Sonnet 107: Not Mine Own Fears, Nor the Prophetic Soul
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Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now, with the drops of this most balmy time, My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes, Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults ore dull and speechless tribes. And thou in this shalt find thy monument When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. |
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LISTEN TO SONNETCAST EPISODE 107
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Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, |
Neither my own fears nor the intuition or speculations of the world generally about what may come to pass...
Shakespeare with these opening lines makes it clear that both he personally, and the world at large had reason to be fearful about some events that were foretold in the future. This straight away anchors the sonnet in a global, as in 'real world'. 'Prophetic soul' as editors generally point out, is used famously by Hamlet in Act I, Scene 5, of his eponymous play, when he hears from the Ghost of his murdered father and king that the perpetrator of this most heinous of crimes is his father's brother and thus finds his own grave and doubts misgivings about his uncle and new stepfather confirmed: GHOST But know thou, noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father's life Now wears his crown. HAMLET O my prophetic soul! My uncle. GHOST Aye, that adulterous and incestuous beast... 'Wide world', here as so often in these sonnets is really the world he inhabits, which is principally that of London society, and therefore by extension England. 'Dreaming' meanwhile, here simply means to speculate or imagine things, rather than, as we would today use it, wishing on them to happen or to come about. In fact, in the context of this sonnet, it has quite the opposite meaning of wishing or longing for things to happen, it denotes here things that are feared might happen. |
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Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. |
...can as yet or in spite of themselves curtail the duration of my true love which has been supposed or suggested to fall forfeit to a time-delimited ending.
In other words: all my own fears and everyone's dread about what was going to happen have turned out to be unfounded and my true love, which was meant to become the penalty for some wrongdoing and be brought to a tragically early end will now in fact continue and live on. For 'lease' to mean 'duration' we need look no further than the famous Sonnet 18: "And summer's lease hath all too short a date," and 'doom' we've also come across before, in Sonnets 14 and 55, whereas its most famous instance is now only a few poems away; it comes in Sonnet 116 which asserts that true love is not subject to the vagaries of time: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks But bears it out even to the edge of doom. In all these cases, 'doom' carries both the portentous character of an impending Doomsday, but also, more prosaically, that simply of death. The use of 'forfeit' here – as opposed to, say, 'victim' – is significant, as it strongly infers a penalty or fine, something that is being surrendered in consequence of some wrongdoing or crime, and a 'confined doom' readily offers an equally valid reading of something or someone being literally confined, as in held or imprisoned, there awaiting their end, which in the case of a person would be death. This latter reading becomes doubly relevant if 'my true love' is read not as 'my sincere and faithful emotion for the person I love' but as 'the person I truly love' themselves. Shakespeare uses 'true love' to mean both, more often to describe the emotion, but also to mean the person so loved, poignantly, for example, in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet wakes up from her drug-induced slumber and finds her Romeo lying next to her, having killed himself in despair at finding her supposedly dead: " What's here? A cup closed in my true love's hand? Poison, I see hath been his timeless end. (Act V, Scene 3) If this is what Shakespeare is doing here, and he is referring to his true love having been 'supposed' to find his end while in prison, then this opens up a particularly interesting dimension, which we also shall explore further, of course, in a moment. ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP doom rhymes with come in a short 'dum' sound. |
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The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage, |
Someone or something that is or can be symbolised as a 'mortal moon' has been eclipsed, and all those people who have made these pessimistic predictions about what the consequences of this event would be now have to concede that they were wrong.
Here too, we will discuss the possible meanings of "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured" in detail in a moment, since it marks the central event on which hinges the whole sonnet. On its own, the line does not explain itself, it simply states that this greatly significant event has occurred and the prophets of doom who predicted grave upheaval as a result of it are now having to eat their words. Whether these augurs are 'sad' because they were wrong, or because the event in itself that has happened is inherently sad, or whether their sadness refers to their 'presage', for which read 'prophecy', because it was so gloomy, is not clearly determined either, and that may in fact be entirely intentional, as all three may to some greater or lesser degree apply. |
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Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age. |
The uncertainties about what is going to happen that have previously prevailed now turn themselves into firmly and rightfully established assurances, and the peace which has come about as a result of this newly settled situation announces its intention to last forever.
