Sonnet 105: Let Not My Love Be Called Idolatry
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Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show, Since all alike my songs and praises be To one, of one, still such and ever so. Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence, Therefore my verse, to constancy confined, One thing expressing leaves out difference. Fair, kind and true is all my argument, Fair, kind and true, varying to other words, And in this change is my invention spent: Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords. Fair, kind and true have often lived alone, Which three till now never kept seat in one. |
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Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show, |
Let it not be said that my love is a form of idolatry, nor allow the object of my love – my beloved – to be seen as an idol.
Both 'idolatry' and 'idol' here carry, and therefore establish, a strong religious context: 'idolatry', in the Christian tradition that Shakespeare finds himself in, is the worship of something or someone other than God, and for this reason is considered a grave sin. And 'idol' in this same sense is any person or object of such worship, in other words not, as we today would mostly understand it, someone to look up to and aspire to, but, if it is a person, someone to deify and in doing so treat as a 'false god'. Shakespeare, with this opening gambit, appears to distance himself from any such practice, or to defend himself against any accusation of such practice, for the reasons that now follow. This, incidentally, is the first and only time in the entire collection that Shakespeare refers to his young lover as 'my beloved'. He uses the term 'beloved' as a passive verb to describe both his young man and himself on two separate occasions: Sonnet 10: Grant if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many, Sonnet 25: Then happy I that love and am beloved, Then, in Sonnet 89, he speaks of "Thy sweet beloved name," but except in this poem, he refers to his young man either as 'my love', as 'sweet love', as 'dear love', or indeed as 'friend', which is one of the reasons why I have eschewed the practice employed by some classical scholars to give this young man the epithet 'beloved' in contrast to Shakespeare, as the older man in the constellation, taking the role of 'lover'. This, though valid for the classical Greek relationship between an older and a younger man, does not properly apply here for a whole raft or reasons, not least among them the patently much higher status and wealth and therefore level of power the young man possesses compared to Shakespeare. PRONUNCIATION: Note that beloved here as so often is pronounced with three syllables: [be-lov-ed]. |
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Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such and ever so. |
The reason no-one should think of my love as idolatry or of my lover as an idol is that all my 'songs and praises', for which read all my poems, are dedicated to one person, and speak of this one person, always and forever in the same way, whereby 'songs and praises' of course references the songs of praise sung in church to God, thus drawing a first direct comparison between the young man and God.
'Still' here as often has the meaning of 'always', and this is not the first time Shakespeare is telling his young man that he always writes the same thing to, for, and about him. Sonnet 76 already made this abundantly clear: O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument; And there as here he uses terminology directly from classical rhetoric to talk about his sonneteering: 'argument' and 'invention' feature both there and here, as does the notion of constancy and invariance: |
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Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence, |
My love is kind today, and he is kind tomorrow, always constant in this 'wondrous excellence' of his, meaning his exquisite qualities of beauty and good character.
There is – as so often – an opportunity here for giving the line a secondary meaning. If 'my love' is understood to possibly also refer to William Shakespeare's love for the young man, then it can still hold true and express something not so much about the young man – who we know has not, in fact, been all that constant in his love towards Shakespeare – but about Shakespeare's dedication and devotion to him. |
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Therefore my verse, to constancy confined,
One thing expressing leaves out difference. |
And that being so, my verse, which is also tied to such constancy, since it only ever talks about the one object of my love, only ever expresses one thing, namely my praise of and love for you. And because of this – as well as to this end – it 'leaves out difference', meaning that it does not embrace any kind of novelty or new themes or new ways of saying what needs to be said, which is simply that you are wonderful.
This too, strongly echoes Sonnet 76, this time its beginning: Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, And note how the parallels continue in the third quatrain of this sonnet here: |
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Fair, kind and true is all my argument,
Fair, kind and true, varying to other words, |
My whole rhetorical argument, meaning everything I put into this properly composed and well-structured poetry of mine, is about someone – by implication you – who is "Fair, kind and true," and so all I ever talk about is this "Fair, kind and true" character of my lover, expressing this in various other words, whereby 'fair' here means 'beautiful', of course, rather than our 'fair-minded'.
It can hardly be a coincidence that the phrase "Fair, kind and true" is repeated here. It thus emphasises the constancy and absence of any substantive difference, but it also forms the foundation for it ending up being named three times in total in this poem, just after it has been spelt out for us that these are three themes that come together here in one: PRONUNCIATION: Note that varying here is pronounced as two syllables: [var-ing]. |
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And in this change is my invention spent:
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords. |
And in this small element of change, which is that I 'vary' the same content 'to other words', meaning that I say the same thing in slightly different ways, my rhetorical 'invention' is spent: this is as far as it goes: I talk about these three themes, beauty, kindness, and truth, and they – as anyone could readily agree – afford an amazing scope for composing poetry.
