(excerpted
by Clifford Stetner)
(excerpted
by Clifford Stetner)
6 Shakespeare in His Sonnets
The Sonnets are about, or rather, the Sonnets are Shakespeare's maintenance of a self at deep levels of need. Those to the young man involve the need, enormously significant for his whole sensibility, that self be realized selflessly in another. Among the last numbered poems to or about this relation, there is increasing self assertion and self-acceptance, reaching toward the independence of "No, I am that I am" in Sonnet 121. But in the great majority of the earlier poems, there is passionate dependence, initially and at intervals triumphant, but frequently precarious and desperate, the poet making himself nothing to make the beloved everything. The relationship that must be maintained at all costs is with a whole person, regarded as an all-sufficing presence. By steep contrast, the woman is a partner in sexual relations who must be denigrated to enable genital assertion and release. To understand fully both these groups of poems, and Shakespeare in them, it seems essential that we recognize that they are addressed to real persons. But it is equally essential that the action of loving is fulfilled, or maintained against odds, through the action of poetry. Any description of the relationships which neglects the poetic process is mislead ing, as is, for example, the description above: that the beloved man is made everything, the poet nothing. For the poet, even in the son nets of complete self-abnegation, is masterfully conducting the sonnet.
"THIS POWERFUL RHYME"
The sheer poetic power has been brought out more fully than ever before by Stephen Booth's recent edition, with its 403 densely packed pages of analytic commentary. 1 The amount of attention
1. Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); cited hereafter as "Commentary."
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Shakespeare in His Sonnets
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given in the past century to these 154 poems is staggering and daunting to anyone undertaking to say more about them. After Hyder Rollins assembled all commentary and theories through the early 1940S in his fine, huge, two-volume Variorum Edition,2 interpretations, editions, and "solutions" have continued to appear at a rate almost equaling studies of Hamlet. This witnesses to something inexhaustible about the poems which itself requires explanation. Booth insists that the poems are mind-boggling and that it is their great virtue to be so. "The relevant meanings of Shakespeare's words and phrases and the contexts they bring with them combine, intertwine, fuse and conflict," 3 in an unparalleled concentration that "gives the whole sequence an illogically powerful aura of coherence," 4 but must frustrate any effort to comprehend the whole. His own commentary does far more than any before to show the fantastically rich way that Shakespeare exploits the verbal resources of his culture. He holds firmly to the view that the poems are Unsatisfying to read, unsatisfying to think about, and likely to evoke critical analyses that satisfy only by making the poems satisfying to think about." 5 To do justice, not to limit and falsify, requires "pluralistically committed" commentary that does not try to say what the poetry means in other words and so violate it.
As with many others who care about the poetry, Booth excludes all consideration of the relationship between the Sonnets and Shakespeare as a man writing them out of human situations, the dimension that most concerns this study. In his view, the persons addressed may well have been fictions. To exclude consideration of the human context is an understandable, though misconceived, response to the quagmire of biographical speculations. Booth deals summarily with the "expeditions to find 'Mr. W. H.' and 'The Rival Poet,' and the games of pin the tail on 'The Dark Lady." 6 We can grant him that they have probably all been failures (and mostly bores). But it is one thing to read the Sonnets by thinking you have discovered their "story" (like so many-most vociferously A. L. Rowse) or by making it up (like Oscar Wilde), another thing to read
2. Hyder Rollins, ed., The New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944).
3. "Commentary," p. xiii.
4. Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 14.
5. "Commentary," p. 507.
6. Ibid., p.516.
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them with awareness of what they themselves convey about the use Shakespeare is making of them, enigmatic as this use often is. To retell a poem as a personal "story" is to substitute the story for the action of the poetry. But the action of the poetry can be properly understood, I think, only by recognizing that it is working to transform or cope with "situations and relationships which," as J. B. Leishman put it, "cannot have been invented, if for no other reason than that they have been left so tantalisingly obscure." 7
Although we do not know the persons involved, we can experience the gestures made toward them, and something of the roots of feeling in a particular temperament implied by the gestures. The poems' qualities, and Shakespeare's in and through them, are consistent with their not having been written for publication. We have Francis Meres's unambiguous reference in 1595 to His sugred sonnets among his priuate friends." 8 Their private character is reflected in the circumstance that, except for the two sonnets (138 and 144) that were included in a piratical anthology in 1599, they were not published until 1609, late in Shakespeare's life, long after most of them must have been written. The only edition, brought out by a marginal publisher with no evidence of Shakespeare's permission or supervision, may well have been soon suppressed, for there is almost no notice of the Sonnets in the decades following their appearance. In 1640 they were so little known that a publisher ventured to pretend that he was bringing out unpublished poems of Shakespeare in issuing a rearranged version of the 1609 text.
Shakespeare's Sonnets are sometimes spoken of as his sonnet sequence, though they are not in fact such a production, indeed not one production at all. C. S. Lewis made the point that the typical Renaissance sonnet was a public form of poetry. "A good sonnet. . . was like a good public prayer: the test is whether the congregation can 'join' and make it their own, not whether it provides interesting materials for the spiritual biography of the compiler. . . .
The whole body of the sonnet sequences is much more like an erotic liturgy than a series of erotic confidences." 9 In his Sonnets, as elsewhere, Shakespeare uses the current idiom and goes beyond
7. J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1963), p. 11.
8. Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598); quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1844.
9. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), p. 491.
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it or puts it to new uses rather than rebelling against it. But though there are places where he seeks "to say / The perfect ceremony of love's rite" (23), most of the poems are drastic (and unparalleled) exceptions to Lewis's rule.
Written singly and in small groups, they were probably begun in 1593 or 1594, perhaps earlier, in the period when the rage for sonnets in private life was at its height and about to wane and when Shakespeare was making much of sonnets in his plays. There are many parallels in imagery and phrasing between those numbered below 97 and Love's Labor's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, as well as the two narrative poems published in 1593 and 1594. It seems to me that we can see in Henry IV and Henry V, Twelfth Night and the problem comedies, especially All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare rehandling and distancing the intense relationship to the highborn young man of the Sonnets. My assumption is that the sonnets to the young man are roughly at least in the order in which they were written-a sequence lived through rather than designed. What we find in them makes this clear in the large, though not in detail. The order of those to the mistress seems for the most part consistent with what they say.
What Shakespeare does with these poems is made possible by the special autonomous integration of the sonnet as a form for feeling and awareness: each sonnet is an action; and when successfully wrought, the action has a formal consummation. What he does was also possible because he was writing in the golden moment when, to call on C. S. Lewis once again, value seemed to be out there in the world, ready to be put into words, and words glowed with value ready to be put into poetry. 10
The curious theme of the first seventeen sonnets works partly because to urge the friend to marry and have children provides occasions for saying simple things beautifully: how lovely April is; how fine it is that age, in spite of wrinkles, has windows through which to see its golden time renewed. The poet's vicarious interest in the young man's sexual fulfillment is not queasy, because it is realized by evoking the creative power generally at work in nature:
Those hours that with gentle work did frame The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell. (Sonnet 5)
10. Ibid., esp. pp. 64-65.
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The phrase "gentle work" is typical of the direct cherishing of the processes of life. The feeling about the destructiveness of death is equally direct:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there. (Sonnet 5)
There is no holding back from obvious words or metaphors: the sun's light is gracious, music is sweet, the buds of May are darling; death is winter, darkness, Time's scythe; beauty is all the usual things, for example a flower. But the meaning of the usual things is renewed:
does tell his name), but for the most part he uses it straight. Usually he does not run his syntax against the line endings or the rhyme scheme. There are a good many exceptions, but normally the sentences or clauses close with the close of each quatrain, or else are balanced symmetrically within the four-line unit. Within sentences, grammar and thought typically pause or turn at the end of the line; where they do run over, the enjambment is rarely emphatic. Shakespeare does not exploit the more outward forms of variation, because within the pattern he is making astonishingly beautiful designs with sound and syllable and cadence. He is like an accomplished figure skater who sticks to the classical figures because what he cares about is what he can make of each evolution. (Shakespeare had, after all, unlimited opportunities in the plays for free-style improvisations, swoops, spins, leaps.) Each sonnet is different, but the difference is achieved not by changing the framework of form but by moving in fresh ways within it.