'Incertainties' are simply 'uncertainties' and you will find some editors 'modernise' the spelling, to my mind unnecessarily. 'Olives' then as now are a universal symbol of peace, and so for peace to proclaim 'olives' or 'olive branches' suggests really that the peace that is now in place, and significantly the person or institution who brings about this peace, is promising to hold and offer this peace to the world in eternity or at least for as long as they can, and for this peace therefore to last an 'endless age'. This, together with the precisely placed 'crown' as a verb further guides us towards understanding the symbolism contained in this sonnet, as we shall shortly see. |
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Now, with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes, |
Now, in this warm and pleasant time, my love newly looks fresh again, and death submits to me, rather than I to him, as I and we all expected – death here once more being personified.
On its own, the expression 'drops of this most balmy time' does not seem to offer an immediate sense other than perhaps the 'dew drops' of a fresh spring morning or similar. But in the context of everything else that seems to be alluded to, and especially following the word 'crown' above, the phrase acquires a potential reference to a time when drops of balm are used, which is at the time of a new king or queen's coronation, and that too, may yet be of the greatest possible significance, which is why this sonnet, perhaps uniquely, asks for a whole second round of interpretation under the light of certain conclusions or inferences that may be drawn from it. |
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Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme
While he insults ore dull and speechless tribes. |
...because in spite of him – death – I will now live on in this 'poor rhyme' of mine, in these verses that I keep on writing for you, while he, death, goes away and gloats or triumphs over other people, people who are illiterate and dull, as in not mentally agile or capable enough to bother with writing verses, even 'poor ones' such as mine.
Shakespeare self-deprecates his writing as 'poor' a couple of times before now in these sonnets, and to varying degrees convincingly: in the genuinely apologetic Sonnet 26 he speaks of "wit so poor as mine," which there comes across as quite sincere, but soon after, in Sonnet 32 he rather more ironically refers to his verses as "these poor rude lines." 'Ore' is how the Quarto Edition often spells what today is mostly rendered as o'er, meaning 'over', and since I dislike unnecessary apostrophising, I embrace the original spelling here. And this is the only time in the sonnets that we hear the word 'tribe'. Shakespeare in his works generally uses it as we do to mean a certain ethnic or cultural group of people, but he also uses it as a somewhat disparaging term for groups of people that he or the character he writes doesn't approve of, as in "all the tribes of hell" in the words of Iago in Othello (Act I, Scene 3), or Edmund speaking of a "tribe of fops" in King Lear. (Act I, Scene 2) |
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And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. |
And you shall find in this – meaning this sonnet specifically, and my many verses that I have been writing and am now able to continue to write for you generally – your monument, and this monument will last beyond the crests of tyrants – meaning the coats of arms of even the fiercest rulers – and the brass plates or decorations adorning the tombs of the powerful and wealthy.
This is a sentiment expressed many times before: my verse will outlast all these trappings of material and stately might, whereby here the use of the term 'tyrants' may be both generically illustrative of even those who hold on to their power most enviously and cruelly, and it may also be a direct and pointed dig at a 'tyrant' whose crest is about to be or has in fact just now recently been well and truly spent, because they passed away... |
Of all the poems in the collection first published in 1609, Sonnet 107 most clearly and most compellingly seems to refer to external events that shape Shakespeare's world.
Because of this, it takes up a pivotal position in the canon, since it may therein hold clues to both its date of composition and to the person it is addressed to. And while there is little doubt in most people's mind that its references are intentional and allude to some momentous occasion that has passed off signally better than anyone at the time would have predicted, and that in the ensuing calm and peace our poet feels that his love and his poetry have been given a new lease of life, no-one can tell with absolute certainty just what Shakespeare is actually referring to or whom he is talking to, or even whether the two factors are directly or only indirectly linked, or not at all.