'Invention' here once again is meant in the sense of inventio in rhetoric: the systematic, methodical search for arguments to support the point one is making. It is really a process of discovery, rather than one of making things up or creating things out of nothing, as we in our everyday language might understand it. And note perhaps also the mirroring of the word 'wondrous': the young man's wondrous excellence, encompassed in his tripartite qualities of being "Fair, kind and true" quite naturally then gives the poet this 'wondrous' scope for talking about it. |
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Fair, kind and true have often lived alone,
Which three till now never kept seat in one. |
These three qualities that make for the three themes I always talk about have "often lived alone," meaning they can frequently be encountered individually in different people: some are beautiful, some are maybe kind, others are true, as in sincere and faithful, but not only is it rare that you find all these three qualities in one person, according to our poet, these three have until now, until the instance of this one young man, never resided in one person.
And with this, Shakespeare brazenly undermines his whole argument that his love should not be called idolatry, nor his lover be seen as an idol, because he is now saying, in his closing couplet, that he, and only he, his love, unites upon himself these three, all but divine, qualities of beauty, kindness, and truth, which perhaps comes as close to saying he is a god as with three qualities one can... |
Sonnet 105 presents a playful paradox that is no doubt fully intended on William Shakespeare's part. Addressing, for a change, not his young lover directly, but speaking to the world in general about him and about his love for him, he tells us that we should not see, and in seeing so by implication judge, this love as the worship of a human and therefore by necessity false god, and then proceeds to deify this same object of his love in terms that – in a culture of immensely powerful religious strictures – comes scandalously close to sacrilege by effectively calling him 'the one and only' and investing him with qualities that prompt immediate comparisons to the holy Trinity.
It is this not a difficult, nor otherwise particularly problematic poem, at least not on the surface. It seems easy enough to understand, and although we can never, with Shakespeare, be entirely certain that we get every layer of meaning and all the references, the play with words it entails and the nods it makes to other contexts seem to be fairly obvious and fairly obviously imbued with a nonetheless subtle irony.
As with many of these sonnets, we may ask ourselves to begin with: what brings it on? Is this a response to someone making a remark towards Shakespeare about his love, or perhaps to some pamphleteer writing about Shakespeare and his lover? This is entirely possible, but it would also be sheer speculation on our part to suggest so.
The sonnet belongs to the last major group or 'zone' of the Fair Youth Sonnets, encompassing Sonnets 104 to 126, which several scholars, though with varying degrees of confidence, believe may have been composed later than the majority of the others that deal with this relationship, and while nothing in the poem itself gives us any clues as to when exactly it may have been written, it follows Sonnet 104, which, as we saw, sets the much discussed time frame of three years, and it references, as we just noted above, Sonnet 76 in particular which, like this poem, makes a point of emphasising the great number and the repetitious nature of these sonnets to, for, and about the young man.
This, if nothing else, supports our impression – gained over an extensive stretch of sonnets now and expressed on multiple occasions – that these sonnets are indeed all or mostly written to, for, and about the same young man, and not, as some editors and scholars have suggested, to a whole range of them, and that the relationship with this young man stretches over several years; three at least, quite possibly by now a bit longer.
The irony, such as it is, stems from this circumstance. If our contention that we are, as we believe we are, and as Shakespeare says we are, always talking about the same young man, then we know for as certain as we can know anything that he, this young man, is not in any sense that we would recognise "Fair, kind and true."
He is, if we are to believe our poet, certainly 'fair' – always as in 'beautiful' – and he may or may not be to varying degrees and at varying times also 'kind'. Chances certainly are that he can be absolutely lovely, the evidence for this being mostly that Shakespeare says so too, and that it would be extremely difficult to believe that a man of William Shakespeare's encompassing understanding of humans could be so smitten for so long by someone who turns out to be entirely unkind and wholly superficial. The only way this relationship over this period can make sense is if – and for this there are many good indications – his young man is a complex and in some ways perhaps also conflicted character who oscillates between being totally adorable to acting at times like a conceited, selfish clot, shall we say, so as to avoid having to deploy another insult beginning with c that especially to our North American friends and listeners might sound unpalatably offensive.
This latter we can infer from what Shakespeare tells us about his love's conduct in several of these sonnets, especially of course around the affair his young lover is having with Shakespeare's own mistress, of all people, in Sonnets 33 to 42, and about his anxiety in view of his behaviour and the company he is keeping when they are apart from each other in Sonnets 48, and 57 & 58, for example, and about the young man's reputation in the world in Sonnet 69, although, as we have seen, in Sonnet 70 he then once again absolves him of any wrongdoing.
