Sonnet 104: To Me, Fair Friend, You Never Can Be Old
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To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed Such seems your beauty still: three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green. Ah, yet doth beauty like a dial hand Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; So your sweet hue, which me thinks 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. |
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To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed Such seems your beauty still: |
To me, my beautiful friend, you can never be old, because your beauty still seems to me today just as it was when I first saw you.
The figure "when first your eye I eyed" contains what in rhetoric is known as an epanodos: the repetition of a concept in reverse order, and it is this a particularly satisfactory one, because it swivels on the axis of the pole-like 'I' which also makes the same sound. The first idea of course is that I 'eyed' your 'eye', meaning I first looked into to your eyes, which connotes a strong, even intimate connection, perhaps as much as falling in love with you at first sight; but the 'eye' of the young man also puns on his 'I', meaning his person as a whole in which case the poet's 'eyed' acquires more of a sense of 'when I first spotted' or 'discovered' or, as we today might say, 'clapped eyes on' you. And the verb 'seems' is revealing. With it, Shakespeare acknowledges that this is not an objective truth: the young man has, it appears, aged or changed since they first met; enough for Shakespeare himself to find it necessary to assure him that to his eyes he still seems as beautiful as he was back then, even if to others, perhaps even to himself, the young man may have started to show signs of age or of growing up: he is after all still a young man. |
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three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride |
Three cold winters have – with their fierce winds – shaken off the splendid, proud display of summer leaves in the canopy of the forest, meaning simply that three summers have been followed by three winters...
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Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen, |
...and in the same course of the seasons, I have seen three beautiful springs turn into three yellow autumns...
PRONUNCIATION: Note that beauteous here is pronounced as two syllables: beaut-eous. |
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Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned
Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green. |
...and the fragrant fresh air of three Aprils has burnt off or been burnt – as in been scorched, or also perhaps here evaporated – by the heat of three hot Junes, and all of this has happened since I first saw you when you were fresh, as in young and full of untarnished beauty, who you are still 'green' today; 'green' of course also meaning young and fresh and still in the spring of life.
In other words: three years have passed since we first met. And of this particularly precise timing there will be a lot more to be said in just a moment. |
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Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceived, |
Ah, as yet, beauty moves stealthily away from the figure – the appearance, the body, the face – of the person whom it belongs to, namely you, my young man, just like the hand of a clock which travels on slowly but steadily, without any perceptible movement.
This is a wonderfully intricate and finely constructed metaphor, because a 'dial hand' – the hand of a clock – slowly moves away from the 'figure', as in the number on the clock face, thus, stealing away from it, but it also could be said to be taking away time from the number of hours that are being measured, since the time left to a person in their life – much as the time left in a day or a year – constantly diminishes. Similarly, beauty – at least when understood in the traditional sense of youth and a youthful appearance – on the one hand slowly moves away from the person whom it inhabits, but it also, in doing so, visually takes away this quality of being beautiful and adored, as the years pass. Interesting to note is that Shakespeare here talks about 'his' figure rather than 'your' figure, thus generalising the observation as a universal phenomenon, and in doing so arguably softening the blow for the young man: this is not something that happens only to you, this happens to everybody, of course, but: |
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So your sweet hue, which me thinks still doth stand
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived. |
In a similar way your sweet – as in lovely, beautiful, perhaps even pretty – appearance, which to me seems to be standing still, meaning that it doesn't seem to change, does in fact have motion in it, it is in fact changing, and so my eye may be deceived. And so 'may' here is rather euphemistic, because this is indeed so, and it confirms what has been suggested above: your beauty only seems to me as it was when we first met, the truth is that your lovely appearance is, if not fading yet, then certainly changing.
The word 'hue' to mean outward appearance was introduced to us as early as Sonnet 20, which also, as it happens references an element of stealth, though in a different sense: A man in hue all hues in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth. And Sonnet 82 directly juxtaposes outward hue with inward beauty of mind: Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hue, drawing the well established classical connection between an inward beauty that is, in the ideal person, reflected by an outward beauty. |
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For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead. |
And so take this as a warning, you generation who are not yet alive in this world, in other words, you people of the future, when you come to read these lines, know this: before you were even born, the epitome of beauty had already died, because this, the highpoint of attainable beauty lives in my young lover and he – though to me it may not seem so, or rather although I convince myself of this not being so because I don't want this to be so – is in fact already past his prime.