There are, however, significant clues, and so much of our discussion of this sonnet will concern itself with what these are and what they mean for our reading of this and the other sonnets in the series.
The core of this sonnet is its central quatrain:
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
The first and entirely crucial question therefore is: who or what is the 'mortal moon' and how hath she her 'eclipse endured'. Everything else follows on from that.
Editors with greater or lesser degrees of patience point to the plausible explanations, and they boil down to principally five:
1 – The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Spanish ships in this maritime assault approached England through the English Channel in a defensive crescent formation, which may be reminiscent of the moon, and it would be possible to say that this 'moon' thus endured its eclipse at the hands of the English naval force who scored an astonishing victory against some considerable odds.
There are two major problems with this theory though. The first is that this puts the date of the sonnet unfeasibly early: in 1588, Shakespeare is only 24 years old, and we don't actually know where exactly he is at the time, because he's no longer in Stratford, but he's not yet in London, at least not as far as we know, although he may of course be in London without us knowing it, but he first gets mentioned there in 1592, but in any case nobody seriously suggests that the bulk of these sonnets was written as early as the late 1580s. And secondly, although Spain was known to be an adversarial power, nobody really had made any such grave predictions about the outcome of any Spanish attack, should it materialise, as it then did.
2 – The actual lunar eclipse of 1595. In terms of its date, this no longer now poses such a big problem, as many of the other sonnets in the collection could and would have been written by then, but although big astrological events were seen as potentially portentous, little else in the sonnet ties in with such a literal report, and also the notion of the actual moon being 'mortal', even in a metaphorical sense, is something of a stretch.
3 – The 'grand climacteric' of the Queen in 1595-6. In classical astrology, a person's climacteric years, from the Greek term klimaktērikós whence we get our 'climax', occur every heptad, or every seven years: these are meant to be particularly significant junctures at which important developments occur or life stages are achieved, and the 63rd year, which marks the end of the 9th cycle of seven, and is therefore called the 'grand climacteric', is seen in this context as especially critical.
'Mortal moon' may well refer to Queen Elizabeth I: with her long-lasting reign she – who as a woman at the time would have been considered the weaker sex and susceptible to the phases of the lunar cycle – proved to be a dependable and steady presence in the political firmament of state; with her virginal aura, she drew comparisons to the chaste Diana, goddess of, among many other things, the Moon, and her increasingly iconic, white-painted face further evoked our Earth's pale satellite. And she was indeed quite mortal.
But while the first, and perhaps to some limited extent even the second line of this middle quatrain would here make sense, and the time frame be acceptable, the next two lines, citing 'incertainties' which 'crown themselves assured' and a 'peace' that proclaims 'olives of endless age' no longer really fit.
4 – A rumoured illness of the Queen in 1599-1600. This would also see the 'mortal moon' as Queen Elizabeth I, and the 'sad augurs' predicting that such a phase would end badly for queen and country might well mock their own presage following her supposed 'recovery', not least since the rumours actually turned out to be false. Therein too lies the idea's weakness, together with the ones it shares with the previous ones: none of the rest of the sonnet supports it.
5 – The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. This demands that we read 'endured' not as 'has gone through and come out at the other end intact', but as 'has gone through full stop – it has now happened'. And then the rest quickly and really rather conveniently falls into place, though not without causing its own not entirely minor complication, as we shall see.
All three major editions that I refer to for this podcast – John Kerrigan's New Penguin, Colin Burrow's Oxford, and Katherine Duncan-Jones' Arden Shakespeare – agree that this last explanation is the strongest, least indefensible, and therefore most plausible one, and I am fully inclined to concur.
Here is why:
For William Shakespeare to refer to Queen Elizabeth I as 'the mortal moon' that now 'hath her eclipse endured', is entirely in character: it's a beautiful, dignified, somewhat mysterious, not entirely obvious, but easily enough understood, evocative, serene metaphor laden with multiple layers of symbolism and meaning. Just what Shakespeare loves to use and infuse his poetry with.