It seems clear that Shakespeare wrote by quatrains. In coming to know a sonnet by heart, you find yourself recalling it one quatrain at a time and often getting stuck trying to move to the next, for lack of a tangible link. The imagery does not regularly carry through; what does carry through is the momentum of the discourse. The movement from quatrain to quatrain is usually a shift of some sort, though it can be simply a continuing with fresh impetus. The figure skater starts each evolution by kicking off from an edge, and can move from one evolution to another either by staying on the same edge of the same blade or by changing from inside edge to outside edge, or from left foot inside to right foot outside, and so on-each of these technical moves focusing a whole living gesture of the balancing, moving body. People praise Shakespeare's sonnets because each one is about one thing; one should add that each is one motion about one thing, the motion normally being composed of three large sweeps and the shorter couplet. (The very different serial movements of Sonnets 66 and 129 are revealing exceptions.)
We must recognize that in most of the Sonnets the couplet is not the emotional climax, nor indeed even the musical climax; where it is made so, either by Shakespeare's leaning on it too heavily, or by our giving it unnecessary importance, one feels that two lines are asked to do too much, especially in some of the sonnets involving conflictual attitudes. This letdown or overreach or turnabout in the couplet is the most common defect in the Sonnets; with tactful reading it usually can be kept from being troublesome (but not always). One needs to attend to the motion and the imaginative expansion which the sonnet achieves in the quatrains, realizing that the couplet is often no more than a turning around at the end to look from a new vantage at what has been expressed.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality O'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
(Sonnet 65)
That a flower is a fragile thing is familiar enough. But that a flower has its own kind of power too-this comes as a poignant realization. It often happens that the metaphorical vehicle in which Shakespeare conveys the tenor of his love absorbs our chief attention, so that the love itself is left behind or fulfilled in what it is compared to. We dwell on the fact that "summer's lease hath all too short a date," that the earth devours "her own sweet brood," that the morning flatters "the mountain tops with sovereign eye," that black night is "Death's second self," and "seals up all in rest." The world is full of value that can be looked at front-face. Shakespeare could get more of this gold into his poetry than anyone else in the golden age because he had the greatest power of admiration.
Every line or phrase of a sonnet is, in the act of reading, part of a single movement: when you know a sonnet well, an individual line, quoted alone, rings with the sound that it has in its proper place.
Each sonnet is one utterance. Shakespeare's use of the form is simple and forthright and also delicate and subtle. He almost never varies from three quatrains followed by a couplet:
Why write I still all one, ever the same.
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name?
(Sonnet 76)
Other Elizabethan sonneteers showed more technical restlessness. Shakespeare not only uses nothing but the Shakespearean form (it
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The main line of the sonnet as Shakespeare writes it is the patterned movement of discourse, not the imagery. The voice rides the undulation of the meter, gaining remarkable power and reaching out in ardent, urgent, solemn, or contorted gestures defined by rhythmical variations. This is not primarily a poetry that explores experience by carrying out the implications of a metaphor or a conceit, as is notable in Donne's work. Shakespeare in the Sonnets occasionally does something like this-most perfectly in the three paralleled metaphors of Sonnet 73: "That time of year. . . the .twilight of such day. . . the glowing of such fire"; but this progression by extending metaphors is most definitely not typical. He is responsible to rhythmical, not metaphorical, consistency. The sonnet often starts with something like a metaphorical program, but usually the program is not carried through. There are, as Booth's annotation brilliantly demonstrates, many almost subliminal continuities or recurrences. Metaphors are picked up, changed, mixed, dropped ad libitum while the sonnet runs its strong course as an utterance. One often finds, as one penetrates the poetic texture of a particular poem, that it holds together by determinate rhythm and sound several almost independent strains of meaning, or a cluster of ambiguities that, worked out logically, are almost mutually exclusive. To ravel out such associations can of course be misleading. In an actual, live reading of a sonnet, clustering ideas, images, and words are felt together, not sorted; they are the mind and heart opening out into the plurality of the world's riches, or opening inward on complexly crossed purposes. What keeps us from coming to a standstill in walleyed contemplation is the flow of the poem's movement as it gathers in meaning in the service of the poet's love.
The poetry often makes a thick harmony out of what might be (sometimes indeed is) woolgathering multiplicity. The most famous instance is "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," thanks to William Empson's discussion at the outset of Seven Types of Ambiguity. II As rich or richer than the interplay of imagery is the interplay of sound, the chord of vowels and of r's in "bare ruin'd choirs," sounded in three successive long, slow syllables
11. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd ed. rev. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1947), pp. 2-3.
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the mystery of the line comes from this music as much as from the wonderful complex of metaphors that Empson brought out. We need to consider, not a special case like Sonnet 73, but the much more common case where there is great richness of metaphor but no metaphorical consistency:
O how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?
(Sonnet 65)
These are splendid lines-but it is the motion of the utterance, with the design of sound, that chiefly carries through, the open breathing o and u sounds and flowing consonants of "how shall summer's honey breath hold out" followed by the battering lines, with "wrackful" and "rocks impregnable." One can understand summer's honey metaphorically as provision for a siege - but there is no question of carrying the metaphor further, for one cannot "batter" honey! And the summer-winter opposition, as well as the battering, has been lost by the time we get to "time decays."
The Sonnets often would be "witty" if it were not that the wit in them goes along with sound and cadences that hold feeling-the wit is rarely isolated to be felt separately, as Donne's so often is, but enters into the whole motion. If we were to read the lines in isolation, we would be amused by the virtuoso alliteration and assonance in lines like these:
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.
. . . . . . . . . . .
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan.
(Sonnet 30)
But when we read them as an integral part of the lovely sonnet "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," the huddled sounds serve to convey the pressure of the past on the present as a thickening or troubling of speech. Where we feel a twinge of amusement, it is usually in combination with feelings dictated by the underlying rhythm, as with the ruefulness of "But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought" (Sonnet 44)' It would be wrong to suppose that the Sonnets are without humor. There are places where Shake speare positively romps, but the fun is almost never unmixed with serious feeling.
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The gay whirl of "Let not my love be called idolatry" (Sonnet 105) is an extreme example of the repetition common in the Sonnets, the same words rolled round, each time with added life because they fall differently each time within the poem's progress. Here this sort of fun is indulged in almost by itself, in celebration of a moment's carefree confidence: "Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind, / Still constant with a wondrous excellence." But even this sonnet, which is as near to a jeu d'esprit as we come, has its serious side, for it raises a question about idolatry which it does not settle.
"LINES OF LIFE"
Many of the Sonnets are wonderfully generous poems: they give beauty and meaning. These are among the most familiar from anthologies. In Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," the poet's art frees the young man from the effects of "chance or nature's changing course":
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This poem comes just after Shakespeare has shifted from urging that immortality must come through children to promising it by his "eternallines." The move comes after a characteristic poetic exploration of the relationship between "lines of life" and lines of poetry in Sonnet 16. Sonnet 15 has broached the shift with a pun on reproduction by husbandry and reproduction by art: "And all in war with time for love of you, / As he takes from you, I engraft you new" (italics added) - by writing I graft you to a new stock. Sonnet 16 returns to marriage, urging it as a "mightier way" to combat time than "my barren rhyme":
So should the lines of life that life repair
Which this time's pencil or my pupil pen
Neither in inward worth nor outward fair
Can make you live yourself in eyes of men.
To give away yourself keeps yourself still,
And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill.
The suggestiveness of "lines of life" appears in the variety of commentators' paraphrases recorded in the Variorum Edition: the "lines
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of life" can be the lines that life etches on a face, or the lines of descent in a genealogy, or the lines of the living pictures presented by children, or the lines of children as living poems (as opposed to the mere written lines of the "pupil pen"), or even, perhaps, as an echo at the back of the mind, what one commentator defends in urging unconvincingly that "lines of life" is a misprint for "loins of life" (compare the sonnet's conclusion: "And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill"). Booth instances these lines in his preface to exemplify the sort of multiplicity he is concerned to bring out, noting that he is following Empson in suggesting, in effect, that all the different glosses proposed are right.12 It is characteristic that even as Shakespeare urges the superiority of biological lineage, he merges it with artistic reproduction.
After one more sonnet, the pre! turns away entirely from reproduction that involves the triad of "sire, and child, and happy mother" (8). The relationship becomes diadic. But the feminine is kept in it, both in the youth-" A woman's face, with nature's own hand painted, / Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion" and in the cherishing poet:
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure. (Sonnet 20)
The poet here is in nearly the same role as "nature as she wrought thee," taking something of the same satisfaction in the young man's sexuality that a mother takes in a man-child's. Ironically, he is like Pygmalion in creating, more than he can acknowledge, the image he adores. But Pygmalion created an age-mate of the opposite sex whom he could finally possess as an object. Shakespeare, at this stage at least, accepts an aim-inhibited relationship. What Shakespeare's metaphor of capital and interest here proposes is that he should enjoy the whole identity of the friend, whereas women enjoy what "use" this capital yields of specifically sexual pleasure. If the youth were "true" to the poet, his own relationships with women would have to be of the same limited kind as the poet's with his mistress.