And the categorical, uncompromising 'dead' on which this sonnet ends leaves us in no doubt about the young man's own mortality. Noteworthy also is the change from 'thou' to 'you' in the closing couplet when addressing the generations yet to come. Some editors see this as a shift in focus from the age to come as a single entity to the individuals of you people being born. But we know from several previous instances that Shakespeare is not quite as strict in his distinction between 'you' and 'thou' as we might expect him to be and so this may in fact simply be a choice made for euphony, making the line sound pleasing to the ear. |
With his celebrated and much-debated Sonnet 104, William Shakespeare appears to set out to do primarily three things: first and foremost, to reassure his young lover that even now, after some appreciable time has passed since they first met, he, the young lover, is still as beautiful to him, our poet, as he was on the very first day; in other words that for him, Shakespeare, the fact that his young lover may be showing signs not so much perhaps of age as of having grown up, doesn't matter. Secondly, to alert the reader and listener – most particularly the reader and listener of the future – to our mortality and to the passing of time and to the fading nature of youth and beauty, even if the changes inflicted by time are not perceptible in the moment. And thirdly – as it turns out for some people today still most controversially – to offer a time frame for the relationship with his young man of precisely and specifically three years. All of which, and particularly of course the latter, we will discuss in this episode.
As an unsuspecting reader of and listener to and maybe lover of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, you may be inclined – as I was when I set out on this project – to embrace Sonnet 104 with open arms and, having read or heard it, leap out of your metaphorical bath of ignorance and uncertainty, exclaim a less than muted eureka! and perform a short but heartfelt dance of joy at having been given such a tangible and unequivocal piece of information by our often, so as not to say forever, enigmatic poet, thinking: here it is. Three years. This could not be any clearer if it tried: at this point, whatever this point is in Shakespeare's life, he has known and to all intents and purposes loved his young man for three years. Perfect.
This, you would then be forgiven for thinking – as I did when I first read this sonnet – is useful knowledge in multiple ways: firstly, it confirms what by now we have been getting a strong sense of: this one relationship lasts over an extended period, certainly more than a few weeks and a few sonnets, certainly over many months and indeed, as we now think we know, years. Three of them. Secondly, it could, if correct, help date the composition of the sonnets: if we were to find a commencement point of the relationship, then we would now know that this is three years after that time; conversely, if we were able to date this sonnet or one that is very likely to have been written very close to it, then we should be able to deduce from this a likely commencement point of the relationship. And this, thirdly and in this context most importantly, may yield significant clues as to the identity of the young lover: if, as will turn out to be the case, we have a shortlist – and a very short one it is – of likely candidates for the young man, then, as we shall see when we return to this question in detail relatively soon, the dating of the sonnets is entirely crucial to determining whom the evidence that we receive from them favours and whom it doesn't.
But, as you can tell from the way I am duty-bound to be setting this up, there is a snag. Pick up any of the scholarly editions of The Sonnets in circulation today, and you will find editors falling over themselves to pour cold water on any such notion as this sonnet telling us anything anywhere near as simple and straightforward as all that. They all – quite reasonably and absolutely correctly – point out that other sonneteers before, during, and – perhaps less pertinent to Shakespeare at the time of his writing this poem – after Shakespeare have written sonnets that talk of a three year period having elapsed since their love began. One of them, Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition, goes as far as to say that "sonneteers tended to live life in multiples of three." The suggestion – and more than suggestion, the to varying degrees but always strong urging – is that we should not take the three year timeframe given by Sonnet 104 literally, as this is a poetic commonplace and may therefore mean anything or nothing at all.