Importantly: there were great and well documented fears about what would happen after the Queen's death. She never married, she never had children, and so she left behind no heir to the throne. And that's arguably the first task of anyone who is or is going to be sovereign in a hereditary monarchy: produce an heir, and ideally a spare. Which is why royal families to this day ache to produce at least two children. Up until and including the current and next generation, King Charles III and his children, in England this had to be boy. It is only with the generation born after 2011, that's the children of Prince William and Prince Harry, that girls can inherit the throne in line of their birth, rather than boys being given precedence.
Queen Elizabeth I not only left behind no boys, she left behind no children at all, and this was one of the greatest concerns for the nation at the time because if there is no clear successor to the throne, then there may be great upheaval: there may be power struggles, there may even be civil war.
None of this came about. At least not for another generation. The 'sad augurs' who had predicted as much were proved wrong. The person who acceded to the throne was King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a cousin to Queen Elizabeth I, which makes him a first cousin twice removed to the Queen of England and thus gives him a rightful claim to the throne in the absence of anyone closer to her.
With him and his coronation in July 1603, the 'incertainties' attendant on the succession of a childless queen most certainly and in his case quite literally 'crowned' themselves assured, and James who now also became King James I of England as well as King James VI of Scotland explicitly and strongly did actually proclaim his intention to make and keep peace: within the island of Great Britain between the now to be unified two countries of England and Scotland, but also with the erstwhile arch foe, Spain. After virtually uninterrupted wars for the best part of a quarter century, a period of comparative peace began. Not quite 'endless', but nonetheless welcome.
The third quatrain of the sonnet then goes on to tell us:
Now, with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults ore dull and speechless tribes.
And as we hinted earlier, the 'drops of this most balmy time' can now be read in the context of a newly embalmed king. Embalming is a central element to a sovereign's coronation to this date.
But a balm is also what you use to heal wounds, as the Old Testament suggests in the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 8, Verse 22:
Is there no balm in Gilead,
Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no recovery
For the health of the daughter of my people?
A question which John Newton in his hymn, first penned in 1779, and turned into a hauntingly beautiful jazz classic by Nina Simone answers with:
There is balm in Gilead,
To make the wounded whole;
and after much political and religious strife, the newly Jacobean England was certainly wounded and in need of healing.
What of William Shakespeare's 'own fears' though? Are they purely concerned with the affairs of the nation? And why would his love look fresh now, with this newly soothing era?
It so happens that one of the principal candidates for Shakespeare's young lover, the young man of these Fair Youth Sonnets, was in prison at the time of the Queen's death. Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. He had been arrested and sentenced to death for his participation in the failed coup attempt by the hapless Earl of Essex two years earlier, in 1601, and while the Earl of Essex and some other conspirators were executed, Henry Wriothesley received the benefit of clemency and spent time in the Tower of London, awaiting his fate.
This changed categorically with the Queen's death: one of the first things the new King did was release him and several others from prison and reinstate him at court and in parliament. And so if Henry Wriothesley is the young man, then it is true in more sense than one to say that Shakespeare's love 'looks fresh' and that death, which had been waiting in the wings for his lover whose sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, has to go and bother some other people for a while now, because he is allowed to live on and so Shakespeare is allowed to continue to write sonnets for and to him and thus live on in his 'poor' rhyme.
This would also tie up the first quatrain:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
If Shakespeare is referring to his lover who has been held in prison here, then he would have every reason to have had fears of his own about the outcome of this period. And the lease of life of his love would really have been supposed to be the forfeit to a confined doom.
And even the closing couplet thus not only makes sense but proves to be true:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
The monument made to the young man with these verses stands, lives, breathes, in our reading and reciting these sonnets, and while it can't be said that Queen Elizabeth I is or will soon be forgotten, nor that her crests or all the trappings of power or her tomb are by now 'spent', as in eroded and dismantled and by time erased, there is little doubt that Shakespeare's poetry will outlast most if not all physical evidence of the kings and queens of England, whether they be tyrants or no.
