The shape of the volume as a whole, a sequence of 154 sonnets and a long sustained poem, A Louers complaint, reflects contemporary practice. As sonnet sequences developed during the 1590s some features became common: Samuel Daniel’s Delia, Contayning certayne Sonnets: with the complaint of Rosamond has a bipartite structure with a sonnet sequence and the longer complaint; Richard Linche’s 1596 sequence to Diella is combined with the extended, “amorous Poeme of Dom Diego and Gineura.” Other sequences formed part of a tripartite structure: Richard Barnfield’s volume of 1598, for example, has “Cynthia,” “Certaine Sonnets” and the “Legend of Cassandra.” But the structure of Shake-speares Sonnets and A Louers complaint is closest to that of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion of 1595. Spenser’s volume has a tripartite structure with a sonnet sequence of 89 sonnets, a small series of anacreontic verses and a longer epithalamium, which Shakespeare has imitated with his sequence of 152 sonnets, two anacreontic sonnets and a long complaint. 4 He has further imitated Spenser’s placement of a mirror sonnet at the mid-point of his sequence, Amoretti 45 of 89 (“Leaue lady in your glasse of christall clene, / Your goodly selfe for euermore to vew”). 5 Shakespeare has a like sonnet at Sonnet 77, the middle sonnet of 154 (“Thy glasse will shew thee how thy beauties were”), and has positioned at the end of the sequence’s first half Sonnet 76, a sonnet that takes stock of the past and looks forward to a new beginning. 6
The placement of other sonnets provides tantalizing glimpses of possible structures which are, however, never sufficiently cogent to allow for conclusions to be drawn. Sonnet 12, beginning, “When I doe count the clock that tels the time,” suggests the hours on a clock face or sundial. Sonnet 60 hints at the number of minutes in the hour in, “So do our minuites hasten to their end.” Sonnet 52 celebrates “feasts so solemne . . in the long yeare set;” the first rank of Solemn Feasts in the Book of Common Prayer’s calendar are “All Sundayes in the yeare,” normally numbering 52. Sonnet 8, a musical sonnet, is appropriately placed, because an “eight” is a “true concord.” Sonnet 19 brings to a conclusion the cycle of sonnets which exhort the youth to procreate while still in his prime. The number 19 was the cycle of years beyond which the Prime could not extend in the metonic calendar (see Sonnet 19). The sequence’s first 152 sonnets could thus be seen as comprising 8 courses of 19 sonnets. The placement of the epicedial Sonnets 71 and 72 after Sonnet 70, when the poet has completed his climacteric three-score-and-ten, seems more than a coincidence and invites some observations about climacterics.
It has often been noticed that Sonnet 63, which begins “Against my loue shall be as I am now” and which acknowledges that “Ages cruell knife” will “cut from memory . . my louers life,” celebrates the grand climacteric, the number 63, a year in one’s life fraught with danger and often marked by death. Sonnet 63 is also the half-way sonnet of 126, the number of sonnets directed to the youth, the span of which might be construed as a double climacteric. But climacterics were not confined to 63, the most pertinent and discussed in Shakespeare’s time being 70, the year of her life, in which Elizabeth I died and which prompted Thomas Wright’s A Succinct Philosophicall declaration of the nature of Clymactericall yeeres, occasioned by the death of Queene Elizabeth of 1604. (Thomas Thorpe was the publisher.) The occasion for his treatise, Wright claims, was “the death of Queene Elizabeth, who died in the 70. yeere of her age, which was the Clymactericall period of her life.” He argues that it is “good to examine and search out the cause of these notable alterations and daungers of death in the Clymactericall yeeres, for those humors which alter the bodie, and dispose it to sicknesse, and death,” because “God hath appointed these Septuarie, and Nonarie yeeres as best seeming his wisdome and prouidence.” He explains that “the first Clymactericall yeeres” are multiples of nine and the “seconds” multiples of seven, concluding with the climacteric of “seauenty,” of which age “spake Dauid when hee sayde . . The dayes of our yeeres are seauentie yeeres, and if in Potentates they be eightie, the labour and griefe is greater.” Wright then lists the most notorious climacterics:
The most daungerous of all these passages or steps, are the forty nine, compounded vpon seuen time seauen: and sixty three standing vppon nine times seauen, and next to these is seauenty, which containeth tenne times seauen; they number them also by nine, and so make eighty one, the most perillous as comprehending nine times nine. 7
Sonnet 49 shares a like beginning with Sonnet 63, “Against that time,” and develops the conceit of reckoning up and being summoned to a final accounting (“vtmost summe” and “audite”) as does Sonnet 126, which concludes with Nature making “Her Audite.” Sonnet 81, which coincides with the “most perillous” of climacterics, is the final epitaphial sonnet, beginning “Or I shall liue your Epitaph to make, / Or you suruiue when I in earth am rotten.” Yet, although it is tempting to read more into the placement of these sonnets, no further structure is readily discernible.