And here is where I have my small but stubborn cavil with the world of academia. It is this where I – humbly but firmly – beg to differ. Because, yes, of course, that much is true: other poets have written poems that speak of three year periods, that's evidenced and irrefutable. What is also evidenced is that in some of these cases we can either see or surmise that the actual relationship that is being referred to lasted much longer than three years. We also know – as we have taken note of many times – that Shakespeare layers his meanings and plays with symbolism and knows his tropes, often adapting, sometimes undermining, occasionally even subverting them. We further know that three is something of a magic number: it is manifestly symbolic, it is imbued with religious, spiritual, geometric, static, biological, and historical significance, and it is therefore by definition poetic.
But as a writer I would have to ask myself this question: when might I feel tempted, prompted even to write, or even just comfortable with writing a poem – provably one of many composed to and for the same person – that speaks specifically of a timeframe of three years? Would I, as a human being first and a writer second, or even as a writer first and a human being second – really not though as a theoretician but as a practitioner – write such a poem a year into my relationship? Why? Two years into it? Not really, no: I can, of course, in this instance, only speak for myself and not for our good friend Will, but I do think not.
Would I perhaps write such a poem somewhat retroactively after four years of a relationship had passed? Possibly. Might I write such a poem quite a few years after the relationship had ended but reflecting back on a time when the relationship was three years old: that too is a distinct possibility. Would I randomly choose a moment in my busy, complex, at times borderline convoluted life to write 'the three year thing' mainly because that is what, as a poet, you do? Considering how wholly I am reinventing the form and shaping language in the process? Bearing in mind how out on a limb I go with the unconventionality of my sonnet collection as a whole? In view of how closely an actual time frame of three years would suit and match up my real life relationship? Seriously?
Seriously, we cannot rule this out. We have – as I say often and don't mind repeating every so often too because it is almost the only certainty we do have – no certainty. But, I've said this before too and will gladly say it again, not least because I enjoy saying it: in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend.
What is entirely likely, makes perfect sense, fits with the overall pattern, matches up with the impression we are given from all the other poems in the collection, and stands therefore to some considerable reason is that William Shakespeare finds himself in a real life relationship with a real life lover that in real life has now, at the time of his saying so, lasted approximately enough three years. Give or take a few days or weeks, perhaps even a few months. As a writer first and human being second or indeed vice versa, my instinct is to say that the sensible thing for a poet to do is to write their three year poem after more or less three years. Not all that much later, certainly no sooner.
Or, if you prefer, think of it from the young lover's perspective: this tango that we are witnessing here has two people - on occasion, as we saw and will see again two plus one people – in it. If you are the young man and your poet finds himself moved to tell you that you will never be old to him, even though, as is inevitably the case, time passes and, imperceptible though it may seem, beauty – at least that superficial, youthful beauty – slowly steals away, and he does so nine, ten months into the relationship and phrases this as a three year period... – you'd be outraged. Three years is a long time in a twenty-one year old's life: there is a hell of a difference between being 18, say, and 21. So don't tell me I am three years older when I'm not. Go away with your poetic commonplace and come back to me when it is more applicable, I prithee, nay I insist.
And there is one thing we need to bear in mind when we look at the 20th century critical response to Sonnet 104: it is a 20th century response. This is of no small significance. If you are listening to this podcast anywhere near the time it is being recorded and published in October 2024, you will find, perhaps surprisingly, that all the leading scholarly editions currently available of William Shakespeare's Sonnets were edited in the last century. Even the ones that have been reprinted many times or given a second or third edition ten, twelve, fifteen years after they were first published: the ground for them was laid in the 1960s and 70s and the work done in the 1980s and 90s. This means that if you are 25 or younger, the people whose interpretations and annotations you read will all be your grandparents' age or older.
Now, age is clearly no bar to understanding Shakespeare, but what this in turn means is that they are all of a generation who grew up and then studied their literature and their Shakespeare heavily influenced by the mid-20th century culture and mindset shaped by French thinkers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others who proclaimed, as the title of Roland Barthes' immensely influential book put it, La mort de l'auteur – The Death of the Author.