12. "Commentary," p. xiii.
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The poet frequently describes them as casual: "Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits, / When I am sometime absent from thy heart":
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?13
(Sonnet 41) .
This is the prologue to remonstrating about the young man's having taken on Shakespeare's own mistress: "Ay me, but yet thou might'st my seat forbear;" We shall return to that situation. Meanwhile, we can notice that, with the exception of that relationship to his own mistress, the poet's attitude toward the young man's sexual adventures is sometimes remarkably like that of a concerned parent:
Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege;
The hardest knife ill used doth lose his edge.
(Sonnet 95)
But-as with some parents, especially a mother strongly attached to a son-concern keeps verging into feelings of neglect ("I am to wait, though waiting so be hell, / Not blame your pleasure" [Sonnet 58]), and resentment and condemnation ambivalently expressed. Leslie Fiedler summarizes the shift from advocating immortality through "breed" to promising it through art: "In either case, love is the spur: either the love which attracts man to woman, body to body, thus ending in. marriage and the family, or the love which draws man to man, soul to soul, thus ending in-literature." 14 Fiedler's bold and wide-ranging account is often illuminating about the problematic area dealt with here. But his view of the homoerotic strain in Shakespeare and the role of those "strangers," women, deals almost exclusively with the relationships as between adults, neglecting the factor of identification and the latent matrix of family feeling. The "love which draws man to man" in the Sonnets, though it ends, as he wittily says, in literature, begins in the family. The bar against physical relationship takes the place of the incest taboo underlying the" danger" of the adored mistress in the Petrarchan tradition.
13. Booth keeps Q's he in this line; the emendation she, followed by most modern editors, originates with Malone (1780).
14. Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p.33.
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The "danger" of the youth is also, in part, his higher social station. Shakespeare's worship includes his joy in "engrafting" himself to an aristocratic heritage he cannot have in his own right. Sonnet 37 opens with a parental gesture of fulfillment through mirroring "As a decrepit father takes delight / To see his active child do deeds of youth" -then moves from difference in age to difference in heritage. The poet, "made lame by fortune's dearest spite," takes all his "comfort of thy worth and truth":
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts do crowned sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store.
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give.
With fine tact the poet matches the friend's inherited resources, "birth," "wealth," with personal qualities, "beauty," "wit," then combines social with intrinsic qualities again in a surge of vicarious joy: "Or any of these all, or all, or more, / Entitled in thy parts." (Italics added.) In his own middle-class situation, Shakespeare was adroit, comparatively well off, admired: "lame, poor, . . . despised" are obeisant to the aristocratic caste, compensatory for the drastic claim made on a member of it. Yet the relationship is serving more than social needs-"lame, poor, . . . despised" are metaphoric for the enormous personal need served by this writing.
The concern to realize and live in the identity of another "is just what we should expect from the man who, beyond all other men, created other identities. But in the plays there is freedom to use the dramatist's power to limit and so define the others who are created. The friend in the sonnets is sometimes rebuked, usually obliquely, but he is never characterized fully; for the poet to do that would limit the "all" which he requires of the friend. And in the sonnets to him there is a difficulty that grows more and more obvious as one reads and rereads the poems: the action, in such a love as this, is almost all on the poet's side. Sonnet 61 recognizes this fact: "Is it thy will thy image should keep open / My heavy eyelids to the weary night?" The conclusion is a troubled recognition that it is the poet's will, not the friend's: "For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, / From me far off, with others all too near."
There are sonnets which acknowledge that such identification as the poet feels with his friend involves selfishness or self-love. Thus Sonnet 62 exploits a double take as to who is who: "Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye, . . . / Methinks no face so gracious is as
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mine, / No shape so true, no truth of such account." The turn comes with the third quatrain: "But when my glass shows me myself indeed / Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity." The same game is played in Sonnet 39, this time with "worth" and" self": "What can mine own praise to mine own self bring, / And what is't bJlt mine own when I praise thee?" It is easy to dismiss this sort of reasoning as sonneteer's logic, when we read a sonnet in isolation. But when we come to understand the sort of relationship Shakespeare is expressing, we realize that these poems mean what they say in making equations. The poet's sense of himself hinges on the identification: elation in realizing himself in the friend's self is matched by desolation when he is left in the lurch of selflessness.
Freud in his study of Leonardo da Vinci described psychical processes in the origins of sublimated homosexuality which clearly have some relationship to what we encounter in Shakespeare in his Sonnets. He summarizes the pattern in general terms in an essay dealing with psychical processes in the formation of overt homosexuality in men. Central to what Freud sees as the "typical process" is an identification with the mother to whom the man, when a child, had been strongly fixated. The identification leads to a search "for love-objects in whom he can re-discover himself, and whom he might then love as his mother loved him. The characteristic mark of the process is that for several years one of the necessary conditions for his love is usually that the male object shall be of the same age as he himself when the change took place." The identification with the mother "enables the son to keep true to her, his first object choice," while the "narcissistic object choice" averts the difficulties of the "move toward the other sex." Freud associates the last of these factors with lithe high value set on the male organ and the inability to tolerate its absence in the love object," and attributes the" depreciation of women, and aversion to them, even horror of them" to the "early discovery that women have no penis." 15
We know, of course, that Shakespeare made the move toward the other sex early, with Anne Hathaway, at age eighteen if not before. His polymorphic sensibility did include in some contexts "high valuation of the male organ," but in displaced or sublimated forms. Fear and aversion to the female sexual organ is also expressed, in scarcely disguised form, in Titus Andronicus, as we have seen, and elsewhere.
15. "Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality," in Standard Edition, vol. 18, pp. 230-31.
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But again this is not a terminal attitude, but one which erupts at moments of special stress. The sonnets to the mistress make clear that genital relationship with her was crucial, if conflictual. W. H. Auden, a particularly trustworthy witness in this matter, mocked the eager claims of "the Homintern" on the Sonnets; he described the love for the young man as "mystical" and observed that such passionate devotion, enthralled by a special type of mortal beauty, rarely survives physical union.16 To adapt Freud's description to Shakespeare's more inclusive sensibility, we should note also that often, again especially in the earlier work, cherishing fathers are set over against threatening, overpowering women.
The urgent, poignant concern about "never resting time" in so many of the sonnets accords with Freud's observation that "for several years one of the necessary conditions for his love" is the youth's being the same age as the older lover was when the mother was given up. The poet deals with a universal regret when he considers that" everything that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment" (15), and that "thou among the wastes of time must go" (12). But the necessity of arresting the young man's aging is stressed almost obsessively, as the necessary condition for the saving identification: "My glass shall not persuade me I am old / So long as youth and thou are of one date" (22). This necessity for the relationship is insisted on especially as it is first set up on a flood tide of confidence:
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime,
a carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen.
. . . . . . .
Yet do thy worst, old time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
(Sonnet 19)
The poet's power here is to confer not immortal memory but specifically eternal youth. Normal aging is an awesome threat, quite beyond usual human concern for a lover's moving out of the first
16. W. H. Auden, Introduction to the Sonnets, in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 1726.
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bloom of youth. Sonnet 104, written after a separation of some duration, tries to deny any change:
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.
The poem then faces up to the changes of three years in a wonderful metaphor that compares the moving hand of a clock to the imperceptible motion of the aging features:
Ah yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred,
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.
The several tortured-or torturous-sonnets that deal with the young man's taking on Shakespeare's mistress are remarkable testimony to the fact that the poet's deepest sense of his identity is grounded-at this stage and in this situation-in his cherishing role toward the man and in identification with him, rather than in his relationship with the woman. The poems struggle to find a way of handling with words the injury the friend and mistress have done him in deeds. Sonnet 40 opens by insisting, through plays on the word love, that the woman's love is not "true" and so need not matter:
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all: What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call; All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.
Then, after a quatrain that moves a bit obscurely toward remonstrance, there comes a gesture of forgiveness that is almost more than the poet can make:
I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.
In such a situation, failure of aggression, or the turning back of it upon the self, rouses disquiet: "Couldn't he be a man about it, at
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least." 17 This in spite of the urgent, poignant speaking voice present in these lines, peaking in the "all" of "Although thou steal thee all my poverty." Where most men would respond with rage or bury the event in silence, Shakespeare encounters this closed ruthlessness and remains open to it, turning injury into poetry. IS The resentment one should expect against the man only finally bursts out in that one word "lascivious," so tellingly placed at the beginning of the line-and immediately taken back by what follows.