And would Shakespeare really here refer to the recently deceased Queen of England as a 'tyrant'? That's hard to say: 'tyrant' for him has much the same meaning as it has for us. It is not a flattering term, and if he is keeping the now late Queen in mind as he says this, then that puts a strong slant indeed on his attitude to the former monarch. That said, she was a formidable woman, the Queen of England, and her reign in many respects was little if anything short of tyrannical. As Jenny Holzer declared in 1982: "ABUSE OF POWR COMES AS NO SURPRISE." That was a truism then, it is true now, it was certainly true in the time of Shakespeare.
How sure though can we be that this interpretation of Sonnet 107 is even vaguely, let alone largely correct? To varying degrees. While editors seem fairly convinced by the argument for the event being the Queen's death, they take more divergent views on the notion that the sonnet also directly refers to his lover's actual imprisonment. Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition practically ridicules it with a remark that comes perilously close to sounding just snide, whereas both John Kerrigan and Katherine Duncan-Jones are certainly willing to entertain it and find it plausible at the very least, though nobody can say it is certainly so, because we simply don't know.
What we do know is that read in this way, the sonnet makes sense, and with these occurrences, it then strongly favours Henry Wriothesley as the Fair Youth.
And herein lies the complication mentioned earlier: while the sonnet – read in this way and entirely plausibly – thus favours Wriothesley, the timing that comes with this reading really doesn't. If the sonnet refers to the death of the Queen, it must have been written after 24th March 1603, if it refers to Wriothesley's release from prison too, then after 10th April of the same year.
By this time, Henry Wriothesley is nearly 30 and long since married to Elizabeth Vernon with whom he tied the knot – much to the Queen's outrage at the time, as it happens – in 1598. Which means that there must be at least one, possibly more than one long gap between the earlier sonnets which evidently and manifestly talk to a young unmarried man, and this one. It also brings into question the position and content of Sonnet 104, which we discussed at length only recently, because it comes only three sonnets before this one in the series. Either the three year duration of the relationship therein referred to is really at best symbolic and the relationship has by then lasted quite a bit longer, or there is a long gap also between that sonnet and this one, or this sonnet simply finds itself in the 'wrong' position in the collection.
All of these things are possible, but they require further examination.
And another point for consideration that editors tend to mention is that another candidate for the young man, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, was also briefly imprisoned under Elizabeth I, but he was released as early as 1601, and so while his dates overall would tally better with the late composition of this sonnet – he was born in 1980 and therefore still only 23 in 1603 – the way Shakespeare treats these two events – the renewal and reprieve of his love on the one hand and the eclipse of a mortal moon and its ensuing peace on the other – as entwined speaks rather against him being the person referred to here.
And this on a concluding note merits some emphasis, especially in view of the note of disdain you may detect in some editors' treatment of the 'release from prison' theory: Shakespeare brackets the central event of national importance entirely within the events that appertain to his personal life: this sonnet is no less about the effects the events have on him and his love than about the global events themselves. He starts with "Not mine own fears" and then, in second place, mentions "the wide world," and neither of these can "yet the lease of my true love control:" this is one emphatic sigh of relief about his love not being "forfeit to a confined doom" after all. Then he talks about the events as they, against all predictions, really occurred, and then he gives us an account of what this means for him and his love.
So the idea that he really is talking about his lover and specifically about his lover's imprisonment and release therefrom is far from far fetched: it is completely congruous and consistent with what this sonnet seeks to do, which is to welcome his lover back to where he belongs, right there in Shakespeare's heart and verse, and though it be after some prolonged period of enforced absence.
And what the next three sonnets do is exactly this: they all speak of just such an absence and of the young man, such absence and some really rather questionable conduct on the part of Shakespeare notwithstanding, being for William Shakespeare "my home of love."
