Sonnet 108: What's in the Brain That Ink May Character
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What's in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit? What's new to speak, what now to register That may express my love or thy dear merit? Nothing, sweet boy, but yet, like prayers divine, I must each day say ore the very same, Counting no old thing old – thou mine, I thine – Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name, So that eternal love in love's fresh case Weighs not the dust and injury of age, Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place, But makes antiquity for aye his page, Finding the first conceit of love there bred Where time and outward form would show it dead. |
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What's in the brain that ink may character,
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit? |
What is there in the brain – for which read what is there that anyone could think of – that may be written down in ink, which has not already portrayed or shown my true spirit to you; in other words, what else is there that could be written down to show you my genuine feelings for you.
'Character' is a verb here, meaning 'to write' or 'to inscribe'. We have come across 'character' to refer to 'writing' before, in Sonnet 59: "Since mind at first in character was done," and in Sonnet 85: "Reserve their character with golden quill." And the verb 'to figure' here means to portray or to represent. |
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What's new to speak, what now to register
That may express my love or thy dear merit? |
What is there new that can be said or that can now for the first time be recorded in writing that may express my love for you or your cherished qualities?
The questions are both rhetorical, of course, since the answer is: |
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Nothing, sweet boy, but yet, like prayers divine
I must each day say ore the very same, |
Nothing, my sweet boy, but still, I have to say the same thing over again, every day, just like my daily prayers...
Shakespeare and his contemporaries were very much expected to say prayers both in the morning and in the evening, and while we neither have reason to believe that he was nor that he wasn't following such a daily ritual, it would certainly have been understood by anyone reading or hearing the sonnet at the time that reeling off the same prayers as a matter of routine was part of everyday English life. Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition of The Sonnets points out that this is the only instance in the collection where Shakespeare addresses his young lover as "sweet boy," although he of course makes extensive use of the epithet 'sweet' in many constellations, among them "thy sweet self" right at the beginning, in Sonnets 1 and 4, "thy sweet love" in the famous Sonnet 29, and "sweet love" in Sonnets 63, 76, and 79, to name but these. 'Ore' again simply means 'over': many editors today spell this o'er. PRONUNCIATION: Note that prayers is pronounced as one syllable: pray'rs. |
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Counting no old thing old – thou mine, I thine –
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name, |
...and in doing so – saying the same thing over and over again – I am bound to consider nothing that is old to be old, such as reiterating that you are mine and I am yours, but instead to treat everything as new, just like at the time when I first exalted your beautiful name.
The verb 'hallowed' is in no small measure significant: it directly echoes the Lord's Prayer – possibly the most important prayer in the Christian faith – which begins with the line: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." This religious referencing and deifying of his young lover comes hard on the heels of Sonnet 105 which starts with the line "Let not my love be called idolatry" and then promptly seems to allude to the Holy Trinity. This s then followed by the 'prefiguring' not of Christ, as in the Bible, but of the young man in Sonnet 106, and Shakespeare takes it all a whole step further, into what at the time may well have been considered risky or at the very least provocative territory, so as not to call it near-blasphemy, by effectively setting the young man's name on a par with that of God. PRONUNCIATION: Note that Even here has one syllable: e'en. |
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So that eternal love in love's fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age, |
And I do this – repeat the same thing over and over again while treating everything as new – so that the eternal love that I have for you, when it comes along in this new casing, or expressed in this ever self-renewing form of praise of you, does not 'weigh' as in 'consider' or 'take into consideration' the decay and damage done to a person by old age...
Meaning that the love which is thus newly dressed in new words every day does not look at how the loved person ages and with age slowly disintegrates, whereby 'dust' here is particularly strong and pointed, because a similarly famous line in religious ceremony is the phrase contained in the Book of Common Prayer, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and so Shakespeare here strongly hints at what the 'injury' of age inevitably must lead to: death. |
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Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page, |
...nor does this daily renewal of my love give room to the wrinkles which by necessity start to appear on a loved person's face; instead it makes age and the passing of time its own servant forever, meaning that instead of love succumbing to age and serving time by noticing the effects of age, it lets time serve its unending purpose of adoring the person so being loved...