The strategy of denying dependence on the woman is combined, in the last of the sequence of Sonnets 40-41-42, "That thou hast her, it is not all my grief." The poem turns the two others into something between children (or wards) and actors in a play:
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her,
And for my sake ev'n so doth she abuse me,
Suff'ring my friend for my sake to approve her.
After the third quatrain laments that their gain is the poet's loss, the poem concludes with a playful-ironic insistence on complete identity with the young man: "But here's the joy, my friend and I are one; / Sweet flatt'ry, then she loves but me alone." One could scarcely go further in living by identification! Yet the whole situation is eased in being distanced as a dramatic hypothesis that ends with a joke. In The Winter's Tale things will go differently after Leontes urges Hermione to treat Polixenes even as he would have her treat him: "How thou lov'st us, show in our brother's welcome" (I.ii.174). He then assumes, in the anguished fantasy of his jealousy, that she has played out the scenario Shakespeare endures passively in these sonnets. Shakespeare here can endure it because the maternal source of basic trust has been internalized; it can be preserved so long as he can go on with the relationship to the young man.
The sonnets about the triangle are disturbing and unsatisfying poems despite their great power, because they do not achieve a stable attitude toward the experience. They move toward control by moving in the direction of drama, but the poet here is twisted on
17. "Would you would bear your fortunes like a man!" (Oth. IV.i.61), says Iago, insuring that aggression born of jealousy will not yield to forgiveness or accommodation in the situation he has created as a binding illusion in Othello.
18. Sonnets 133 and 134 indicate that the poet remained, at least for a time after the betrayal was known, also attached to the woman, "mortgaged to [her] will."
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the rack of an openness to life and a need for relationship, for love, which cannot let go of actual persons. The poet cannot forgo the cherishing parental bond that holds him in the relationship despite betrayal. In the plays such sympathy can flow into opposites and antagonists. In Othello-as later in The Winter's Tale-triangular relationships like that in the Sonnets are dramatized as totally disruptive because in these plays the implicit reference is not to a younger couple, envisaged from the poet's parental vantage, but to the original, older couple. Othello's and Leontes' experience of betrayal reanimates the rage of a child forced to recognize his exclusion by the sexual union of the parents.
“AS WITH YOUR SHADOW I WITH THESE DID PLAY"
Along with the poet's identity as cherishing parent there is also in the Sonnets a complementary relationship to the beloved as an object of love who is himself like the all-sufficing parent in infancy. To speak in this way falsifies of course the contingent way relationship to the friend is achieved. The positive poems characteristically evoke the friend's all-sufficing presence by synecdoche, parts taken for a whole that is beyond expression. Sonnet 53 dramatizes synecdoche:
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since everyone hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
Shakespeare here stands Neoplatonism on its head, as Leishman observes: the beloved is the Idea or "substance" of which things in the wide universe of becoming-Adonis, Helen of Troy, the "spring and foison of the year" -are but "shadows," even though the beloved is a living, actual person.19 But the poem is of course not doctrine: it goes back through language used by Neoplatonism to the sort of experience out of which it may grow. Instead of defining the "substance" which "can every shadow lend," the poem asks in astonishment, "What is your substance, whereof are you made?" We experience the paradox that both Adonis and Helen are poor imitations, but the surprise and wonder point toward a unity that is the ground beyond sexual difference. The "strange shadows," the
19. Themes and Variations, p. 149.
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"spring and foison of the year," convey the "you" which is "in every blessed shape we know." They are "received together" with this presence, to use the Greek root of synecdoche.
Recent psychoanalytic studies. of infancy, particularly the seminal thinking of the late D. W. Winnicott, provide a way of understanding, not simply the infantile roots of the "all," but the way the poetry achieves relationship to it. 20 In his view, playing in the presence of the mother, and the objects of play specially identified with that situation, are crucial in the infant's moving out from symbiotic unity toward separation. The child can endure periods of the absence of the parent by playing with "transitional objects." These are things originally "received together" with her, things that are synecdoches for her: "And you in every blessed shape we know." Winnicott thinks of such play and its objects as existing in a "potential space," neither "objective" nor "subjective," which is resonant both with the maternal presence and with "things of this world" -to echo an apposite title of Richard Wilbur's.21 The things of this world which are made into art, in this view, have been brought into such potential space as it expands beyond the nursery to include whatever each of us comes to make our own in the common culture.
Many of Shakespeare's sonnets can be seen, in this perspective, as play aimed at evoking, by way of the young man, a sense of the original maternal presence-and reckoning with its vulnerability to "never-resting time" (Sonnet 5) and other betrayals. The poems are transitional objects, for they are physical; meaning is made into "dulcet and harmonious breath" (MND II.i.151): "You still shall live-such virtue hath my pen- / Where breath most breathes, ev'n in the mouths of men" (Sonnet 81). The transitions the sonnets effect are back toward an original presence and at the same time out toward its new embodiment in the young man: a glow is cast upon him and on the world and reflected back upon the poet. Winnicott has a discussion of the way the mother's face mirrors to the infant what she sees in him or her, thus giving the infant an identity.22 His discussion is illuminating for the mirror/face that bestows or confirms identity in the sonnets. He also describes the
20. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971); see esp. "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena," pp. 1-25.
21. See "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," from Richard Wilbur, Things of This World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956).
22. "Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development," in Playing and Reality, pp. 111-18.
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stress for the child of a face that is indifferent or hostile, including situations where hostility within the frame of continued intimacy must be preferred to the nothing of indifference or rejection: "Bring me within the level of your, frown, / But shoot not at me in your wakened hate" (Sonnet 117).
Sonnets 97 and 98, in describing poignant separation, embody and make explicit the resource of play for enduring absence. At the same time they adumbrate experience of loss in infancy.
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What free zings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer's time,
The teeming autumn big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords' decease.
Yet this abundant issue seemed to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near. (Sonnet 97)
Throughout, absence is creating even as it is lamented. The first four lines give intense life to the mouth and ear: the poignant sense of absence from "thee" is developed as we encounter the same sound in "fleeting" and "freezings"; the open a sounds in "What dark days" feel cavernous against the prevailing e tones; "December's bareness" includes three vowel sounds almost the same as those in "everywhere," so that the bareness seems to spread out "everywhere"-and the meter makes "everywhere" larger than it would be in prose by stressing two of its three syllables. Consonants of course are also put to work reinforcing the meaning-for example, by linking "fleeting" and "freezing" to "felt," "old" to "December," "December" to "bareness." In the imagery, similarly, orphaned nature is "teeming." Something enormously vital as well as "wanton" is going on, from which the poet feels cut off but which the poem makes present. The lines about gestation have the elusive richness of multi-determined association and suggestion characteristic of the sonnets at their most intense and expansive. "Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime" rehandles in a line of similar shape and sound what was relatively simple in Sonnet 3
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"and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime." Where the early poem urged the young man to bless some "uneared womb" with "the tillage of thy husbandry," now we look out through windows of age and separations at "abundant issue" which is "unfathered." Through the negative, "unfathered" says that the friend fathers the rich increase in the sense that it is only available to the poet when mediated by him. But playing with the thought of "widowed wombs" makes him a present absence.
Sonnet 98 continues the seasonal mediation exquisitely:
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smeH
Of different flow'rs in odor and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
As the poem says "Nor did I wonder at the lily's white" it does so. The last four lines could not be more explicit in describing play with "transitional objects" as a way of coping with separation: lily and rose are "figures of delight, / Drawn after you" -"you away, / As with your shadow I with these did play." That the beloved youth and his absence are endowed with the meaning of an earlier situation is consistent with what seems a submerged reference in the two linked poems to the birth of a new, rival child.
In Sonnet 97 we move without transition from "this time removed was summer's time" to "teeming autumn big with rich increase"; the experience is like the fascination and dismay of a very young child who finds himself watching the mother grow pregnant, "big with rich increase," with the prospect of being himself orphaned, in effect, as her deepest attention is given to the new life. For that loss the friend's presence could be compensation, restoring "summer and his pleasures." In Sonnet 98 "proud-pied April" has arrived, "dressed in all his trim." Metrically, he bounces in on four trochees! He charms "heavy Saturn" to laugh and leap with him, and seems to sit and grow in a proud lap, from which
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the poet cannot or will not pluck him. But while the poet feels again the winter of being left out, with the spring for someone else, he in fact realizes its beauty, tells a summer story, even though a poignant one. Shakespeare's genius (and the capacity for growth that enabled it and was enabled by it) permits him to use the later relationship with the young man to keep alive by poetry his earliest
relation to the grace of life.