Because of this, it takes up a pivotal position in the canon, since it may therein hold clues to both its date of composition and to the person it is addressed to. And while there is little doubt in most people's mind that its references are intentional and allude to some momentous occasion that has passed off signally better than anyone at the time would have predicted, and that in the ensuing calm and peace our poet feels that his love and his poetry have been given a new lease of life, no-one can tell with absolute certainty just what Shakespeare is actually referring to or whom he is talking to, or even whether the two factors are directly or only indirectly linked, or not at all.
There are, however, significant clues, and so much of our discussion of this sonnet will concern itself with what these are and what they mean for our reading of this and the other sonnets in the series.
The core of this sonnet is its central quatrain:
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
The first and entirely crucial question therefore is: who or what is the 'mortal moon' and how hath she her 'eclipse endured'. Everything else follows on from that.
Editors with greater or lesser degrees of patience point to the plausible explanations, and they boil down to principally five:
1 – The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Spanish ships in this maritime assault approached England through the English Channel in a defensive crescent formation, which may be reminiscent of the moon, and it would be possible to say that this 'moon' thus endured its eclipse at the hands of the English naval force who scored an astonishing victory against some considerable odds.
There are two major problems with this theory though. The first is that this puts the date of the sonnet unfeasibly early: in 1588, Shakespeare is only 24 years old, and we don't actually know where exactly he is at the time, because he's no longer in Stratford, but he's not yet in London, at least not as far as we know, although he may of course be in London without us knowing it, but he first gets mentioned there in 1592, but in any case nobody seriously suggests that the bulk of these sonnets was written as early as the late 1580s. And secondly, although Spain was known to be an adversarial power, nobody really had made any such grave predictions about the outcome of any Spanish attack, should it materialise, as it then did.
2 – The actual lunar eclipse of 1595. In terms of its date, this no longer now poses such a big problem, as many of the other sonnets in the collection could and would have been written by then, but although big astrological events were seen as potentially portentous, little else in the sonnet ties in with such a literal report, and also the notion of the actual moon being 'mortal', even in a metaphorical sense, is something of a stretch.
3 – The 'grand climacteric' of the Queen in 1595-6. In classical astrology, a person's climacteric years, from the Greek term klimaktērikós whence we get our 'climax', occur every heptad, or every seven years: these are meant to be particularly significant junctures at which important developments occur or life stages are achieved, and the 63rd year, which marks the end of the 9th cycle of seven, and is therefore called the 'grand climacteric', is seen in this context as especially critical.
'Mortal moon' may well refer to Queen Elizabeth I: with her long-lasting reign she – who as a woman at the time would have been considered the weaker sex and susceptible to the phases of the lunar cycle – proved to be a dependable and steady presence in the political firmament of state; with her virginal aura, she drew comparisons to the chaste Diana, goddess of, among many other things, the Moon, and her increasingly iconic, white-painted face further evoked our Earth's pale satellite. And she was indeed quite mortal.
But while the first, and perhaps to some limited extent even the second line of this middle quatrain would here make sense, and the time frame be acceptable, the next two lines, citing 'incertainties' which 'crown themselves assured' and a 'peace' that proclaims 'olives of endless age' no longer really fit.
4 – A rumoured illness of the Queen in 1599-1600. This would also see the 'mortal moon' as Queen Elizabeth I, and the 'sad augurs' predicting that such a phase would end badly for queen and country might well mock their own presage following her supposed 'recovery', not least since the rumours actually turned out to be false. Therein too lies the idea's weakness, together with the ones it shares with the previous ones: none of the rest of the sonnet supports it.
5 – The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. This demands that we read 'endured' not as 'has gone through and come out at the other end intact', but as 'has gone through full stop – it has now happened'. And then the rest quickly and really rather conveniently falls into place, though not without causing its own not entirely minor complication, as we shall see.
All three major editions that I refer to for this podcast – John Kerrigan's New Penguin, Colin Burrow's Oxford, and Katherine Duncan-Jones' Arden Shakespeare – agree that this last explanation is the strongest, least indefensible, and therefore most plausible one, and I am fully inclined to concur.
