Cheerful Girls and Willing Boys: Old and Young Bodies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
MacInnes, Ian
Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2 (September, 2000)
Abstract
Many twentieth-century critics have been willing to admit that Shakespeare’s depiction of the self in the Sonnets is historically specific, but most of their interpretations assume that this self is either unique or at least highly distinctive. I am challenging this assumption. Drawing on works such as Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Minde in General , Ficino’s De Triplici Vita, and other medical texts of the period, I explore the Sonnets as part of a larger body of work on the status and value of the passions. I focus in particular on the way Shakespeare connects the subject positions of the three main characters (young man, dark lady, and poet) with their humoral bodies. Many have struggled to assign these roles to real historical characters, but I argue that the three way drama of young man, young woman, and older poet would have been considered an appropriate subject for any Renaissance author interested in the passions. Ultimately, I want to suggest that what is often perceived as the poems’ mental pathology is really an expression of the relationship between early modern physical regimes of health and the aging body.
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