"LOVE IS MY SIN, AND THY DEAR VIRTUE HATE"
In the sonnets to the mistress there is also a potential association of her with the ideal and taboo mother, from which it is usually the poems' business to escape. Where the ideal in the young man is propitiated, in the mistress it is exorcised, good-humoredly in "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" (Sonnet 130). The idealization of the man is protected by the poet's turning the hostile component of a suppressed ambivalence back upon himself.23 The hostile current is predominant with the woman. She seems to have given good cause. But this is convenient, for it gives a basis for degrading her and so making her sexuality accessible: "Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate"! (Sonnet 142). Hate is paradoxically a virtue because it is "grounded on sinful loving" -loving, not taboo. Shakespeare eagerly joins the mistress in this enabling animosity—“Canst thou, 0 cruel, say I love thee not, / When I against myself with thee partake?" (Sonnet 149)-which is abundantly complemented in his regard for her. The bawdy couplet of Sonnet 150 identifies the purpose served by his scorn for her: "If thy unworthiness raised love in me, / More worthy I to be belov'd of thee."
One of the few poems to her not dedicated to this "dear virtue," Sonnet 143 playfully casts her in the role of a mother neglecting her infant as she runs to catch "One of her feathered creatures broke away" -a hen, but so described as to admit recognizing it as an other lover (or, by the shape of the experience, another child). The little domestic drama is a pleasant conceit, not to be leaned on heavily:
23. See Richard P. Wheeler, "Poetry and Fantasy in Shakespeare's Sonnets 88-96," Literature and Psychology 22 (1972): 151-62.
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So run'st thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind;
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind.
It is striking that by setting up the relation in terms that so explicitly reflect its roots, Shakespeare arrives for a moment at a good-humored plea. The few other unhostile wooing poems, with the one exception of Sonnet 138, are similarly ingratiating and self-deprecating: in Sonnet 128 the poet envies the "saucy jacks" that "kiss the tender inward of thy hand." Much more commonly, he asks for favors in the same breath that he tells her he loves her in spite of his five wits and his five senses (Sonnet 141), spells out her falsehood, and exclaims at the paradox that "in the very refuse of [her] deeds" she somehow makes him love her more "the more I hear and see just cause of hate" (Sonnet 150). These are outrageous poems: one wonders whether in fact some of them can have been sent to the poor woman-whether most of them were not offstage exercises in hate and spite written from a need to get something out of the poet's system. To tell a woman that since she is promiscuous she may as well let you put in to her "will" among the rest, especially since your name too is Will (Sonnet 135), does not seem a very likely way to win even a hardened profligate.
Several poems, for example Sonnet 151, present a sequence in which degrading the woman and his relation to her frees the poet for impudent phallic self-assertion: "Love is too young to know what conscience is, / Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?" The "love" of the first line here is clearly Cupid. 24 The second line, as Shakespeare goes way beyond the usual clichés about helplessness to resist Cupid's arrows that initiate passion, suggests the genesis of taboo in infancy: "conscience. . . born of love." The sonnet works to get past such conscience-"flesh . . . rising at thy
24. Brigid Brophy, in Black Ship to Hell (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), pp. 463-72, explores the appropriateness of Cupid's youth as "the affirmation of infantile sexuality" (p. 467) in the development of adult sexual relations out of "the incestuous love between mother and son" (p. 466). She sees a hint regarding the "reduction of Cupid from a young man to a baby" in Apuleius's story of Cupid and Psyche, in which Venus is reluctant to recognize "that her son is grown-up enough to have a love-affair" (p. 466). .Erich Neumann, in his commentary on Apuleius's tale, notes that it is Aphrodite herself, in her jealousy, who seeks to degrade sexually the mortal rival who becomes her son's lover (Amor and Psyche, trans. Ralph Manheim [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], pp. 60-61, 88).
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name doth point out thee, I As his triumphant prize" -completing its action by changing the meaning of the key word: "No want of conscience hold it that I call / Her love for whose dear love I rise and fall." The whole relation to the mistress is a very clear-cut version of what Freud describes in his essay "A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men": for a man to achieve potency the woman must be degraded, so as to disassociate her from the ideal presence founded on the early relationship to the mother.25 The result of such symbolic action, repeated in poem after poem, is not simply despair-despite the wishful simplification of Sonnet 144: "Two loves I have of comfort and despair." On the contrary, as Sonnet 151 makes totally clear, denigration is sexually enabling. The poet often expresses bafflement that this should be so, even as he engages in the devaluing process. 26
Where the sonnets to the woman do become completely grim, there is usually a certain falsifying simplification in resorting to unmeasured abuse, as in the couplet that ends but does not resolve the analysis of love's fever in Sonnet 147: "For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who are as black as hell, as dark as night." But with the whole Sonnets situation in view, it does not seem cynical to observe that there is strength in Shakespeare's being able to have "relations," as we put it, with the woman. The positive value is recognized once very clearly, in Sonnet 138:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she may think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Consummation follows the laying out of lies, hers to him, his to her, tea for two, two for tea: "Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, I And in our faults by lies we flattered be." To be heavily moral about such a poem is to miss its positive function in getting beyond morality. For Patrick Cruttwell, Sonnet 138 is "perhaps the most terrible poem of the whole sequence," climaxed by the "grim se
25. Standard Edition, vol. 11, pp. 165-75.
26. Cf. Robert Bagg ("Some Versions of Lyric Impasse in Shakespeare and Catullus," Arion 4[1965]: 64-95), who explores tensions between the poems' "recognition of a possible moral world where love has other habits" and "the world Shakespeare inhabits," where "love must absorb and comprehend many strange and ugly vicissitudes" with "protean transformations of feeling in the face of shifting truth" (p. 94).
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riousness" of the pun on "lie"! 27 I have felt that it is engagingly jaunty in defining the cheapness of the whole relationship-cheapness being one of the hardest things to get into poetry. 28
Self-abasement in the relation to the young man ,reaches a climax _ the Sonnets 87 to 94. This group follows the poems about the rival poet, where it is hard to sympathize with the queasy apologies for "my tongue-tied muse" (Sonnet 85) combined with disingenuous, covertly disabling praise for "the proud full sail of his great verse" (Sonnet 86). In Sonnet 87 we get the arresting opening: "Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing, I And like enough thou know'st thy estimate"; the group is often called "the farewell sonnets." Numerically, they come before the retrospective descriptions of absence we have seen in Sonnets 97 and 98. It is reasonable to infer that a separation of some duration did follow the "farewell"; . we shall see that many of the poems after 97 and 98 Involve new, more self-affirming postures.
Of particular concern here are Sonnets 87 to 94 because of the connection one can see between the contorted gestures they make and infantile responses to the threat of intolerable loss. From a psychoanalytic vantage point the poet's predicament can be summarized as a struggle not to acknowledge a process of disillusionment that would erode the ideal image of the friend in which the poet's own identity is precariously anchored. These poems seek to sustain, at whatever cost to the self, a magical unity of poet and the beloved-something akin to "the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment Freud postulated of very young infants for whom the all-important mother is slow to reappear." 29 What is so strange in these posturings of a mature man is the assumption that the youth will profit from-and be grateful for-the moral masochism offered him as a transaction of devotion:
27. Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), pp. 13-14.
28. Edward Snow considers the lovers' lies in Sonnet 138 by reference to the way the love of Antony and Cleopatra moves through and beyond excellent falsehoods, and by contrast with the devastating exchange between Iago and Othello as they spiral down to sexual horror through the sonnet's key words, "know," "think," "believe." Following closely, through such comparison, the human implications of Sonnet 138's syntactic and semantic mutuality, Snow finds: "The grounds for cynicism and despair in Shakespeare's romantic vision are the stuff of the sonnet, but it manages to transform them into something workable, even strangely affirmative," ("Loves of Comfort and Despair: A Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 138," ELH 47 [1980]: 462, 479).
29. Wheeler, "Poetry and Fantasy," p. 156.
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When thou shalt be disposed to set me light,
any of them ever anthologized?) because the presence is missing which is evoked in the positive sonnets by synecdoche, drawing in "all things rare / That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems" (Sonnet 21). As transitional object and play fit the generous poems, so "hallucinatory wish-fulfillment" describes such gesturing in a void. "But do thy worst to steal thyself away, / For term of life thou art assured mine" (Sonnet 92)-the triumphant tone is almost absurdly incongruous with what is being said, "I cannot lose you because if you leave me I shall die."
