On the new edition of Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare (New York Review Books, 2005), Ben Donenberg, artistic director of Shakespeare Festival / LA, files these notes:
1.
While thumbing through a book on Zen gardening, I was thrilled to discover that some two thousand years before Hamlet advised his players that the purpose of playing was “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature,” Chuang-Tzu – an early Chinese Zen master – noted that “the perfect man uses his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep.”
2.
Professor Van Doren is right when he says that speculation about the identities of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and the Young Man addressed in the sonnets is of no consequence because ultimately Shakespeare’s sonnets are his expressions of his ideal. The Young Man is a reflection of the beauty that Shakespeare wants to see in his idealized self. The Dark Lady reflects the mystery and awe that Shakespeare feels when he imagines his ideal woman.
3.
Van Doren describes the closing couplet as the weakest element in a Shakespeare sonnet. The couplets fail or burn out, he says. But each couplet enriches an empty mechanical form with a pulsing iambic rhythm that echoes the inconstant beating of our hearts. In the morning, when I’m sitting alone and doing nothing, my heartbeat is steady at times and at other times my heart skips a beat or two. Such are the human rhythms of the sonnets.
— Ben Donenberg