Sonnet 102: My Love Is Strengthened Though More Weak in Seeming
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My love is strengthened though more weak in seeming:
I love not less, though less the show appear. That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere. Our love was new, and then, but in the spring, When I was wont to greet it with my lays, As Philomel in summer's front doth sing And stops his pipe in growth of riper days: Not that the summer is less pleasant now Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night, But that wild music burdens every bow, And sweets grown common lose their dear delight; Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue, Because I would not dull you with my song. |
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My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming:
I love not less, though less the show appear. |
Although my love to you seems weaker now than it was, because – as the two previous sonnets both made clear – I talk about it less, it is in fact stronger: I do not love you less, even though it appears so to you.
ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP appear in this instance rhymes with everywhere in an 'ear' sound that resembles our 'pear'. |
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That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere. |
That love of which its owner keeps talking to everybody about how much he values it, through such broadcasting is turned into a commodity and treated as if it could be taken to market or put up for sale. In other words, if someone keeps shouting from the rooftops how much they love someone else, it becomes more of a sales pitch than an act of love and genuine appreciation.
The theme of a love that is diminished through overpraise is not new. It features as early as Sonnet 21, in which Shakespeare speaks to the world about his lover, rather than to him directly, and compares his own poetry to that of other poets who make excessive, even ridiculous claims about their loves, and declares: O let me, true in love, but truly write, And then, believe me, my love is as fair As any mother's child, though not so bright As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air. Let them say more that like of hearsay well, I will not praise that purpose not to sell. And in fact this association of praising with selling is proverbial: there is a proverb that says "he who praises wishes to sell," and of course it is possible, indeed likely, that Shakespeare was aware of this proverb. Interesting about this reference is that in Sonnet 21, Shakespeare uses the word 'love' to mean both the emotion – "true in love" –and the loved person – "my love" – whereby we have to keep bearing in mind that it is not certain whether this reference is intended: it may be subconscious, it may even be accidental, in any case though it is telling. Because if we read the two lines in this sonnet with 'love' meaning the loved person, then the poem at this point acquires a startling new power dynamic, in which the 'love's' 'owner' 'merchandises' his lover and thus effectively pimps him if he talks too much about him. |
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Our love was new, and then, but in the spring
When I was wont to greet it with my lays, |
Our love was new, and then, just in the springtime of our love, meaning at the beginning, when I was getting used to greeting it with my songs, for which here also, as in Sonnet 100, read poems... – and when you 'greet' love with poems, that means you write poetry about your love.
This is the third of only three times in the sonnets that Shakespeare uses the word 'lays' to mean 'songs', or here, by extension, 'poems', and so, as flagged up in our discussion of Sonnet 98, we will want to take a closer look at this briefly in the context of the 'rare words' approach to dating the sonnets. |
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As Philomel in summer's front doth sing
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days: |
...then at this still early time in our love, I did as Philomel does: just as Philomel sings at the beginning of summer – summer's front – and stops or silences his pipe, meaning is own voice, as the days grow riper and therefore the summer older, I also stopped my metaphorical pipe, and ceased singing your praises for a while.
Philomel is the nightingale, taking its name from Philomela, sister of Procne in Greek mythology. Procne is married to Tereus, King of Thrace. There are, as so often with myth, various versions of the story, but in essence and in a nutshell, Tereus, overcome with lust for her, rapes his sister-in-law Philomela and, to stop her from talking about the crime committed against her, cuts out her tongue. Philomela, unable to speak, weaves a tapestry that reveals what has happened, and when her sister Procne learns of this, she, together with Philomela wreaks a dreadful revenge on her husband by killing their son Itys and serving him up to Tereus as dinner. When Tereus realises what has just happened, he chases the two women, trying to kill them. On the point of being caught, in desperation, they pray to the gods to be transformed into birds, so as to escape his rage, and this is how Philomela turns into a nightingale and Procne into a swallow. Editors are at odds with each other over whether or not the second of these two lines contains a mistake: here, Shakespeare refers to Philomel's pipe as 'his'. This makes sense in so far as in the natural world it is only the male nightingale that sings, the female of this species is silent. Which also, as it happens, explains why Philomel sings 'in summer's front' and then 'stops his pipe in growth of riper days': the male nightingale's song is a mating call which therefore happens mostly in the breeding season, which in England for nightingales lasts from late April to early June. Once the lovebirds have found each other, the singing stops and the males start defending their territory and taking care of their young apparently. Traditionally, though, Philomel, being a metamorphosed princess, is thought of as female. And indeed, Shakespeare is about to refer to her as 'her' twice in the ensuing lines. Some editors for this reason emend 'his' to her' in this line too, arguing for example, as Katherine Duncan-Jones does in the Arden Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, that the manuscript may have spelt 'her' 'hir' and that therefore the typesetter simply misread this as 'his'. The inconsistency may also stem from a shift of emphasis in Shakespeare's mind from Philomel as a piper, which editors point out tended to be a male activity, to her as the mournful hymn singer which, as Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition suggests, "tends to be a feminine activity in Shakespearean drama." We don't know which is the case, and so I here am inclined, as I am wherever possible, and as John Kerrigan in the New Penguin edition advocates, to leave Will and well enough alone and retain 'his'. |
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Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night, |
This cessation of the nightingale's song – and thus by implication of my own laying down of lays – is not due to any suggestion that summer now, when it has advanced a bit, is any less pleasant than at the beginning of the season when her, Philomel's, mournful hymns hushed the night...