When the poet turns to the youth as an actual person, in Sonnet 94, his complex ambivalence effectually pulls the poem apart. "They that have pow'r to hurt, and will do none," begins with a meditation on the lordly autonomy of those "who moving others are themselves as stone": "They are the lords and owners of their faces, / Others but stewards of their excellence." But the tone shifts abruptly when, after the first eight lines, the poem edges toward an expression of the youth's corruptibility:
Upon thy part I can set down a story
Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted,
That thou in losing me shall win much glory.
(Sonnet 88)
The objective social situation that comes to mind as fitting this appeal is of a child placating a morally cruel parent by acknowledging ascribed wickedness in the hope of giving satisfaction and so winning acceptance: "The injuries that to myself I do, / Doing thee vantage, double vantage me." Of course in adult life lovers and intimate friends imitate every sort of child-parent scenario. But the scenario here is all, or almost all, Shakespeare's, as is apparent from his complaining of the youth's indifference. So in Sonnet 89 he pleads that the beloved at least give the attention involved in finding fault: "Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault." Then the poet would be able to play his game of self-reproof-which he plays anyway in promising to play it: "Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill . . . / As I'll myself disgrace."
There are earlier poems of self-abasement where the class difference provides a social model of master and servant-or rather, slave:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require. (Sonnet 57)
The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flow'r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
The class or caste difference does in some measure motivate as well as shape expression in such cases. But making all allowance for the subservience expected in patronage, the energy of self-effacement is beyond any call of duty. And the language of complaint constantly strains against the tone of satisfied adulation-"the world without end hour. . . the bitterness of absence. . . though you do anything." The poem thinks ill even as it claims not to. If the friend were God! Milton's "They also serve who only stand and wait" comes to mind-and Jonson's comment on Donne's" Anniversaries" on the death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, that "if it had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something." 30
These poems of abasement and farewell are so unsatisfying (are
The problem is not simply that the husbandry metaphor is radically transformed in moving from those who "husband nature's riches from expense" to the plight of the "summer's flow'r." We cannot put octave and sestet together in a single coherent reading-as attempts in the Variorum make clear-because Shakespeare's sensibility is confronting in the sonnet a situation in life which a sonnet cannot resolve.3)
MY DEEPEST SENSE, HOW HARD TRUE SORROW HITS"
The generalizing sonnets, which seek to express terminal attitudes-instead of a terminal event-are all among those after Son
Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. David Laing (London: F. Shorbel for the Shakespeare Society, 1842), p. }.
31. William Empson makes this sonnet the "crossroads" for very great criticism linking the Sonnets to the plays, particularly the Prince Hal-Falstaff relationship and the sense and sensuality of Angelo in Measure for Measure, in Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), pp. 85-111.
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net 97: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments" (116); "'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed" (121); "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame" (129); "Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth. . . Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross" (146). The first of these is often read at weddings; it is perhaps the most commonly anthologized of all the sonnets, expressing as it does the need all feel for unconditional love. Booth has an excursus "on the special grandeur of the best sonnets," which exhibits its marvelous range of meaning, instancing resonant contexts such as the marriage service and the Psalms, and also bringing out ambiguous suggestions, some of them bawdy, which might undercut its sweeping affirmation. He concludes that its absolute "love alters not" is "absolutely strengthened by the self-contradiction engulfed within it." 32
But Booth's reading deals with the poem in isolation, and so neglects a frequent problem with the Sonnets, their uncertain or indeterminate tone. When one reads Sonnet 116 in conjunction with those immediately around it, it fits Robert Frost's definition of a poem as "a momentary stay against confusion." 33 It is read in that way, in conjunction with other generalizing sonnets, by Carol Neely, who observes that these exceptional poems are "attempts to step back and escape from the immediate painful situation" peculiar to the parts of the sequence in which they appear.34 She finds the precariousness of the attempt emerging in the poems, including in Sonnet 116 the doubt underlying its final assertion: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved." Then she looks at the astonishing reversal of its affirmation about the "ever fixed mark" in the next following poem, where some of the same imagery is used to acknowledge infidelities: "Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all / . . . That I have hoisted sail to all the winds / Which should transport me farthest from your sight." At the close, Sonnet 117 attempts to justify infidelity by a couplet where we hear the same rhyme words as those of the couplet in 116:
Bring me within the level of your frown,
But shoot not at me in your wakened hate,
Since my appeal says I did strive to prove
The constancy and virtue of your love.
32. "Commentary," p. 391.
33. "The Figure a Poem Makes" (1939), in Robert Frost on Writing, ed. Elaine Barry (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973), p. 126.
34. Carol Neely, "Detachment and Engagement in Shakespeare's Sonnets: 94, 116, 129," PMLA 92 (1977): 83.
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When we look now at Shakespeare dramatizing Shakespeare in Sonnet 116 (not a "speaker" uttering it in the house of language), it becomes the statement, verging on a plea, that the beloved should not "bend with the remover to remove" the poet, even though he has been a "wand'ring bark."
One has to accept the fact that Sonnet 116 can be read in two ways at least: one way, it makes unconditional love imaginatively real; the other way, it is a plea for such love. When one is concerned to encounter Shakespeare in his Sonnets, all the poems are gestures expressing need in an always open situation. Or one recognizes that they are all dramatic, though the dramatic situation is only clear-so far as it is clear-by implication. Those poems that seem to falsify the situation put one off: for example, the couplet of Sonnet 117 seems clearly specious after the confession "that I have scanted all / . . . Forgot upon your dearest love to call." If he forgot the love, how can his quasi-legal "appeal" be that "I did strive to prove / The constancy and virtue of your love"? If the sonnet were spoken by someone in a play-by Proteus, say, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona-we could enjoy seeing through the speciousness, cued by the dramatic situation (and by his servant Launce).
Another way to understand the protean meanings is to note that the Sonnets are poetry, not simply statements, though-and this can cause difficulties- they are statements as well as poetry. There is frequently an honesty by association, often to opposites. Booth does unprecedented justice to often subliminal counter-suggestions in his annotation. Even with Sonnet 116: though he observes that "it is one of the few Shakespeare sonnets that can be paraphrased without brutality," he brings out an "undercurrent of frivolous sexual suggestiveness." "Many of the metaphors and ideas of this sonnet seem just on the point of veering off towards puerile joking about temporary male impotence-loss of tumescence-after sexual climax. . . ; quatrain 2, for instance, is always ready to turn into a grotesquely abstruse pun on 'polestar.'" Whether one recognizes this sort of suggestion in "the star to every wand'ring bark, I Whose worth's unknown, although his highth be taken" depends on the reader and the occasion of his reading. The poem, because it is great poetry, is a thing one can walk around, so to speak, or a place one can walk in. Booth is certainly right that "a sense of straightforward simplicity" can emerge from "potentially dizzying complexity" in many cases or on many occasions. 35
35. "Commentary," pp. 387, 391-92, xiii.
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It is not plausible, with such poems, that a "final" attitude should be arrived at. Yet critics have taken Sonnet 146's hortatory advice to the "poor soul" as final, especially read in conjunction with -Sonnet 129's devastating description of "lust in action." These are both powerful, moving poems. The torrential movement of Sonnet 129 scarcely pauses for twelve driving lines. In two lines of adjectives, "perjured, murd'rous, bloody" huddle like expletives. "Savage, extreme, rude, cruel" generate a reciprocal movement, "Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight," which concludes with "Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream." Yet the couplet draws back:
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heav'n that leads men to this hell.
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store:
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then.
One need not notice the pun in "hell" from Elizabethan slang for female genitals; the recognition of the contingency of the denunciation is explicit. Is it too much to suggest, also, that in denouncing lust the poem has generated a violent pressure of frustration similar in structure to the driving pressure that can lead to "lust in action"? Such underground pressure, we know, frequently fuels denunciations-Angelo's, for example, as Measure for Measure demonstrates.
