his “love”, because this man should be the role model of beauty to “succeeding men”, men who will live in times to come. But the decay that time brings is inescapable. Then in the last two lines, the speaker seems to defy time himself, he says: time, do all you want, but in my verse this man’s beauty will be preserved.

What is open to discussion is the kind of relationship there is between the speaker and the man he is writing to. There are sonnets and passages that contain possible evidence of a homosexual relationship. For instance, sonnet 20; where the speaker calls the man “the master-mistress of my passion.” But it can also be argued that the speaker and the man were just good and intimate friends, not lovers. Another explanation for the expressions of love towards the man is that they should be seen in the hierarchical relation between the poet and his patron. These expressions were just a means to place the poet in the best possible light with his patron.