Shakespeare being no fool, we can safely assume that he does this consciously. He knows that we know – because he tells us in this collection of poems – that his love, whom he idolises in this three-times expressed three-fold deification, is of these three things that he calls him one thing at best, one thing we would hope and believe in parts and at times, and one thing not really at all.
Either this, or, and here lies a rather thrilling new avenue of consideration, his young man has not only grown up a bit, as we saw in Sonnet 104, but also matured and changed. We can't and mustn't rule out the possibility that a shift has taken place and that the young man has been showing himself lately as, indeed, not only beautiful – still as beautiful to Shakespeare as he was when they first met, so Sonnet 104 assures him and us – but also as kindhearted and loyal, faithful, true. At least to the extent a young nobleman in late Elizabethan, possibly early Jacobean England can be faithful and true to his somewhat older male lover.
If this were the case, then the last line of this sonnet would acquire an interesting new dimension. We could then feel justified, more than justified, invited, to read it not as 'these three qualities have not lived in one person until you came along', which in any case, no matter how we look at it, is hyperbolic and patently untrue, but as 'these three qualities have not until now, this time in our relationship, found seat in one', meaning therefore that it has not until just now or very recently been the case that you, my gorgeous young man, have been all these three things in one: beautiful, kind, and also true.
We cannot know if this reading has any foundation in factuality, because we do not know what really brought on this sonnet, when exactly it was actually written, and whether Shakespeare is being subtly ironic in the sense that he knows he is presenting his love to us finer than he really is or in the sense that only now, after all this time, and when the outward beauty of his young man has already started to show signs of waning, these three qualities, so precious, so sought after, find themselves finally at home in his young lover.
Which then leaves us with the question, still, why the religious and in Shakespeare's day potentially really rather risky reference? And the answer is simply: we don't know. All manner of speculative explanations have been offered, ranging from the possibility of a hidden snipe at either the Catholic Church, or at the then still very newly Reformed Church of England, right through to Shakespeare here alluding to the classical Greek, and specifically Platonic, ideal of 'the Good, the True, and the Beautiful'.
And this is certainly not something we would be wise to put past him: we know Shakespeare has a classical education, and we know from the references in his plays that he was deeply influenced by classical literature, by the Renaissance, and by Neoplatonic thinking. And if you find yourself in a relationship that may or may not be as we understand it 'Platonic', but that in such a classical Neoplatonic philosophical framework can be celebrated and lived, whereas in a Christian context it is seen as sinful, even abominable, then toying with these concepts in a manner that would be understood by those around you who have eyes and ears for the subtleties of religious and philosophical symbolism would both make sense and be, for a poet of the day, enjoyable and fruitful, in so far as it allows him to make a skilful poetical point that is not at all all that easy to make in other ways at the time.
And of course, if he is operating on this level here, and this is much more about the principle of the matter than about the individual, then it becomes virtually irrelevant whether his young lover is really "Fair, kind and true," because we then understand that this is what Shakespeare's ideal love, or idol, is, or would be, if he existed, which then makes this poem rather more about the poet and how he loves and sees the world, than directly about anything as mundane as his actual lover – and I hope you do notice my own note of irony in this very last sentence, because of course I know that one's real actual lover is anything but 'mundane'...
It is this not a difficult, nor otherwise particularly problematic poem, at least not on the surface. It seems easy enough to understand, and although we can never, with Shakespeare, be entirely certain that we get every layer of meaning and all the references, the play with words it entails and the nods it makes to other contexts seem to be fairly obvious and fairly obviously imbued with a nonetheless subtle irony.
As with many of these sonnets, we may ask ourselves to begin with: what brings it on? Is this a response to someone making a remark towards Shakespeare about his love, or perhaps to some pamphleteer writing about Shakespeare and his lover? This is entirely possible, but it would also be sheer speculation on our part to suggest so.
The sonnet belongs to the last major group or 'zone' of the Fair Youth Sonnets, encompassing Sonnets 104 to 126, which several scholars, though with varying degrees of confidence, believe may have been composed later than the majority of the others that deal with this relationship, and while nothing in the poem itself gives us any clues as to when exactly it may have been written, it follows Sonnet 104, which, as we saw, sets the much discussed time frame of three years, and it references, as we just noted above, Sonnet 76 in particular which, like this poem, makes a point of emphasising the great number and the repetitious nature of these sonnets to, for, and about the young man.
This, if nothing else, supports our impression – gained over an extensive stretch of sonnets now and expressed on multiple occasions – that these sonnets are indeed all or mostly written to, for, and about the same young man, and not, as some editors and scholars have suggested, to a whole range of them, and that the relationship with this young man stretches over several years; three at least, quite possibly by now a bit longer.