The song of the nightingale is universally perceived as melancholy or mournful, a fact that no doubt led to the gruesome tragedy of poor princess Philomela being associated with the bird, and because this birdsong is as sadly melodious as it is, it resembles hymns sung solemnly in church, which is why they 'hush the night': their sorrowful lament makes all the other creatures in the forest go quiet in enchanted, though anguished, sympathy. |
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But that wild music burdens every bough
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But because now, in the full swing of summer, every bough of every tree is crowded with all manner of birds – creatures of the wild – whose physical weight literally and whose music metaphorically burdens them and weighs them down.
'Burden' as a noun also means the 'refrain' or 'chorus' of a song, and so, when turned into a verb, the music of the wild fills the trees with its choruses, leading, so the implication, to an auditory overload: there's just altogether too much noise in the forest now for me to be wanting to contribute to this too... |
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And sweets grown common lose their dear delight;
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...and, this is another good reason to stop singing your praises at times: overuse degrades the pleasure. Sweets – here meaning pleasant, lovely things in general, if they are allowed to grow common, lose the cherished delight they used to bring when they were rare.
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Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue
Because I would not dull you with my song. |
And so for this reason, just like Philomel, I sometimes hold my tongue and go quiet, because I would not want to bore you with my poems, nor would I wish to blunt the world's interest in you by overdoing it and boring people generally with my talk of you, thus making you in their eyes and ears dull, for being overexposed.
ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP tongue in this instance rhymes with song. |
With Sonnet 102, William Shakespeare returns to addressing his young lover directly, though still in explanation and indeed defence of the extended period of silence of which Sonnets 100 & 101 spoke, both of which were addressed to his own Muse, admonishing her for her absence.
In contrast to those two poems, Sonnet 102 takes full responsibility for the dearth of praises sung in sonnet form to the young man and sets out its reasoning in an argument that is so elaborate, it doesn't quite fit the form: Shakespeare never actually manages to finish his sentence that covers the entirety of the second and third quatrain, which gives the poem an almost improvised quality that may or may not be fully intended.
There are two particularly interesting aspects to Sonnet 102. One is this very rare 'unfinished' sentence that makes perfect sense even though it is, strictly speaking, badly constructed, the other is the apparent contradiction the poem offers in terms of the time frame for the relationship.
First this technical point. Every one of the three major scholarly editions I refer to for this podcast ignores it, as does the single online one I sometimes use, and of all these, only Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden Shakespeare edition at least nods to it with her punctuation. Arguably, the fact that nobody mentions this, may simply mean that it isn't all that important, but whether this is an important point or not is almost by the by, it is most certainly unusual and therefore in itself noteworthy.
Here is what Shakespeare does:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring...
we would expect something to happen now, 'but in the spring'. Ideally something instigated by or related to the poet or his young lover, along the lines of: 'and then, but in the spring, I did this, or you did that, or another thing happened that was of some consequence'. But this does not materialise until the closing couplet, and there the conclusion is coached in a new clause that can stand on its own, relating, as it does, to things that have been talked about in the meantime:
Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.