Some editors want to read "makes antiquity for aye his page" to mean 'makes old age or the passing of time forever the subject of the page it writes on', seeing in this a parallel to the question raised at the beginning about what ink may character. This, however, hardly makes sense, since Shakespeare is neither here nor anywhere else advocating that he or any other poet focus on 'antiquity' in this or any other sense in their writing, unless we draw the interpretation further and assume that he here thinks of antiquity as an 'old' or long lasting love that is then being represented forever as new on the page. And that could then well be an additional intended layer of meaning, though it is this perhaps a bit of a stretch. Still, we probably should not put it past Shakespeare entirely who, as we know, loves his wordplay and his layered meanings. 'For aye' meanwhile, simply means 'forever'. |
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Finding the first conceit of love there bred
Where time and outward form would show it dead. |
...and thus this eternal love in its fresh case is finding the very first conception of love, meaning the way our love was when it was brand new, nurtured and reared in the place where time itself and outward appearance which is affected by time would otherwise show it to be dead by now, that place being the loved person's body.
While it is telling that from the last quatrain onwards, Shakespeare speaks in general terms, no longer referring to his young man directly as he does at the beginning, the implication is of course that he continues to mean him. And this, following Sonnet 104 which closes on the exact same rhyme with the syllables -bred and dead, once more strongly points towards the young man having aged somewhat, or at the very least matured in his appearance and is therefore maybe seeking, or needing, assurance from his poet lover that he, Shakespeare, is willing and able to love him just the same. |
With Sonnet 108, William Shakespeare loops back into sentiments expressed intermittently since Sonnet 76, but particularly again recently in Sonnet 105: I have essentially said it all, there is nothing I can do other than repeat and reiterate and rephrase the praises I have sung and continue to sing for you. What it also picks up from Sonnet 105 is the religious tone this set with a there still fairly oblique reference to the Holy Trinity. This was already amplified, though subtly, in Sonnet 106, and here it finds a whole new level of what may potentially be perceived as impudence, if looked on from a devoutly religious perspective.
What it also does – and this may in some respects for our observation be most directly relevant – is to tell his young lover yet again that he is showing signs of age, but that to him, Shakespeare, this doesn't matter.
Editors are keen to point out that 108 is the number of sonnets contained in the collection of sonnets entitled Astrophil or Astrophel and Stella by Shakespeare's contemporary Sir Philip Sidney. We have mentioned him twice so far in this podcast, once in relation to Sonnet 21, citing his critical essay An Apology for Poetry, and once in relation to Sonnet 94, citing his prose work Arcadia, from which Shakespeare very possibly could have lifted his opening line for that poem. But these two mentions may not quite have done him justice yet, because Sidney was greatly influential on the English and therefore Shakespearean sonnet, and his collection may certainly be said to have helped pave the way for Shakespeare.
Sidney was born in 1554, so ten years before Shakespeare, and he died aged only 31 – as we have seen for a poet a then respectable age, for us today still practically in his youth – from a battle wound sustained while fighting in the Netherlands on the protestant side against England's then arch enemy, catholic Spain. And he was important enough to have his body repatriated and be given a grand funeral at St Paul's Cathedral with a stately procession.
Astrophel and Stella was first published in what is believed to be a pirated edition posthumously in 1591, with a first fully authorised edition following in 1598, but like Shakespeare's sonnets, Sidney's circulated among his friends and London's literary circles in manuscript form long before then, and their date of composition is therefore assumed to lie in the early 1580s. This makes it very possible indeed that Shakespeare may have known of, read, and, like other poets of the time, been inspired by Sidney. Some of these other poets then proceeded to adopt the figure of 108 for their own sonnet sequences, among them Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, who was exactly Sidney's age, but who outlived him by more than forty years. He was a good friend of Sidney's and after his death became Sidney's biographer.