The irony, such as it is, stems from this circumstance. If our contention that we are, as we believe we are, and as Shakespeare says we are, always talking about the same young man, then we know for as certain as we can know anything that he, this young man, is not in any sense that we would recognise "Fair, kind and true."
He is, if we are to believe our poet, certainly 'fair' – always as in 'beautiful' – and he may or may not be to varying degrees and at varying times also 'kind'. Chances certainly are that he can be absolutely lovely, the evidence for this being mostly that Shakespeare says so too, and that it would be extremely difficult to believe that a man of William Shakespeare's encompassing understanding of humans could be so smitten for so long by someone who turns out to be entirely unkind and wholly superficial. The only way this relationship over this period can make sense is if – and for this there are many good indications – his young man is a complex and in some ways perhaps also conflicted character who oscillates between being totally adorable to acting at times like a conceited, selfish clot, shall we say, so as to avoid having to deploy another insult beginning with c that especially to our North American friends and listeners might sound unpalatably offensive.
This latter we can infer from what Shakespeare tells us about his love's conduct in several of these sonnets, especially of course around the affair his young lover is having with Shakespeare's own mistress, of all people, in Sonnets 33 to 42, and about his anxiety in view of his behaviour and the company he is keeping when they are apart from each other in Sonnets 48, and 57 & 58, for example, and about the young man's reputation in the world in Sonnet 69, although, as we have seen, in Sonnet 70 he then once again absolves him of any wrongdoing.
Shakespeare being no fool, we can safely assume that he does this consciously. He knows that we know – because he tells us in this collection of poems – that his love, whom he idolises in this three-times expressed three-fold deification, is of these three things that he calls him one thing at best, one thing we would hope and believe in parts and at times, and one thing not really at all.
Either this, or, and here lies a rather thrilling new avenue of consideration, his young man has not only grown up a bit, as we saw in Sonnet 104, but also matured and changed. We can't and mustn't rule out the possibility that a shift has taken place and that the young man has been showing himself lately as, indeed, not only beautiful – still as beautiful to Shakespeare as he was when they first met, so Sonnet 104 assures him and us – but also as kindhearted and loyal, faithful, true. At least to the extent a young nobleman in late Elizabethan, possibly early Jacobean England can be faithful and true to his somewhat older male lover.
If this were the case, then the last line of this sonnet would acquire an interesting new dimension. We could then feel justified, more than justified, invited, to read it not as 'these three qualities have not lived in one person until you came along', which in any case, no matter how we look at it, is hyperbolic and patently untrue, but as 'these three qualities have not until now, this time in our relationship, found seat in one', meaning therefore that it has not until just now or very recently been the case that you, my gorgeous young man, have been all these three things in one: beautiful, kind, and also true.
We cannot know if this reading has any foundation in factuality, because we do not know what really brought on this sonnet, when exactly it was actually written, and whether Shakespeare is being subtly ironic in the sense that he knows he is presenting his love to us finer than he really is or in the sense that only now, after all this time, and when the outward beauty of his young man has already started to show signs of waning, these three qualities, so precious, so sought after, find themselves finally at home in his young lover.
Which then leaves us with the question, still, why the religious and in Shakespeare's day potentially really rather risky reference? And the answer is simply: we don't know. All manner of speculative explanations have been offered, ranging from the possibility of a hidden snipe at either the Catholic Church, or at the then still very newly Reformed Church of England, right through to Shakespeare here alluding to the classical Greek, and specifically Platonic, ideal of 'the Good, the True, and the Beautiful'.
And this is certainly not something we would be wise to put past him: we know Shakespeare has a classical education, and we know from the references in his plays that he was deeply influenced by classical literature, by the Renaissance, and by Neoplatonic thinking. And if you find yourself in a relationship that may or may not be as we understand it 'Platonic', but that in such a classical Neoplatonic philosophical framework can be celebrated and lived, whereas in a Christian context it is seen as sinful, even abominable, then toying with these concepts in a manner that would be understood by those around you who have eyes and ears for the subtleties of religious and philosophical symbolism would both make sense and be, for a poet of the day, enjoyable and fruitful, in so far as it allows him to make a skilful poetical point that is not at all all that easy to make in other ways at the time.
And of course, if he is operating on this level here, and this is much more about the principle of the matter than about the individual, then it becomes virtually irrelevant whether his young lover is really "Fair, kind and true," because we then understand that this is what Shakespeare's ideal love, or idol, is, or would be, if he existed, which then makes this poem rather more about the poet and how he loves and sees the world, than directly about anything as mundane as his actual lover – and I hope you do notice my own note of irony in this very last sentence, because of course I know that one's real actual lover is anything but 'mundane'...
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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!