If you've been listening to this podcast and caught my conversation with Professor Gabriel Egan you will have heard him say just how pervasive this idea was that we should not read an author's text as essentially theirs in the context of their life, but much more as a general reflection of their time and their culture; and you will also, not so incidentally, have heard him say that computational approaches to the analysis of literature appears to show fairly conclusively that the author is far from dead, that they are pretty much alive and kicking and putting their personal, individual voice stamp on quite literally everything they do literally.
Of real relevance to us in the discussion of this sonnet though is the fundamental approach by a large portion of 20th century Shakespeare scholars which almost categorically, so as not to say ideologically, rejects the idea of reading a poet's poetry biographically and therefore seeks to actively distance itself from any interpretation that may look or sound like it is taking any reference to biographical detail at all literally.
In other words: the urge to find reasons why a specific time reference such as the three years found in Sonnet 104 should not be taken as biographical information but as a cultural construct that happened to be currency at the time was immense. And so while it would be foolish and arrogant in the extreme to dismiss these editors and their work, it would be in similar measure naive and uncritical to simply adopt their take on poetry as 'objective' or 'neutral'. It was in itself steeped in a highly sociopolitically driven, in places, some would argue, almost dogmatic school of deconstructionist thought.
It is not this the place for me to argue or elaborate in great detail whether this school of thought has its merits or not – I believe to some limited extent it actually does – but it is entirely necessary to flag up its dominance in the academic education of the people who have put together the editions of William Shakespeare that you read today. And it is also of course necessary to point out that the death of the author theory has its critics, for example Professor Brian Vickers among several others who emphasise the importance of historicism and the author's own personal experiences and intentions.
I – as you can tell – veer strongly towards reading The Sonnets as a direct and emotionally involved reflection of and response to real events in William Shakespeare's life, and so I am prepared here to postulate that by far the likeliest reason for William Shakespeare referring to a three year period having elapsed since he first eyed the eye of his young lover is that by then something close to the region of three years have actually since then elapsed..
Having talked in such detail about only the third part of Shakespeare's threefold 'message' to the young man and through him to us, we may be allowed to condense our examination of the other two just a bit.
The second element we mentioned was the reminder to the young man and to us, as readers and listeners of their future, that time passes and with it beauty fades, and what awaits us all in the end is certain death. This may not sound like a revolutionary insight but it is nonetheless interesting to say the least that Shakespeare here takes the rather extraordinary step of saying to his young man in such unsparing terms that he, much as his beauty, will die, and it is even more noteworthy that he does so in almost the same breath as he tells him that to him he can never be old. It rather relativises this first and we ventured most important part of the communication, which in itself poses the question we already formulated once before in relation to Sonnet 104 while discussing one of the previous poems: what is it that prompts Shakespeare to thus reassure – and with the ensuing caveat then possibly also to unsettle – his young man.
Any reasonable answer would have to feature some sort of doubt or worry on the part of the young man that this might somehow not be so. And this is far from difficult to imagine. If the young man was in his young years as pretty and lovely as Shakespeare in many of these sonnets suggests, and if this relationship has now lasted at least three years, as this particular sonnet strongly suggests – I now rest my case for this reading of it – then that means our poet's young lover must now at the very least be 19, more likely at least 21 years old. At least 19 because in Elizabethan England 16 for a boy is really the earliest age at which he would reasonably be expected to start thinking of marriage – though that would still be quite early – and more likely at least 21, because 18 is a much more eligible age for a young nobleman, and we have, as you will know if you've been listening to this podcast, no reason not to believe that the first 17 sonnets in the collection were written for the same young man as those that follow, and the first 17 sonnets do nothing much but urge this young man to marry.
Also, 21 is when in Elizabethan England you come of age, and anyone who has ever reached a significant milestone of either a big round number or of actually turning officially adult may be able to relate to the range of anxieties this might just evoke in a young-at-heart person.
Still, anything we can say about the young man's age is and remains speculation, but what we can assume with a great deal of likelihood is that something external has occurred that has moved Shakespeare to writing this poem: either something the young man has said or written to him about his own age and looks, or something Shakespeare has noticed in his appearance or conduct, or something that 'the world' around them has said or written about the young man that he, the young man, may or may not have responded or reacted to. And this may be a good moment to remind ourselves that the young man is in the public eye: he is known to the world of the day, the world being London, of course, and English society.