Here is why:
For William Shakespeare to refer to Queen Elizabeth I as 'the mortal moon' that now 'hath her eclipse endured', is entirely in character: it's a beautiful, dignified, somewhat mysterious, not entirely obvious, but easily enough understood, evocative, serene metaphor laden with multiple layers of symbolism and meaning. Just what Shakespeare loves to use and infuse his poetry with.
Importantly: there were great and well documented fears about what would happen after the Queen's death. She never married, she never had children, and so she left behind no heir to the throne. And that's arguably the first task of anyone who is or is going to be sovereign in a hereditary monarchy: produce an heir, and ideally a spare. Which is why royal families to this day ache to produce at least two children. Up until and including the current and next generation, King Charles III and his children, in England this had to be boy. It is only with the generation born after 2011, that's the children of Prince William and Prince Harry, that girls can inherit the throne in line of their birth, rather than boys being given precedence.
Queen Elizabeth I not only left behind no boys, she left behind no children at all, and this was one of the greatest concerns for the nation at the time because if there is no clear successor to the throne, then there may be great upheaval: there may be power struggles, there may even be civil war.
None of this came about. At least not for another generation. The 'sad augurs' who had predicted as much were proved wrong. The person who acceded to the throne was King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a cousin to Queen Elizabeth I, which makes him a first cousin twice removed to the Queen of England and thus gives him a rightful claim to the throne in the absence of anyone closer to her.
With him and his coronation in July 1603, the 'incertainties' attendant on the succession of a childless queen most certainly and in his case quite literally 'crowned' themselves assured, and James who now also became King James I of England as well as King James VI of Scotland explicitly and strongly did actually proclaim his intention to make and keep peace: within the island of Great Britain between the now to be unified two countries of England and Scotland, but also with the erstwhile arch foe, Spain. After virtually uninterrupted wars for the best part of a quarter century, a period of comparative peace began. Not quite 'endless', but nonetheless welcome.
The third quatrain of the sonnet then goes on to tell us:
Now, with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults ore dull and speechless tribes.
And as we hinted earlier, the 'drops of this most balmy time' can now be read in the context of a newly embalmed king. Embalming is a central element to a sovereign's coronation to this date.
But a balm is also what you use to heal wounds, as the Old Testament suggests in the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 8, Verse 22:
Is there no balm in Gilead,
Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no recovery
For the health of the daughter of my people?
A question which John Newton in his hymn, first penned in 1779, and turned into a hauntingly beautiful jazz classic by Nina Simone answers with:
There is balm in Gilead,
To make the wounded whole;
and after much political and religious strife, the newly Jacobean England was certainly wounded and in need of healing.
What of William Shakespeare's 'own fears' though? Are they purely concerned with the affairs of the nation? And why would his love look fresh now, with this newly soothing era?
It so happens that one of the principal candidates for Shakespeare's young lover, the young man of these Fair Youth Sonnets, was in prison at the time of the Queen's death. Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. He had been arrested and sentenced to death for his participation in the failed coup attempt by the hapless Earl of Essex two years earlier, in 1601, and while the Earl of Essex and some other conspirators were executed, Henry Wriothesley received the benefit of clemency and spent time in the Tower of London, awaiting his fate.
This changed categorically with the Queen's death: one of the first things the new King did was release him and several others from prison and reinstate him at court and in parliament. And so if Henry Wriothesley is the young man, then it is true in more sense than one to say that Shakespeare's love 'looks fresh' and that death, which had been waiting in the wings for his lover whose sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, has to go and bother some other people for a while now, because he is allowed to live on and so Shakespeare is allowed to continue to write sonnets for and to him and thus live on in his 'poor' rhyme.
This would also tie up the first quatrain:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
If Shakespeare is referring to his lover who has been held in prison here, then he would have every reason to have had fears of his own about the outcome of this period. And the lease of life of his love would really have been supposed to be the forfeit to a confined doom.
And even the closing couplet thus not only makes sense but proves to be true:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
The monument made to the young man with these verses stands, lives, breathes, in our reading and reciting these sonnets, and while it can't be said that Queen Elizabeth I is or will soon be forgotten, nor that her crests or all the trappings of power or her tomb are by now 'spent', as in eroded and dismantled and by time erased, there is little doubt that Shakespeare's poetry will outlast most if not all physical evidence of the kings and queens of England, whether they be tyrants or no.
