The sonnets 1_17 of shakespeare

The first 17 sonnets are addressed to a young man of exceptional beauty who is encouraged to father children. What is striking about this series is that there are exactly 17 sonnets that are all centred on encouraging the young man to marry and father children. Seventeen is an unusual and distinctive number that seems to indicate its own significance. The content of the sonnets shows no evidence of input to them from outside of the author during their development: no questions are answered, there is no change of direction in response to any feedback from the subject, they appear to be a preset series issued together. The deliberate intent of these sonnets and the fact that a sonnet itself conforms to regular numbering schemes also suggests that the series containing precisely 17 is not accidental.

The encouragement of a person to marry and father children is an unusual theme, if not unique, in the world of Elizabethan poetry. That the author himself should have been personally motivated to invest such time and effort and have the temerity to do such a thing strikes me as extremely unlikely. In an age of commissioned poetic works, this series of sonnets being commissioned from the author by another party seems to be the most plausible scenario by which such a poetic work could only come about.

The series betrays a lack of understanding of why the subject fails to marry and have children of his own accord:

Sonnet 3 asks what fair woman would not welcome the opportunity of being the subject's wife:

"For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?"

and what man would willingly fail to leave children:

"Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love to stop posterity?"

Sonnet 4 asks why the subject does not continue his legacy of beauty:

"Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?"

and why he fails to pass on his beauty in the form of children:

"Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?"

and what he will leave behind him when has died:

"Then how when nature calls thee to be gone:
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?"

Sonnet 6 asks what defeated death could do if the subject leaves children:

"Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?"

Sonnet 9 asks whether he doesn't marry because he does not wish to face the prospect of leaving a widow:

"Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye
That thou consum'st thyself in single life?"

Sonnet 13 asks what man fails to commit to being a husband to enable his own beauty to be passed on to his offspring as his beauty declines:

"Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter's day,
And barren rage of death's eternal cold?"

Sonnet 16 asks why the subject fails to fortify himself against time by having children which is a better way to tackle time than the author's verse:

"But wherefore do not you a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant, time,
And fortify yourself in your decay
With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?"

There are no answers provided to these questions, but it is clear that the young man's contemporaries were unable to explain the subject's failure to commit to the naturally expected step of marrying and fathering children.

Why would a man need to be encouraged to marry and father children? Why would the verse written to encourage him to do so contain so many questions as to why he fails to do so of his own accord? It strikes me that the type of person who is impassive to such pleas and who fails to make such a commitment of his own accord would either have a profound objection to the woman whom he is being married off to, or is inevitably a homosexual. This assertion is supported by Sonnet 20.

After the first 17 sonnets, the author proceeds to memorialise the subject in his own verse. That the subject will not marry and have children as he has been previously encouraged to do seems to have been accepted and the relationship that has been established between the poet and the subject via the commission has now developed into a typical one of patron/poet. Sonnet 18 is a clear break from the theme of the first 17 and demarcates the 1-17 series. In Sonnet 20, the poet writes a sonnet in which he explicitly encourages a heterosexual orientation for the subject.

What is key to this sonnet is its clear and graphic sexuality. The sonnet is explicitly centred on the making of a man by Nature who could have been made a man or a woman given the person's beauty. The sonnet then determines that Nature, female in gender, chose to make him a man for selfish female reasons, and so defined his sexual capacity and indeed defined to whom it should be literally "used" on. Sexually, it's very clearly a statement about which direction the young man should be channelling his sexual efforts into. The most unequivocal line stating this is:

"She pricked thee out for women's pleasure"

which is an explicitly sexual statement by the author that the subject has been made by Nature for pleasuring women.

A heterosexual man doesn't need to be told that he is equipped for sexual relations with women. It's obvious to him and comes naturally. Such explicit and direct advice however is entirely compatible with it being addressed to a man who has homosexual tendencies, and especially one whose family and guardians are seeking to guide him into a heterosexual relationship that he has failed to indulge in voluntarily.

In addition, what man would appreciate being described as having:

"A woman's face with nature's own hand painted...
A woman's gentle heart...
And for a woman wert thou first created..."

if not an effeminate one?

Equally, homosexual relations are explicitly discouraged by the author via:

"And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing."

In other words: "by providing you with an addition (the male sexual organ), Nature has defeated any prospect of a sexual relationship between me and thee. Nature has added one thing to you (the male sexual organ) when deciding whether to make you a man or a woman, and in so doing has added nothing to my purpose, i.e. hasn't done me any favours by making you a man".

This all points to the young man having homosexual tendencies