Who are the Addressees of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (in Slovenian)?

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) were traditionally understood as falling into two groups: sonnets 1–126 were said to celebrate a handsome young man and sonnets 127–154 were thought to address a “dark lady.” It was also generally believed that the sonnets develop a fairly coherent narrative of the speaker’s relationship with the two individuals. The textual truth, however, is that it is impossible to determine how many addressees the Sonnets have or what gender they are. The article argues that out of the 139 sonnets with one addressee, 115 are ungendered in the source text (83%), while 14 are about a man and 10 are about a woman. Six sonnets have (at least) two addressees and the rest are about abstract concepts. Two integral Slovenian translations have been published so far—by Janez Menart in 1965 and by Srečko Fišer in 2005—and in confronting gender ambiguity and sexual fluidity in the source texts, both translators followed the traditionally assumed gendering of the sonnets, with Fišer maintaining neutrality in a slightly larger proportion of the sonnets than Menart (44% and 37% respectively).