Katherine Duncan-Jones attributes a great deal of significance to the number 108 and considers this poem to be something of a stock-taking sonnet, which I am not overly convinced by, but she then makes an interesting observation, which does, if it is at all founded in fact, add a truly fascinating dimension:
Sonnets 1-17 can be – and generally are – regarded as a self-contained sequence: all of these sonnets, as we saw and discussed, do nothing other than tell a young man to get married and have children: they do not really talk of an active, mutual relationship.
Sonnet 126, as we shall see, takes up a unique position in the collection, because it is left deliberately and signally unfinished.
This means that counting from Sonnet 18 to and including Sonnet 125 we get 108 sonnets: a Sidneian sequence.
She goes one step further though, noting the number of sonnets in the Dark Lady sequence, and this merits quoting directly:
"Though no one has pointed this out before, the figure 28 most probably alludes to the length of the lunar month, which is also that of the female menstrual cycle. In enclosing the great central, Sidneian, sequence of 108 sonnets, between the shorter units of 17 and 28 sonnets, Shakespeare may have created a contrast between the steadfast growth to physical perfection of the young man and the emotional and moral turbulence of the 'dark lady' cycle, with its images of sex-crazed lunacy:..."
Her words, not mine. We cannot know, obviously, whether this is really what Shakespeare is doing here, but we should not underestimate the power and significance of numerology and symbolism in Shakespeare's day, and while we are quoting scholars, let me also cite Duncan-Smith citing another eminent scholar of Renaissance poetry, Thomas P Roche as saying:
"Our main difficulty as readers of sonnet-sequences is that we have not yet learned the rules of the game, have not learned to read beyond the plangent voices of the poet-lovers."
And so while we can't say anything for certain about the significance of the number 108 in this or indeed any other sonnet sequence, a casual research query within seconds throws up a whole gamut of possible references which may or may not have been known to our Elizabethan poets, at least some of whom, though not Shakespeare himself, were also university educated scholars:
The number 108 is sacred in Hinduism, with the number of beads on a traditional prayer necklace or mala counting as many, and it symbolises there, in Hinduism, the union of the individual soul, known as Atman, with the universal soul, known as Brahman.
In Buddhism, 108 is also the number of mala beads on a prayer chain and it is the number of earthly desires a human being must overcome to reach enlightenment.
In astronomy, we find that the distance between the Earth and the Sun – though fluctuating – is roughly 108 times the diameter of the Sun, whereas the distance between the Earth and the Moon – similarly not static – is also roughly 108 times the diameter of the Moon, while in geometry, a pentagon's internal angles measure 108 degrees, the pentagon being a powerful symbol of humanity as a whole and of the golden ratio, among many other things.
Ancient texts apparently frequently refer to the number 108 as one that connects the macrocosm and the microcosm, and indeed in numerology, it consists of the digits 1, 0, and 8, whereby 1 represents oneness or the divine, 0 represents completeness or the void, and 8 represents infinity or eternity, which makes the number 108 one that encapsulates spiritual completion, unity, and infinite potential.
My source for all this, incidentally and should you wonder, is ChatGPT, and if you find that any of it is not accurate, then do please let me know, I shall be happy to correct it.
All of which leaves us with nothing so much as with a distinct possibility that Sidney to start with and then others in emulation, gave meaning and significance to the number 108.
What of the words though: what do the words of Sonnet 108 tell us, because that is, after all, our avowed approach with this podcast, to listen to the words themselves and to hear what they have to say.
The answer: nothing much that's new. Which is why I have allowed myself on this occasion to detour via other, more tangential, considerations. The words themselves, much as the sonnet itself expresses, express mostly what has been expressed before.
But these, in brief, are the elements worth noting:
1 Like other sonnets before this, Sonnet 108 puts an emphasis on the repetitive nature of Shakespeare's own writing, thus making it clear that he understands, as does their recipient, that there are many, many of these sonnets going to the same young man. This strengthens our case for there being one principal young lover, not, as some scholars suggest, several.
