A Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2008
“Departing emphatically from studies that have treated Shakespeare’s sonnets as autobiography, timeless expressions of love, formal works of art, and so on, Matz (George Mason Univ.) focuses instead on helping the reader understand the cultural/social world in which the sonnets were written–that is, on reading the sonnets through the eyes of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The result is the most realistically balanced, generally honest guide to these remarkable poems that this reviewer has encountered. Along the way one is more amused than instructed by the vagaries of earlier interpreters, many of whom reveal more about themselves than about the poet or the sonnets. Not the least of Matz’s achievements in his defense of a secure place in Shakespeare’s canon for erotic poems to a young man and vitriolic poems to a black mistress (dropping the traditional euphemism “dark lady”), all in a series reflecting a tangled love triangle. Highly recommended.”
—Choice
“In The World of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Robert Matz offers readers elegant guidance into the social and literary conventions that shape Shakespeare’s poems and have influenced their reception over the past four hundred years. The book is especially astute in its reading of the sex-gender system, including its class and racial dimensions, in which Shakespeare conceived his fair young male beloved and his black mistress. This is the book I would recommend to any novice and even to more experienced readers approaching the sonnets.”
–Jonathan Goldberg, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Emory University
“Matz proves himself to be a sharp and subtle analyst of individual Sonnets, and he forges a workably convincing connection between the power relations of courtly love and—for instance—the “masochistic intensity” (88) of a poem such as Sonnet 57 (“Being your slave”). He is also clever, and convincing, in teasing out the essential offensiveness of virtually all of what he calls the “black mistress sonnets” (7), including some of those that have generally been found more pleasing, such as Sonnet 128 (“How oft when thou, my music, music play’st”). As he lucidly observes, “Shakespeare” (as he calls the speaker throughout) “wouldn’t talk sexually to the young man in the way he talks to the black mistress” (116). Here, as elsewhere, the speaker’s “teasing tends to slide from playful eroticism to insult” (117). Matz is also highly attuned to the speaker’s complex and uncomfortable inner life, and he argues “that the black mistress serves as a scapegoat for anxieties about duplicity or sin in the relationships between fair young men” (147).
–Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare Quarterly
“Teachers and students alike will learn from Matz’s accessible information and extensive research, and grow from the opportunity to participate in the 400-year conversation about Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the end, we remember that we must connect the sonnets to Shakespeare’s world in order to understand their connection to ours. This book will come in handy when I teach the sonnets.”
–Nichole Lehman, English Department, Chantilly High School, Chantilly, Virginia