SOURCE: Kernan, Alvin. “Shakespeare's Sonnets and Patronage Art.” In Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court 1603-1613, pp. 169-210. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Kernan analyzes the sonnets within the context of the relationship between patron and artist in Renaissance England. The critic maintains that the collection of poems may be viewed as a loosely structured story concerning the relationship between an older poet of lower social standing and a young aristocratic patron.

In spite of postmodernist skepticism, we conceive, in our still romantic way, of all art of any worth as being the privileged expression of the unlimited creative imagination of the individual artist. We think of patronage, therefore, even as we call for government art subsidies, as a condition of servitude against which the true artist by nature rebels, and one which inevitably produces bad art.

But in the...