And indeed, as just mentioned, the Quarto Edition treats this as a separate sentence. Now, we have mentioned before, the punctuation in the Quarto Edition is haphazard to say the least and all editors make choices about how to punctuate the sonnets. In this instance, most editors – Katherine Duncan-Jones being the exception – follow the Quarto Edition and place a full stop at the end of the third quatrain to thus separate it from the closing couplet. And on its own, the third quatrain does form a sentence:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burdens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
But this leaves the second quatrain hanging:
Our love was new, and then, but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
...then what? Of course, we know what Shakespeare is saying, that is not the issue, the issue, such as it is, is that he doesn't say it: he gets sidetracked into his comparison with Philomel and then winds everything up at the end with "Therefore I sometime hold my tongue..."
This is highly irregular. It is the first time in a hundred plus sonnets that a lapse of this kind has attracted our attention. Is it a lapse though? Or is Shakespeare deliberately doing something we simply lack the insight to recognise. This is possible. Also possible is that he just doesn't care that much. And if that were to be the case, we would have to ask ourselves, at the very least, why? Why doesn't he care enough about this sonnet to form a coherent sentence? Is he really distracted by other, more important things, and if so, what?
The last time we wondered whether Shakespeare was being perhaps a bit lackadaisical was with Sonnet 81, and there this wasn't because of some grammatical deficiency or lapse on his part, but purely because of an odd phrasing of which we also therefore wondered whether it might contain some hidden meaning that to us is simply lost. Here though, we have no reason not to understand the code, and I do mean this in a general sense: all language is code and there is nothing in these lines that strikes us as particularly cryptic or problematic. Except that it isn't properly formulated through. Absolutely: Shakespeare could turn around to us and say, you're just being pedantic here. Who cares if it's a proper sentence or not, it's poetry! And to quite some extent he would be right: I would be inclined to agree with him. It is just very unusual for him to do so.
Then again, Sonnet 102 does form part of this group of four sonnets, of which it is the third one, and with the previous couple we got the impression that they were somewhat detached, disengaged, even perhaps formulaic, certainly not conveying a great and immediate, urgent passion. And if that impression is correct, then that would certainly offer one plausible explanation for what we are witnessing here: if, as we felt with Sonnets 100 & 101, William Shakespeare's heart just isn't really in it at this point, then that could account for him not quite caring enough to tie things up properly in this sonnet. This would, in that sense at least, fit the pattern.
But we don't know. On previous occasions, when Shakespeare did something unusual with his language, we ventured that he may be drawing attention to something unusual going on in the content. This could also be the case here, but I wouldn't be able to tell you what it is, and nor, it seems, would anybody else, which would explain why nobody mentions it. And so we are left with this less than satisfactory state of affairs where we may simply have to accept that this is what it is, and in a way so be it.
And it may be no coincidence that the second point of interest that is noteworthy about this sonnet also hints at nothing so much as an uncharacteristically slapdash execution of the composition.
Because here is the main thrust of what Shakespeare is communicating to his young man, and it is easy enough to follow: much as the nightingale sings at the beginning of summer and then falls silent with the 'growth of riper days', which is the time when summer has advanced a bit, so I was in the habit of singing your praises in the early stages of our love, and now, as the relationship has settled with so many sonnets under my belt, I consider it wise to pipe down a bit, so as not to cheapen you or bore you by just adding to the noise in the metaphorical forest. So far so good.
Except that is not what Shakespeare is saying. What he actually says is:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring...
...I ceased my piping, so to speak.
Now, the spring of love is a flexible concept and one person's fresh April is another person's jaded November, but spring at any rate is not when Philomel stops his pipe. He stops his pipe, as Shakespeare tells us, "in growth of riper days," when summer has progressed somewhat. And again, you or Will, or anyone could throw their hands in the air and exclaim: you are splitting hairs here. We get the gist: it's poetry: it is not meant to be taken literally. And very obviously that's true. But whether it is meaningful, let alone significant, or not, here too we can say, it is interesting that Shakespeare doesn't make a tighter case for himself.
Still, the argument that he does make is reasonable enough. We know from these sonnets, because in them he tells us, that he has by now written many, many poems to his young lover. We know from these sonnets, because in them he tells us, that there have been periods of separation and reunions and there have been many ups and downs, so we can very reasonably assume that this relationship has gone on for some time now and that the novelty of these sonnets has therefore started to wear off: we have the sonnets, and much as we love them – and we do love them – someone could be forgiven for saying: I get the message, thanks, that will do for the time-being.