Even Leslie Fiedler takes Sonnet 146 as a final, conclusive turning away:
Shakespeare, at the moment of writing the Sonnets, could not condone in himself the highest love he could conceive, but foresaw its dissolution in betrayal and lust, felt it deserved to be thus dissolved. And so he falls back, as generations of poets had before him, into the Christian palinode. 36
The tenderness and beauty of diction in the octet are moving, but the sestet becomes obtrusively hortatory. It is cast, moreover, in prudential economic terms: buy long ages in heaven by "selling hours of dross" -a bargain! The couplet about feeding on death is a Q.E.D. that has not been very clearly demonstrated-though this contributes to the somewhat hectic tone that is dramatized. The poem does not establish any loving religious relationship, finds no alternative object in God or Christ. One can contrast the widowed Donne's expression of moving from the love of his wife to love of God:
Since she whom I lov'd hath payd her last debt
Here the admyring her my mind did whett To seeke thee God.38
Apart from considerations of context, Sonnet 146 cannot intrinsically bear the weight of such determinate reversal.
Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
. . . . . . . these rebel pow'rs that thee array, 37
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
"'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed" (Sonnet 121) takes to an extreme the self-knowledge of the poems around it and is like them in making a declaration of autonomy within a social context:
For why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
36. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare, p. 38.
37. There is general consensus that the first three words of this line in the 1609 quarto-"My sinful earth" -were mistakenly supplied by the compositor. Several guesses have been made regarding what words were consequently lost, some quite plausible, all pure invention. In his note to this line, Booth offers "pressed with" as his own necessarily "arbitrary preference" ("Commentary," p. 504).
The third quatrain fuses self-assertion with self-acceptance, together with recognition of the final unknowable mystery of human identity, by echoing, without any cue for a blasphemous tone, Jehovah's self-description:
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own;
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel.
By their rank thought my deeds must not be shown.
38. "Holy Sonnets: XVII," The Poems of John Donne, ed. Sir Herbert Grierson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 301.
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The conclusion is tentative-and remarkable in that it does not abandon moral terms in spite of the way moral valuations have just been seen as contingent or projective:
Unless this general evil they maintain
All men are bad and in their badness reign.
The poem shows Shakespeare enfranchising his identity without putting himself above "sinful earth" (Sonnet 146), but on the contrary accepting that he like everyone is down in it, and that the mysterious force of life may inescapably involve sources of vitality that are bad.
It is striking, by contrast with Marlowe, that Shakespeare can do without diabolism to support him in such exploration. Shakespeare's sensibility secularizes what in religious terms would be a tolerant recognition of original sin, a Catholic or broad Anglican sort of acceptance, as against the unforgiving terror that drives Doctor Faustus to the arms of Mephostophilis, or motivates other Marlowe protagonists to deny or subvert morality altogether. In psychological terms, Shakespeare's superego at this stage of his development is far less exigent and cruel. This relatively unthreatened openness to polymorphous pleasure is consistent with identification with the cherishing aspect of parental presences-with not having challenged and then internalized, as an alien and disabling inner directive, a threatening parental figure's potentially violent, feared antagonism to desire.
The sonnet just preceding 121, in expressing feelings of reciprocity, lets us see how Shakespeare's powers of sympathy come into playas he moves out from narcissism to recognition of his own experience in another person. Few poems have expressed so close to the heart and nerves the transformation of passion into compassion as does Sonnet 120, "That you were once unkind befriends me now":
For if you were by my unkindness shaken,
As I by yours, y'have passed a hell of time,
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffered in your crime.
a that our night of woe might have rememb'red
My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits.
Shakespeare's "deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits" is the core of the generosity that animates the plays.
In considering how Shakespeare achieves a contingent mastery
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of the relationship to the young man, and increasing self-knowledge and acceptance, one runs into potential parallels, a number of them already made by _ritics, with Henry IV and Henry V and the festive and problematic comedies. Some relationships to the Sonnets will be explored in more detail in chapter. 7 when we look at how the later history plays relate to the shift into the major tragedies. But we can note here something of the generous outgoing tq life involved in Shakespeare's finding social and dramatic embodiment for the need which, in the Sonnets, is concentrated in the expression of the love for the friend. A striking instance is in the opening out of sexual possibilities in Twelfth Night in response to a young woman disguised as a young man.
The androgynous appeal of disguised Viola clearly reflects the fact, essential to the love for the friend in the Sonnets, that Elizabethan manners allowed the feminine aspects of men to be more fully expressed, without compromising their manhood, than in other epochs. Twelfth Night sorts out in a saturnalian, comic rhythm the Sonnets' congested response to the marvelous beauty and potentiality felt in a single young person, "the master mistress of my passion." Antonio, the infatuated rescuer of Viola's twin brother, Sebastian, carries on the directly charged friendship between men; like his namesake in The Merchant of Venice, he must at the end be content to look on while his protege moves into a new stage of life through marriage. But meanwhile, the providential revelation that Cesario-Viola has an identical twin brother makes it possible for the misplaced infatuation of both Olivia and Orsino to be fulfilled. The master-mistress of their passion splits, at the last moment, into a master and a mistress.
In exploring Cesario-Viola's appeal to both Orsino and Olivia in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, it seems to me now that I generalized ambiguously in saying that "with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign." 39 The normal is never of course wholly secure; it is something that is maintained by culture against odds. The artist, in dealing with potentially disruptive situations, takes on the odds. Shakespeare's repeated use in the comedies of the boy actor playing a girl disguised as a youth permits him to show young womanhood emerging from the sexually undifferentiated beauty of early adolescence, and it
39. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), P' 245.
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makes us realize anew how everyone who is fully alive to the grace of life has qualities of both sexes.4O Twelfth Night finishes one way of working out the potentialities of the sensibility we see infatuated with a young man "for a woman. . . first created" (Sonnet 20) in the Sonnets. The verbal play with master and mistress in its final scene might conceivably signal Shakespeare's consciousness of doing so. The Duke says to Viola, who has yet to change from her masculine attire:
Your master quits you; and for your service done him, . . .
And since you call'd me master for so long,
Here is my hand-you shall from this time be
Your master's mistress.
(V.i.321,324-26)
But there was another thing to do, another way to go, subdominant in Twelfth Night but central, if not fully mastered, in All's Well That Ends Well, which splits off the "master" in Bertram while centering the passion for him in the "mistress," Helena.
In Helena's love for the elusive Bertram there is an uneasy alliance with the poet as he uses her to express passion reaching across class lines. Over against Helena-whose love, though largely silent after the beautifully poignant, hopeless love poetry of the opening acts, wins her way to a place in the aristocracy-Shakespeare exhibits in Parolles very voluble male-to-male sycophancy united with pretension to equality and tutelage. In the relations of Helena and Parolles to Bertram we have, I think, an attempt to work through, in art, aspects of Shakespeare's relation to the highborn young man of the Sonnets.4] The love for the friend is vicariously
40. The culture's openness to androgynous coloration in the personal styles of men, and its relatively clear-cut definitions of the social roles of women, combine in the theatrical institution of boy actors for women's parts. The absence of any feeling that the role of boy actors is degrading, except as it accords with the general social status of common players, is notable in Hamlet's conversation about the children's companies and in his welcome of the players to Elsinore. As he greets the visiting company, it is striking that Hamlet pays considerable attention to the boy actor, playfully but not derogatorily addressed as though he were a young woman: "You are welcome, masters, welcome all. . . . What, my young lady and mistress! by' lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not crack'd within the ring. Masters, you are all welcome" (II.ii.421, 424-29).
41. Muriel Bradbook first called attention to the resemblances between Helena's love and the Sonnets, in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), p. 169. Roger Warren provides further exploration of this relationship in "Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram, and the Sonnets," Shakespeare Survey 22(1969): 79-92. Richard P. Wheeler considers the relationship of the Sonnets
Shakespeare in His Sonnets
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invested in Helena; Parolles' attachment to Bertram is purely a social and military pretension, which turns out to be merely words. He is genuine only to the extent that he is not just a liar but a compulsive liar, so that his exposure and dismissal do not kill his heart at all-he can comfortably move down or over from pretended equal of Bertram to known buffoon for Lafew: "Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live" (IV.iii.333-34).
An emotional strategy recurrent in the Sonnets, to affirm the poet's love by distinguishing it from that of empty time-servers, is repeated over and over in All's Well: as Helena's masked pursuit of Bertram proceeds, Parolles is unmasked. In All's Well this strategy is not fully successful. The play dramatizes a scapegoat action by which Helena's search for heterosexual "mutual render, only me for thee" (Sonnet 125) is made up for by exposing Parolles' search for status by a male-to-male render of mere words. But the humiliation of Parolles cannot do what the deep scenario calls for it to accomplish: it cannot fully divert us from the real obstacles, and the humiliations, that never seem to be completely overcome in Helena's quest for Bertram. As Helena herself oscillates between gestures that proclaim her inadequacy to the aristocratic marriage and her insistent pursuit of Bertram through secret maneuvering and the expedience of the bed-trick, so the play, despite the ending, seems to extend more than resolve the persistent class tensions of the Sonnets. And the shallow and callous arrogance that peers out from behind the image of the friend in the Sonnets is so fully manifest in Bertram's behavior that our sense of Helena's final triumph is compromised by the nature of its object. Helena's love for a young lord who resembles in many ways the friend of the Sonnets presents one way in which the need for relationship to virile manhood finds expression at the beginning of the great tragic period. Although the comic form cannot fully master this mode of resolution, it is testimony of Shakespeare's commitment to the full range of possibilities that he should try this variation.