2 Like other sonnets before this, Sonnet 108 is unequivocally addressed to a young man, here for the first time as "sweet boy." This strengthens our case for this one principal young lover being a young man. This by now will sound to most of you as stating the blatantly obvious, but you will come across people who argue otherwise. Even today.
3 Like other sonnets before this, Sonnet 108 speaks of a direct reciprocity in the relationship: "thou mine, I thine." This, as on previous occasions, may yet be wishful thinking, but as far as our poet is concerned, the love and devotion is at least to some extent mutual. This strengthens our case for this one young male lover, for all his apparent petulance and philandering, having given and still giving our Will reason to believe that he cares for him greatly too.
4 As other sonnets have done very recently only, most notably Sonnet 104, Sonnet 108 spells out to the young man the signs of age and the unavoidability of death. And it appears to do so with a vector towards the future, suggesting not only that the young man has already changed in his appearance – we ventured he may not so much have grown old as simply grown up – but also that this love, which Shakespeare daily renews in his near-ritual sonneteering, will last until ashes go to ashes and dust goes to dust: until, in other words, death do them part. This is not the first time Shakespeare invokes in these sonnets a quasi-marriage type commitment to his young man, and it most certainly won't be the last, as the rapidly approaching, celebrated and so very often cited and recited Sonnet 116 will show when it speaks of a "marriage of true minds."
5 As particularly Sonnets 105 and 106 have done, Sonnet 108 avails itself of the language and symbolism of religion, specifically the Christian religion, something that at a time of serious religious strife could be considered daring to say the least. But whatever exactly the meaning is of this, it is to us mostly lost: we could pursue all manner of theories, but they would be and remain just that, pure speculation, and none would be conclusive.
Still, if we were to accept Sonnet 107 as referring to the death of Queen Elizabeth I and therefore the commencement of the reign of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, and if we further then assume – in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, reasonably – that Sonnet 108 was composed at around the same time, then we could infer from this more liberal and audacious use of language an at least subconscious, maybe even conscious, relaxation in Shakespeare's stance and position. After all, it is at exactly this time, in 1603, that Shakespeare's company of actors, hitherto known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men and thus already by then well established, become The King's Men: the highest form of patronage available to anyone on the British Isles. And King James was, at least in the very early years of his reign until the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, somewhat less circumspect on matters of religion than his predecessor Queen Elizabeth I. Also, he very openly celebrated what has been termed a 'homosocial' culture at court, and so it is possible that Shakespeare felt at this time in his writing he could be bolder with his use of language than he had been.
And what follows in Sonnets 109 and 110 would to some extent support such a notion: these are the first two sonnets in the canon to openly and very directly give expression to Shakespeare's own infidelities with, as we'll find it to be strongly suggested, not just his mistress, of whom we already know, but also with other young men. And this will not only shine a whole new light onto our poet, but it will also by necessity pose the question: could, everything we noted above notwithstanding, this mean that at least some of these sonnets were written to at least some of these other young men?
To answer this, and many other pertinent questions, we shall, of course, have to look at these next ensuing sonnets very closely indeed...
What it also does – and this may in some respects for our observation be most directly relevant – is to tell his young lover yet again that he is showing signs of age, but that to him, Shakespeare, this doesn't matter.
Editors are keen to point out that 108 is the number of sonnets contained in the collection of sonnets entitled Astrophil or Astrophel and Stella by Shakespeare's contemporary Sir Philip Sidney. We have mentioned him twice so far in this podcast, once in relation to Sonnet 21, citing his critical essay An Apology for Poetry, and once in relation to Sonnet 94, citing his prose work Arcadia, from which Shakespeare very possibly could have lifted his opening line for that poem. But these two mentions may not quite have done him justice yet, because Sidney was greatly influential on the English and therefore Shakespearean sonnet, and his collection may certainly be said to have helped pave the way for Shakespeare.
