Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated

Abstract

By using echoes in some sonnets to lines in certain plays, emphasizing those echoes which were not later repeated, and by applying dates to those plays, in 1926 Elizabeth Beckwith tentatively dated a third of the 154 in the entire sonnets cycle. Her belief was that an unintentional authorial pattern of usage would be less subjective than other approaches to dating the sonnets. Yet, by use of dates from external allusions later applied by Prof. Leslie Hotson and other scholars, this author suggests that it may be possible to extend the total number of datable sonnets to over half of the cycle. However, Beckwith did not use dates for the plays which were later to become a standard dating scheme accepted by most scholars today, and so adjustments of her dates would change the dates she awarded to many of her selected sonnets. This author suggests that even the standard dating scheme is flawed, particularly if Shakespeare was dead when the Sonnets were published in 1609. He suggests another dating regime that meshes quite well with both Beckwith's 52 and an additional 27. Thus, the result for the 79 sonnets is to avoid certain problems in the distribution that Beckwith's method generated. The net result is what Beckwith termed "a skeleton around which the remaining sonnets can be safely built", but for over half rather than only a third of the cycle. This author suggests a half "skeleton" is more indicative of the chronology for the whole sonnets cycle than only a third.