To turn to the relation of the Sonnets to the major tragedies, we need to go back to the earlier sonnets where the love is all-sufficing and to those where it becomes an all-or-nothing relationship, like Lear's with Cordelia or Othello's with Desdemona. Though the bio
Ito All's Well in detail in Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), Pp.57-75.
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The Whole Journey
graphical chronology must remain inferential, it seems that Shakespeare made an investment in his own life which anticipated the search for something like the divine in the human dramatized in tragedy only some years later. Yeats wrote that man "is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work." 42 In the worshipful sonnets we see Shakespeare trying to choose perfection of the life-but even here he seeks the perfection of another life and seeks to realize it by poetry. The investment did not lead to personal tragedy or degradation, as it might well have done for a similar sensibility without Shakespeare's resources. The most important of these resources was of course his mastery as dramatist, including the financial independence this yielded, which protected him from abject practical need for patronage.
One way to focus on the relationship of the Sonnets to the major tragedies is to consider likeness and difference with properly religious experience. J. B. Leishman does this in his fine study of the poems, considered against a lifetime's reading in the poetry of the whole Western tradition. Leishman, noting similarities between Shakespeare's regard for the friend and attitudes that Herbert's poetry and Vaughan's reserve for addressing Christ, points out that from a Christian vantage point many of the sonnets "seem in the strict sense idolatrous, for in them the supreme object of the poet's contemplation is a human life, regarded, not as the symbol or incarnation of something that transcends it, but as itself transcendent: all-supplying, all-restoring, all-sufficing." 43 Murray Krieger has explored the way the Sonnets can recapture, by the action of poetry, the equivalent of sacred time in a secular world, as mirror becomes transforming window.44 Leishman considers content rather than poetics, and is not concerned with the familial roots of experience as poetry reaches back to and forward from them. Working with religious analogy, he considers how the poems move between doubt and faith-"there, where I have garner'd up my heart, / Where either I must live or bear no life" (Oth.IV.ii.57-60):
Shakespeare's adoration is directed towards a mortal and visible beloved, whose worthiness and responsiveness he is sometimes com
42. "The Choice," Collected Poems of w. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p.242.
43. Leishman, Themes and Variations (n. 7 above), p. 217.
44. Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 165-90.
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pelled to doubt, and one can never feel quite certain, and perhaps Shakespeare himself could never feel quite certain, whether what he is celebrating is the beloved or the love which the beloved has inspired. This continual oscillation between doubt at the heart of assurance and assurance at the heart of doubt is the dramatically tragic and tragically dramatic element in Shakespeare's sonnets, and it may well be that it was in it and out of it that some of the greatest moments in his tragedies arose.4s
Of course, in struggling with the tragic potential of the love dramatized in the Sonnets, Shakespeare's resources included the sonnet itself, as he used it to evoke and live through an ideal presence and later to recover himself. A contingent but real mastery of the situation that pulls apart Sonnet 94 develops in many of the sonnets numbered from 97 up through the envoy in 126, including 120 and 121, discussed earlier. Among them are poems that recover the sense of wonder at the beloved's beauty as a resource, like Sonnets 97 and 98, or again, 106, "When in the chronicle of wasted time / I see descriptions of the fairest wights." But what is new is self-reference of an independent kind, beyond the efforts of the various generalizing poems to stand back from the relationship and so resolve its tensions-without, I feel, ever escaping contingency. The infidelities that the poet acknowledges and apologizes for are made occasions for Shakespeare to speak about himself in his own right, even while pleading for forgiveness. Self-knowledge becomes self-assertion and self-acceptance-again always contingent, as the poems are always in motion: "though in my nature. . ." "No, I am that I am" (Sonnets 109, 121).
Instead of falling into disabling disillusion, a possibility one feels in the farewell sonnets, Shakespeare in effect falls back into himself. In Sonnets 109 to 112 and 117 to 121 he confronts directly the polymorphic responsiveness of his own personality:
Alas 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
(Sonnet 110)
Here "made myself a motley" suggests the actor's impulse and his humiliations, and in Sonnet 111 Shakespeare explicitly asks his
45. Themes and Variations, p. 230.
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friend to forgive in him the "public manners" bred by the "public means" from which he must provide for his livelihood:
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Commentators have emphasized, indeed exaggerated, the ignominious status of the acting profession in the Elizabethan age, seeing in this outward circumstance the source of Shakespeare's self-disabling humility toward his friend. No doubt it was a factor, just as part of the appeal of the young man was superior birth. But the temperament that made Shakespeare an actor and dramatist is more fundamental than the matter of status, as these sonnets make explicit: they describe a complex, resonant personality, which can be over-responsive, over-eager, drawn on to act unworthy parts and unable to avoid living out in new relationships what has already been found shameful. In Sonnet 109 ("0 never say that I was false of heart"), Shakespeare subordinates an absence that "seemed my flame to qualify" to the overriding spiritual bond: "As easy might I from myself depart, / As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie." His fluidity and his almost unbearable openness to life and desire are acknowledged in the sestet in a moving plea:
Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stained
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.
Though the couplet makes "this wide universe" nothing except the friend, in fact it is the poet in his own nature who occupies the whole poem.
The sort of knowledge of the heart and its turnings which finds expression in the plays appears in these sonnets with a special if limited intensity-the intensity involved in seeing, in one's single life, the broken lines made by Eros. In the same moment when he asks forgiveness for making "old offences of affections new," Shakespeare has the courage to recognize that there is value, as well as humiliation, in selling" cheap what is most dear":
Most true it is, that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely. But by all above,
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These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.
(Sonnet 110)
There is no set posture in these poems against morality or convention: if they simplified things by adopting a romantic or bohemian rationale, they could not be so serious in exploring the way passion turns corners that it cannot see around and moves in directions contrary to the will.
The new, higher estimation of self-self-regard, with all that implies as against entire dependence on the regard of the friend comes out in Sonnet 114, which deals in a new, detached way with projections of the friend's beauty, the "shadows" of Sonnets 53, or 97 and 98. This time they are explicitly recognized as projections and distortions and as the poet's action:
Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best
As fast as objects to his beams assemble?
a 'tis the first, 'tis flatt'ry in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up.
There is humor, surely, in speaking of "my great mind most kingly." But the concluding lines make clear that there is also serious self-assertion, and not to the credit of the whole relationship. Though the poet insists that he, not the friend, prepares the cup of specious similitudes, it still may be poisoned:
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing,
And to his palate cloth prepare the cup.
If it be poisoned, 'tis the lesser sin
That mine eye loves it and cloth first begin.
This comes close to what we get in Sonnet 138 to the woman: here the poet's seeing flatters as mutual lies do there.
The next to last numbered sonnet to the man, 125, insists that that relation has become mutual, despite difference in social rank. The previous poem has asserted that "my dear love" is not lithe child of state" but "all alone stands hugely politic" -the social references are cryptic (as in Sonnet 107, "Not mine own fears"), but
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the self-assertion is clear. Sonnet 125 insists, again with cryptic reference to time-servers, that the private tie can coexist with Shakespeare's being outwardly in the role of a gentleman-in-waiting in
the service of the great:
Were't ought to me I bore the canopy,
With my extern the outward honoring,
Or laid great bases for eternity,
Which proves more short than waste or ruining?
Have I not seen dwellers on form and favor
Lose all and more by paying too much rent
For compound sweet forgoing simple savor,
Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent?
No, let me be obsequious in thy heart,
And take thou my oblation, poor but free,
Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art,
But mutual render, only me for thee.
Hence, thou suborned informer! A true soul
When most impeached stands least in thy control.
Whatever happened to the social relationship later, it seems consistent with Sonnet 125 that the writing of sonnets to the young man should stop. For though it speaks of "my oblation," clearly the poem itself is not an oblation, as earlier sonnets had been. The relationship insisted on does not accept one-sided worship and so does not need to be made by sonnets.
In All's Well That Ends Well, the play that most closely dramatizes the social structure an