And the reason we may consider this likely to the point of being probable is simply that you do not tell someone you love that to you they can never be old unless someone or something has suggested otherwise. Doing so without any prompt or reason would amount to simply saying to them: you're getting old. And beyond getting old, you're going to die. Shakespeare though makes a point of separating these out from each other. He tells him, yes you are in fact growing up and getting older, yes you will be eclipsed by the end of your life as we all will, but I hold you as dear and I see in you such beauty as I did and as I saw on the very first day I met you, and much as I have been saying for three years now and in many a sonnet written to, for, and about you, my poetry will preserve you as you truly are. And this, it can now confidently be confirmed, by us, the age that then at the time was still unbred, is indeed the case.
As an unsuspecting reader of and listener to and maybe lover of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, you may be inclined – as I was when I set out on this project – to embrace Sonnet 104 with open arms and, having read or heard it, leap out of your metaphorical bath of ignorance and uncertainty, exclaim a less than muted eureka! and perform a short but heartfelt dance of joy at having been given such a tangible and unequivocal piece of information by our often, so as not to say forever, enigmatic poet, thinking: here it is. Three years. This could not be any clearer if it tried: at this point, whatever this point is in Shakespeare's life, he has known and to all intents and purposes loved his young man for three years. Perfect.
This, you would then be forgiven for thinking – as I did when I first read this sonnet – is useful knowledge in multiple ways: firstly, it confirms what by now we have been getting a strong sense of: this one relationship lasts over an extended period, certainly more than a few weeks and a few sonnets, certainly over many months and indeed, as we now think we know, years. Three of them. Secondly, it could, if correct, help date the composition of the sonnets: if we were to find a commencement point of the relationship, then we would now know that this is three years after that time; conversely, if we were able to date this sonnet or one that is very likely to have been written very close to it, then we should be able to deduce from this a likely commencement point of the relationship. And this, thirdly and in this context most importantly, may yield significant clues as to the identity of the young lover: if, as will turn out to be the case, we have a shortlist – and a very short one it is – of likely candidates for the young man, then, as we shall see when we return to this question in detail relatively soon, the dating of the sonnets is entirely crucial to determining whom the evidence that we receive from them favours and whom it doesn't.
But, as you can tell from the way I am duty-bound to be setting this up, there is a snag. Pick up any of the scholarly editions of The Sonnets in circulation today, and you will find editors falling over themselves to pour cold water on any such notion as this sonnet telling us anything anywhere near as simple and straightforward as all that. They all – quite reasonably and absolutely correctly – point out that other sonneteers before, during, and – perhaps less pertinent to Shakespeare at the time of his writing this poem – after Shakespeare have written sonnets that talk of a three year period having elapsed since their love began. One of them, Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition, goes as far as to say that "sonneteers tended to live life in multiples of three." The suggestion – and more than suggestion, the to varying degrees but always strong urging – is that we should not take the three year timeframe given by Sonnet 104 literally, as this is a poetic commonplace and may therefore mean anything or nothing at all.
And here is where I have my small but stubborn cavil with the world of academia. It is this where I – humbly but firmly – beg to differ. Because, yes, of course, that much is true: other poets have written poems that speak of three year periods, that's evidenced and irrefutable. What is also evidenced is that in some of these cases we can either see or surmise that the actual relationship that is being referred to lasted much longer than three years. We also know – as we have taken note of many times – that Shakespeare layers his meanings and plays with symbolism and knows his tropes, often adapting, sometimes undermining, occasionally even subverting them. We further know that three is something of a magic number: it is manifestly symbolic, it is imbued with religious, spiritual, geometric, static, biological, and historical significance, and it is therefore by definition poetic.
But as a writer I would have to ask myself this question: when might I feel tempted, prompted even to write, or even just comfortable with writing a poem – provably one of many composed to and for the same person – that speaks specifically of a timeframe of three years? Would I, as a human being first and a writer second, or even as a writer first and a human being second – really not though as a theoretician but as a practitioner – write such a poem a year into my relationship? Why? Two years into it? Not really, no: I can, of course, in this instance, only speak for myself and not for our good friend Will, but I do think not.
