Failing to Succeed

The opening poems of Shakespeare&s;s Sonnets , the so-called Procreation Sonnets, may be the most inscrutable section of the sequence. For seventeen sonnets the speaker makes a varying plea to the young man to marry and father children, despite the fact that nothing could be less Petrarchan. At the same time, over the course of this opening, threads of homoerotic desire increasingly weave themselves through the narrative. Critics have wrestled with the implications of this for more than two hundred years, but they have done little to explain how the section might serve as a meaningful introduction to a Petrarchan sonnet sequence. Drawing on recent theories connecting failure and queer identity I offer a new way of coming to grips with one of the most perplexing beginnings of any Renaissance sonnet sequence. Examining Shakespeare&s;s uses of failure at the most fundamental level of language and meaning, we can see how the opening sonnets build a gradually accruing sense of a poetics at odds with itself, and we can make sense of the early poems in terms of the entire sequence, tracing how the poet creates an imaginative space within which the potential anxieties of homoerotic love can be both confined and revealed.