And so with this point too, we find, 20, 25 minutes or so into an episode on Sonnet 102, that maybe there just isn't that much that can be said about this poem, and perhaps so be it: Shakespeare can make us care greatly when he wants to, so maybe if he doesn't want us to care that much about something, that too is something we can accept and respect.
Before we go though there is one more element we wanted to have a brief look at, because it offers itself for examination at this particular juncture: the word 'lays' to mean 'songs' or here by extension, also 'poems'.
Shakespeare uses the word as a noun with this meaning exactly three times in the sonnets, in close proximity to each other, namely in Sonnets 98, 100, and 102. Also, as we noted when we first encountered it in Sonnet 98, it was, even in Shakespeare's day, a 'poeticism', meaning that it was not so much part of everyday language, as the kind of word a poet would use in a heightened application of their writing. This makes it a rare word and a highly specific one at that, and thus one of interest, because it seems to enter Shakespeare's vocabulary suddenly and then it disappears again.
You may remember that in our conversation with Sir Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson, as well in our conversation with Professor Gabriel Egan, we touched on the methodology employed by, among others, Professor Macdonald P Jackson in the dating of the sonnets. The principle is one of looking for rare words to see how their use in the sonnets correlates to the plays, because the plays are more easily and more precisely datable than the sonnets, and by identifying such correlations, it is hoped and assumed that the date of composition of the plays can be related to a putative date of composition of the sonnets.
Now, I must stress that this here is not a study, it is one isolated example, and so this cannot serve to prove or disprove anything: it has no statistical significance. But applying this approach, it would be interesting to see whether the word 'lays' also appears to mean 'songs' in the plays and if so where, how often, and when. And this is an extremely easy question to answer: yes it does appear in the plays with this meaning, exactly twice: once in Henry VI Part 2 and once in The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Always holding on to the caveat that we are not here reproducing a scientific study, but looking at an isolated example – an anecdotal piece of evidence, one might say – we can now compare the dates of composition for these two plays with the dates of composition put forward by scholars using the rare word correlation method, and what we would hope to find would be an overlap as this would confirm the hypothesis.
Sonnets 98, 100, and 102 are closely clustered inside the group that is formed by Sonnets 87-103, which by this method gets dated to about 1594-95, whereby Macdonald P Jackson himself acknowledges and highlights that these are at best approximations. Henry VI Part 2 is generally considered to be an early play, in fact one of the earliest Shakespeare wrote, and gets dated to between 1590 and 1592, so a couple of years earlier, give or take another couple of years. The Two Noble Kinsmen, on the other hand, is generally considered to be one of the late plays, in fact possibly his last, in collaboration with John Fletcher, and gets dated between 1612 and 1614, so well after The Sonnets were published in 1609.
Again, this doesn't prove or disprove anything. What it does do is show us that William Shakespeare used this particular one word early on in his playwriting career, then also briefly in his sonnets, and then not again until it resurfaces very late in his playwriting career. And that, too, is in itself interesting to note: it is something that obviously happens and we don't know why. It could be that Fletcher reintroduced it into Shakespeare's vocabulary. It could be that Shakespeare, having prepared The Sonnets for publication – if he did have a hand in this, which is by no means certain but postulated by some scholars as likely – had the word newly lodged in his mind and thus was able to access it when working on the late play. It could be sheer fluke.
But because this is so interesting, even when it doesn't yield up any conclusive results, we will dedicate a whole episode to this method and specifically to Macdonald P Jackson's work before the series is through, not least because it has become highly influential since the turn of this century.
In contrast to those two poems, Sonnet 102 takes full responsibility for the dearth of praises sung in sonnet form to the young man and sets out its reasoning in an argument that is so elaborate, it doesn't quite fit the form: Shakespeare never actually manages to finish his sentence that covers the entirety of the second and third quatrain, which gives the poem an almost improvised quality that may or may not be fully intended.
There are two particularly interesting aspects to Sonnet 102. One is this very rare 'unfinished' sentence that makes perfect sense even though it is, strictly speaking, badly constructed, the other is the apparent contradiction the poem offers in terms of the time frame for the relationship.