Would I perhaps write such a poem somewhat retroactively after four years of a relationship had passed? Possibly. Might I write such a poem quite a few years after the relationship had ended but reflecting back on a time when the relationship was three years old: that too is a distinct possibility. Would I randomly choose a moment in my busy, complex, at times borderline convoluted life to write 'the three year thing' mainly because that is what, as a poet, you do? Considering how wholly I am reinventing the form and shaping language in the process? Bearing in mind how out on a limb I go with the unconventionality of my sonnet collection as a whole? In view of how closely an actual time frame of three years would suit and match up my real life relationship? Seriously?
Seriously, we cannot rule this out. We have – as I say often and don't mind repeating every so often too because it is almost the only certainty we do have – no certainty. But, I've said this before too and will gladly say it again, not least because I enjoy saying it: in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend.
What is entirely likely, makes perfect sense, fits with the overall pattern, matches up with the impression we are given from all the other poems in the collection, and stands therefore to some considerable reason is that William Shakespeare finds himself in a real life relationship with a real life lover that in real life has now, at the time of his saying so, lasted approximately enough three years. Give or take a few days or weeks, perhaps even a few months. As a writer first and human being second or indeed vice versa, my instinct is to say that the sensible thing for a poet to do is to write their three year poem after more or less three years. Not all that much later, certainly no sooner.
Or, if you prefer, think of it from the young lover's perspective: this tango that we are witnessing here has two people - on occasion, as we saw and will see again two plus one people – in it. If you are the young man and your poet finds himself moved to tell you that you will never be old to him, even though, as is inevitably the case, time passes and, imperceptible though it may seem, beauty – at least that superficial, youthful beauty – slowly steals away, and he does so nine, ten months into the relationship and phrases this as a three year period... – you'd be outraged. Three years is a long time in a twenty-one year old's life: there is a hell of a difference between being 18, say, and 21. So don't tell me I am three years older when I'm not. Go away with your poetic commonplace and come back to me when it is more applicable, I prithee, nay I insist.
And there is one thing we need to bear in mind when we look at the 20th century critical response to Sonnet 104: it is a 20th century response. This is of no small significance. If you are listening to this podcast anywhere near the time it is being recorded and published in October 2024, you will find, perhaps surprisingly, that all the leading scholarly editions currently available of William Shakespeare's Sonnets were edited in the last century. Even the ones that have been reprinted many times or given a second or third edition ten, twelve, fifteen years after they were first published: the ground for them was laid in the 1960s and 70s and the work done in the 1980s and 90s. This means that if you are 25 or younger, the people whose interpretations and annotations you read will all be your grandparents' age or older.
Now, age is clearly no bar to understanding Shakespeare, but what this in turn means is that they are all of a generation who grew up and then studied their literature and their Shakespeare heavily influenced by the mid-20th century culture and mindset shaped by French thinkers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others who proclaimed, as the title of Roland Barthes' immensely influential book put it, La mort de l'auteur – The Death of the Author.
If you've been listening to this podcast and caught my conversation with Professor Gabriel Egan you will have heard him say just how pervasive this idea was that we should not read an author's text as essentially theirs in the context of their life, but much more as a general reflection of their time and their culture; and you will also, not so incidentally, have heard him say that computational approaches to the analysis of literature appears to show fairly conclusively that the author is far from dead, that they are pretty much alive and kicking and putting their personal, individual voice stamp on quite literally everything they do literally.
Of real relevance to us in the discussion of this sonnet though is the fundamental approach by a large portion of 20th century Shakespeare scholars which almost categorically, so as not to say ideologically, rejects the idea of reading a poet's poetry biographically and therefore seeks to actively distance itself from any interpretation that may look or sound like it is taking any reference to biographical detail at all literally.