Sidney was born in 1554, so ten years before Shakespeare, and he died aged only 31 – as we have seen for a poet a then respectable age, for us today still practically in his youth – from a battle wound sustained while fighting in the Netherlands on the protestant side against England's then arch enemy, catholic Spain. And he was important enough to have his body repatriated and be given a grand funeral at St Paul's Cathedral with a stately procession.
Astrophel and Stella was first published in what is believed to be a pirated edition posthumously in 1591, with a first fully authorised edition following in 1598, but like Shakespeare's sonnets, Sidney's circulated among his friends and London's literary circles in manuscript form long before then, and their date of composition is therefore assumed to lie in the early 1580s. This makes it very possible indeed that Shakespeare may have known of, read, and, like other poets of the time, been inspired by Sidney. Some of these other poets then proceeded to adopt the figure of 108 for their own sonnet sequences, among them Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, who was exactly Sidney's age, but who outlived him by more than forty years. He was a good friend of Sidney's and after his death became Sidney's biographer.
Katherine Duncan-Jones attributes a great deal of significance to the number 108 and considers this poem to be something of a stock-taking sonnet, which I am not overly convinced by, but she then makes an interesting observation, which does, if it is at all founded in fact, add a truly fascinating dimension:
Sonnets 1-17 can be – and generally are – regarded as a self-contained sequence: all of these sonnets, as we saw and discussed, do nothing other than tell a young man to get married and have children: they do not really talk of an active, mutual relationship.
Sonnet 126, as we shall see, takes up a unique position in the collection, because it is left deliberately and signally unfinished.
This means that counting from Sonnet 18 to and including Sonnet 125 we get 108 sonnets: a Sidneian sequence.
She goes one step further though, noting the number of sonnets in the Dark Lady sequence, and this merits quoting directly:
"Though no one has pointed this out before, the figure 28 most probably alludes to the length of the lunar month, which is also that of the female menstrual cycle. In enclosing the great central, Sidneian, sequence of 108 sonnets, between the shorter units of 17 and 28 sonnets, Shakespeare may have created a contrast between the steadfast growth to physical perfection of the young man and the emotional and moral turbulence of the 'dark lady' cycle, with its images of sex-crazed lunacy:..."
Her words, not mine. We cannot know, obviously, whether this is really what Shakespeare is doing here, but we should not underestimate the power and significance of numerology and symbolism in Shakespeare's day, and while we are quoting scholars, let me also cite Duncan-Smith citing another eminent scholar of Renaissance poetry, Thomas P Roche as saying:
"Our main difficulty as readers of sonnet-sequences is that we have not yet learned the rules of the game, have not learned to read beyond the plangent voices of the poet-lovers."
And so while we can't say anything for certain about the significance of the number 108 in this or indeed any other sonnet sequence, a casual research query within seconds throws up a whole gamut of possible references which may or may not have been known to our Elizabethan poets, at least some of whom, though not Shakespeare himself, were also university educated scholars:
The number 108 is sacred in Hinduism, with the number of beads on a traditional prayer necklace or mala counting as many, and it symbolises there, in Hinduism, the union of the individual soul, known as Atman, with the universal soul, known as Brahman.
In Buddhism, 108 is also the number of mala beads on a prayer chain and it is the number of earthly desires a human being must overcome to reach enlightenment.
In astronomy, we find that the distance between the Earth and the Sun – though fluctuating – is roughly 108 times the diameter of the Sun, whereas the distance between the Earth and the Moon – similarly not static – is also roughly 108 times the diameter of the Moon, while in geometry, a pentagon's internal angles measure 108 degrees, the pentagon being a powerful symbol of humanity as a whole and of the golden ratio, among many other things.
Ancient texts apparently frequently refer to the number 108 as one that connects the macrocosm and the microcosm, and indeed in numerology, it consists of the digits 1, 0, and 8, whereby 1 represents oneness or the divine, 0 represents completeness or the void, and 8 represents infinity or eternity, which makes the number 108 one that encapsulates spiritual completion, unity, and infinite potential.