First this technical point. Every one of the three major scholarly editions I refer to for this podcast ignores it, as does the single online one I sometimes use, and of all these, only Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden Shakespeare edition at least nods to it with her punctuation. Arguably, the fact that nobody mentions this, may simply mean that it isn't all that important, but whether this is an important point or not is almost by the by, it is most certainly unusual and therefore in itself noteworthy.
Here is what Shakespeare does:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring...
we would expect something to happen now, 'but in the spring'. Ideally something instigated by or related to the poet or his young lover, along the lines of: 'and then, but in the spring, I did this, or you did that, or another thing happened that was of some consequence'. But this does not materialise until the closing couplet, and there the conclusion is coached in a new clause that can stand on its own, relating, as it does, to things that have been talked about in the meantime:
Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.
And indeed, as just mentioned, the Quarto Edition treats this as a separate sentence. Now, we have mentioned before, the punctuation in the Quarto Edition is haphazard to say the least and all editors make choices about how to punctuate the sonnets. In this instance, most editors – Katherine Duncan-Jones being the exception – follow the Quarto Edition and place a full stop at the end of the third quatrain to thus separate it from the closing couplet. And on its own, the third quatrain does form a sentence:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burdens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
But this leaves the second quatrain hanging:
Our love was new, and then, but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
...then what? Of course, we know what Shakespeare is saying, that is not the issue, the issue, such as it is, is that he doesn't say it: he gets sidetracked into his comparison with Philomel and then winds everything up at the end with "Therefore I sometime hold my tongue..."
This is highly irregular. It is the first time in a hundred plus sonnets that a lapse of this kind has attracted our attention. Is it a lapse though? Or is Shakespeare deliberately doing something we simply lack the insight to recognise. This is possible. Also possible is that he just doesn't care that much. And if that were to be the case, we would have to ask ourselves, at the very least, why? Why doesn't he care enough about this sonnet to form a coherent sentence? Is he really distracted by other, more important things, and if so, what?
The last time we wondered whether Shakespeare was being perhaps a bit lackadaisical was with Sonnet 81, and there this wasn't because of some grammatical deficiency or lapse on his part, but purely because of an odd phrasing of which we also therefore wondered whether it might contain some hidden meaning that to us is simply lost. Here though, we have no reason not to understand the code, and I do mean this in a general sense: all language is code and there is nothing in these lines that strikes us as particularly cryptic or problematic. Except that it isn't properly formulated through. Absolutely: Shakespeare could turn around to us and say, you're just being pedantic here. Who cares if it's a proper sentence or not, it's poetry! And to quite some extent he would be right: I would be inclined to agree with him. It is just very unusual for him to do so.
Then again, Sonnet 102 does form part of this group of four sonnets, of which it is the third one, and with the previous couple we got the impression that they were somewhat detached, disengaged, even perhaps formulaic, certainly not conveying a great and immediate, urgent passion. And if that impression is correct, then that would certainly offer one plausible explanation for what we are witnessing here: if, as we felt with Sonnets 100 & 101, William Shakespeare's heart just isn't really in it at this point, then that could account for him not quite caring enough to tie things up properly in this sonnet. This would, in that sense at least, fit the pattern.
But we don't know. On previous occasions, when Shakespeare did something unusual with his language, we ventured that he may be drawing attention to something unusual going on in the content. This could also be the case here, but I wouldn't be able to tell you what it is, and nor, it seems, would anybody else, which would explain why nobody mentions it. And so we are left with this less than satisfactory state of affairs where we may simply have to accept that this is what it is, and in a way so be it.
And it may be no coincidence that the second point of interest that is noteworthy about this sonnet also hints at nothing so much as an uncharacteristically slapdash execution of the composition.
Because here is the main thrust of what Shakespeare is communicating to his young man, and it is easy enough to follow: much as the nightingale sings at the beginning of summer and then falls silent with the 'growth of riper days', which is the time when summer has advanced a bit, so I was in the habit of singing your praises in the early stages of our love, and now, as the relationship has settled with so many sonnets under my belt, I consider it wise to pipe down a bit, so as not to cheapen you or bore you by just adding to the noise in the metaphorical forest. So far so good.
Except that is not what Shakespeare is saying. What he actually says is:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring...
...I ceased my piping, so to speak.