In other words: the urge to find reasons why a specific time reference such as the three years found in Sonnet 104 should not be taken as biographical information but as a cultural construct that happened to be currency at the time was immense. And so while it would be foolish and arrogant in the extreme to dismiss these editors and their work, it would be in similar measure naive and uncritical to simply adopt their take on poetry as 'objective' or 'neutral'. It was in itself steeped in a highly sociopolitically driven, in places, some would argue, almost dogmatic school of deconstructionist thought.
It is not this the place for me to argue or elaborate in great detail whether this school of thought has its merits or not – I believe to some limited extent it actually does – but it is entirely necessary to flag up its dominance in the academic education of the people who have put together the editions of William Shakespeare that you read today. And it is also of course necessary to point out that the death of the author theory has its critics, for example Professor Brian Vickers among several others who emphasise the importance of historicism and the author's own personal experiences and intentions.
I – as you can tell – veer strongly towards reading The Sonnets as a direct and emotionally involved reflection of and response to real events in William Shakespeare's life, and so I am prepared here to postulate that by far the likeliest reason for William Shakespeare referring to a three year period having elapsed since he first eyed the eye of his young lover is that by then something close to the region of three years have actually since then elapsed..
Having talked in such detail about only the third part of Shakespeare's threefold 'message' to the young man and through him to us, we may be allowed to condense our examination of the other two just a bit.
The second element we mentioned was the reminder to the young man and to us, as readers and listeners of their future, that time passes and with it beauty fades, and what awaits us all in the end is certain death. This may not sound like a revolutionary insight but it is nonetheless interesting to say the least that Shakespeare here takes the rather extraordinary step of saying to his young man in such unsparing terms that he, much as his beauty, will die, and it is even more noteworthy that he does so in almost the same breath as he tells him that to him he can never be old. It rather relativises this first and we ventured most important part of the communication, which in itself poses the question we already formulated once before in relation to Sonnet 104 while discussing one of the previous poems: what is it that prompts Shakespeare to thus reassure – and with the ensuing caveat then possibly also to unsettle – his young man.
Any reasonable answer would have to feature some sort of doubt or worry on the part of the young man that this might somehow not be so. And this is far from difficult to imagine. If the young man was in his young years as pretty and lovely as Shakespeare in many of these sonnets suggests, and if this relationship has now lasted at least three years, as this particular sonnet strongly suggests – I now rest my case for this reading of it – then that means our poet's young lover must now at the very least be 19, more likely at least 21 years old. At least 19 because in Elizabethan England 16 for a boy is really the earliest age at which he would reasonably be expected to start thinking of marriage – though that would still be quite early – and more likely at least 21, because 18 is a much more eligible age for a young nobleman, and we have, as you will know if you've been listening to this podcast, no reason not to believe that the first 17 sonnets in the collection were written for the same young man as those that follow, and the first 17 sonnets do nothing much but urge this young man to marry.
Also, 21 is when in Elizabethan England you come of age, and anyone who has ever reached a significant milestone of either a big round number or of actually turning officially adult may be able to relate to the range of anxieties this might just evoke in a young-at-heart person.
Still, anything we can say about the young man's age is and remains speculation, but what we can assume with a great deal of likelihood is that something external has occurred that has moved Shakespeare to writing this poem: either something the young man has said or written to him about his own age and looks, or something Shakespeare has noticed in his appearance or conduct, or something that 'the world' around them has said or written about the young man that he, the young man, may or may not have responded or reacted to. And this may be a good moment to remind ourselves that the young man is in the public eye: he is known to the world of the day, the world being London, of course, and English society.
And the reason we may consider this likely to the point of being probable is simply that you do not tell someone you love that to you they can never be old unless someone or something has suggested otherwise. Doing so without any prompt or reason would amount to simply saying to them: you're getting old. And beyond getting old, you're going to die. Shakespeare though makes a point of separating these out from each other. He tells him, yes you are in fact growing up and getting older, yes you will be eclipsed by the end of your life as we all will, but I hold you as dear and I see in you such beauty as I did and as I saw on the very first day I met you, and much as I have been saying for three years now and in many a sonnet written to, for, and about you, my poetry will preserve you as you truly are. And this, it can now confidently be confirmed, by us, the age that then at the time was still unbred, is indeed the case.
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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!