And would Shakespeare really here refer to the recently deceased Queen of England as a 'tyrant'? That's hard to say: 'tyrant' for him has much the same meaning as it has for us. It is not a flattering term, and if he is keeping the now late Queen in mind as he says this, then that puts a strong slant indeed on his attitude to the former monarch. That said, she was a formidable woman, the Queen of England, and her reign in many respects was little if anything short of tyrannical. As Jenny Holzer declared in 1982: "ABUSE OF POWR COMES AS NO SURPRISE." That was a truism then, it is true now, it was certainly true in the time of Shakespeare.
How sure though can we be that this interpretation of Sonnet 107 is even vaguely, let alone largely correct? To varying degrees. While editors seem fairly convinced by the argument for the event being the Queen's death, they take more divergent views on the notion that the sonnet also directly refers to his lover's actual imprisonment. Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition practically ridicules it with a remark that comes perilously close to sounding just snide, whereas both John Kerrigan and Katherine Duncan-Jones are certainly willing to entertain it and find it plausible at the very least, though nobody can say it is certainly so, because we simply don't know.
What we do know is that read in this way, the sonnet makes sense, and with these occurrences, it then strongly favours Henry Wriothesley as the Fair Youth.
And herein lies the complication mentioned earlier: while the sonnet – read in this way and entirely plausibly – thus favours Wriothesley, the timing that comes with this reading really doesn't. If the sonnet refers to the death of the Queen, it must have been written after 24th March 1603, if it refers to Wriothesley's release from prison too, then after 10th April of the same year.
By this time, Henry Wriothesley is nearly 30 and long since married to Elizabeth Vernon with whom he tied the knot – much to the Queen's outrage at the time, as it happens – in 1598. Which means that there must be at least one, possibly more than one long gap between the earlier sonnets which evidently and manifestly talk to a young unmarried man, and this one. It also brings into question the position and content of Sonnet 104, which we discussed at length only recently, because it comes only three sonnets before this one in the series. Either the three year duration of the relationship therein referred to is really at best symbolic and the relationship has by then lasted quite a bit longer, or there is a long gap also between that sonnet and this one, or this sonnet simply finds itself in the 'wrong' position in the collection.
All of these things are possible, but they require further examination.
And another point for consideration that editors tend to mention is that another candidate for the young man, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, was also briefly imprisoned under Elizabeth I, but he was released as early as 1601, and so while his dates overall would tally better with the late composition of this sonnet – he was born in 1980 and therefore still only 23 in 1603 – the way Shakespeare treats these two events – the renewal and reprieve of his love on the one hand and the eclipse of a mortal moon and its ensuing peace on the other – as entwined speaks rather against him being the person referred to here.
And this on a concluding note merits some emphasis, especially in view of the note of disdain you may detect in some editors' treatment of the 'release from prison' theory: Shakespeare brackets the central event of national importance entirely within the events that appertain to his personal life: this sonnet is no less about the effects the events have on him and his love than about the global events themselves. He starts with "Not mine own fears" and then, in second place, mentions "the wide world," and neither of these can "yet the lease of my true love control:" this is one emphatic sigh of relief about his love not being "forfeit to a confined doom" after all. Then he talks about the events as they, against all predictions, really occurred, and then he gives us an account of what this means for him and his love.
So the idea that he really is talking about his lover and specifically about his lover's imprisonment and release therefrom is far from far fetched: it is completely congruous and consistent with what this sonnet seeks to do, which is to welcome his lover back to where he belongs, right there in Shakespeare's heart and verse, and though it be after some prolonged period of enforced absence.
And what the next three sonnets do is exactly this: they all speak of just such an absence and of the young man, such absence and some really rather questionable conduct on the part of Shakespeare notwithstanding, being for William Shakespeare "my home of love."
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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!