Now, the spring of love is a flexible concept and one person's fresh April is another person's jaded November, but spring at any rate is not when Philomel stops his pipe. He stops his pipe, as Shakespeare tells us, "in growth of riper days," when summer has progressed somewhat. And again, you or Will, or anyone could throw their hands in the air and exclaim: you are splitting hairs here. We get the gist: it's poetry: it is not meant to be taken literally. And very obviously that's true. But whether it is meaningful, let alone significant, or not, here too we can say, it is interesting that Shakespeare doesn't make a tighter case for himself.
Still, the argument that he does make is reasonable enough. We know from these sonnets, because in them he tells us, that he has by now written many, many poems to his young lover. We know from these sonnets, because in them he tells us, that there have been periods of separation and reunions and there have been many ups and downs, so we can very reasonably assume that this relationship has gone on for some time now and that the novelty of these sonnets has therefore started to wear off: we have the sonnets, and much as we love them – and we do love them – someone could be forgiven for saying: I get the message, thanks, that will do for the time-being.
And so with this point too, we find, 20, 25 minutes or so into an episode on Sonnet 102, that maybe there just isn't that much that can be said about this poem, and perhaps so be it: Shakespeare can make us care greatly when he wants to, so maybe if he doesn't want us to care that much about something, that too is something we can accept and respect.
Before we go though there is one more element we wanted to have a brief look at, because it offers itself for examination at this particular juncture: the word 'lays' to mean 'songs' or here by extension, also 'poems'.
Shakespeare uses the word as a noun with this meaning exactly three times in the sonnets, in close proximity to each other, namely in Sonnets 98, 100, and 102. Also, as we noted when we first encountered it in Sonnet 98, it was, even in Shakespeare's day, a 'poeticism', meaning that it was not so much part of everyday language, as the kind of word a poet would use in a heightened application of their writing. This makes it a rare word and a highly specific one at that, and thus one of interest, because it seems to enter Shakespeare's vocabulary suddenly and then it disappears again.
You may remember that in our conversation with Sir Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson, as well in our conversation with Professor Gabriel Egan, we touched on the methodology employed by, among others, Professor Macdonald P Jackson in the dating of the sonnets. The principle is one of looking for rare words to see how their use in the sonnets correlates to the plays, because the plays are more easily and more precisely datable than the sonnets, and by identifying such correlations, it is hoped and assumed that the date of composition of the plays can be related to a putative date of composition of the sonnets.
Now, I must stress that this here is not a study, it is one isolated example, and so this cannot serve to prove or disprove anything: it has no statistical significance. But applying this approach, it would be interesting to see whether the word 'lays' also appears to mean 'songs' in the plays and if so where, how often, and when. And this is an extremely easy question to answer: yes it does appear in the plays with this meaning, exactly twice: once in Henry VI Part 2 and once in The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Always holding on to the caveat that we are not here reproducing a scientific study, but looking at an isolated example – an anecdotal piece of evidence, one might say – we can now compare the dates of composition for these two plays with the dates of composition put forward by scholars using the rare word correlation method, and what we would hope to find would be an overlap as this would confirm the hypothesis.
Sonnets 98, 100, and 102 are closely clustered inside the group that is formed by Sonnets 87-103, which by this method gets dated to about 1594-95, whereby Macdonald P Jackson himself acknowledges and highlights that these are at best approximations. Henry VI Part 2 is generally considered to be an early play, in fact one of the earliest Shakespeare wrote, and gets dated to between 1590 and 1592, so a couple of years earlier, give or take another couple of years. The Two Noble Kinsmen, on the other hand, is generally considered to be one of the late plays, in fact possibly his last, in collaboration with John Fletcher, and gets dated between 1612 and 1614, so well after The Sonnets were published in 1609.
Again, this doesn't prove or disprove anything. What it does do is show us that William Shakespeare used this particular one word early on in his playwriting career, then also briefly in his sonnets, and then not again until it resurfaces very late in his playwriting career. And that, too, is in itself interesting to note: it is something that obviously happens and we don't know why. It could be that Fletcher reintroduced it into Shakespeare's vocabulary. It could be that Shakespeare, having prepared The Sonnets for publication – if he did have a hand in this, which is by no means certain but postulated by some scholars as likely – had the word newly lodged in his mind and thus was able to access it when working on the late play. It could be sheer fluke.
But because this is so interesting, even when it doesn't yield up any conclusive results, we will dedicate a whole episode to this method and specifically to Macdonald P Jackson's work before the series is through, not least because it has become highly influential since the turn of this century.
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!