My source for all this, incidentally and should you wonder, is ChatGPT, and if you find that any of it is not accurate, then do please let me know, I shall be happy to correct it.
All of which leaves us with nothing so much as with a distinct possibility that Sidney to start with and then others in emulation, gave meaning and significance to the number 108.
What of the words though: what do the words of Sonnet 108 tell us, because that is, after all, our avowed approach with this podcast, to listen to the words themselves and to hear what they have to say.
The answer: nothing much that's new. Which is why I have allowed myself on this occasion to detour via other, more tangential, considerations. The words themselves, much as the sonnet itself expresses, express mostly what has been expressed before.
But these, in brief, are the elements worth noting:
1 Like other sonnets before this, Sonnet 108 puts an emphasis on the repetitive nature of Shakespeare's own writing, thus making it clear that he understands, as does their recipient, that there are many, many of these sonnets going to the same young man. This strengthens our case for there being one principal young lover, not, as some scholars suggest, several.
2 Like other sonnets before this, Sonnet 108 is unequivocally addressed to a young man, here for the first time as "sweet boy." This strengthens our case for this one principal young lover being a young man. This by now will sound to most of you as stating the blatantly obvious, but you will come across people who argue otherwise. Even today.
3 Like other sonnets before this, Sonnet 108 speaks of a direct reciprocity in the relationship: "thou mine, I thine." This, as on previous occasions, may yet be wishful thinking, but as far as our poet is concerned, the love and devotion is at least to some extent mutual. This strengthens our case for this one young male lover, for all his apparent petulance and philandering, having given and still giving our Will reason to believe that he cares for him greatly too.
4 As other sonnets have done very recently only, most notably Sonnet 104, Sonnet 108 spells out to the young man the signs of age and the unavoidability of death. And it appears to do so with a vector towards the future, suggesting not only that the young man has already changed in his appearance – we ventured he may not so much have grown old as simply grown up – but also that this love, which Shakespeare daily renews in his near-ritual sonneteering, will last until ashes go to ashes and dust goes to dust: until, in other words, death do them part. This is not the first time Shakespeare invokes in these sonnets a quasi-marriage type commitment to his young man, and it most certainly won't be the last, as the rapidly approaching, celebrated and so very often cited and recited Sonnet 116 will show when it speaks of a "marriage of true minds."
5 As particularly Sonnets 105 and 106 have done, Sonnet 108 avails itself of the language and symbolism of religion, specifically the Christian religion, something that at a time of serious religious strife could be considered daring to say the least. But whatever exactly the meaning is of this, it is to us mostly lost: we could pursue all manner of theories, but they would be and remain just that, pure speculation, and none would be conclusive.
Still, if we were to accept Sonnet 107 as referring to the death of Queen Elizabeth I and therefore the commencement of the reign of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, and if we further then assume – in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, reasonably – that Sonnet 108 was composed at around the same time, then we could infer from this more liberal and audacious use of language an at least subconscious, maybe even conscious, relaxation in Shakespeare's stance and position. After all, it is at exactly this time, in 1603, that Shakespeare's company of actors, hitherto known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men and thus already by then well established, become The King's Men: the highest form of patronage available to anyone on the British Isles. And King James was, at least in the very early years of his reign until the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, somewhat less circumspect on matters of religion than his predecessor Queen Elizabeth I. Also, he very openly celebrated what has been termed a 'homosocial' culture at court, and so it is possible that Shakespeare felt at this time in his writing he could be bolder with his use of language than he had been.
And what follows in Sonnets 109 and 110 would to some extent support such a notion: these are the first two sonnets in the canon to openly and very directly give expression to Shakespeare's own infidelities with, as we'll find it to be strongly suggested, not just his mistress, of whom we already know, but also with other young men. And this will not only shine a whole new light onto our poet, but it will also by necessity pose the question: could, everything we noted above notwithstanding, this mean that at least some of these sonnets were written to at least some of these other young men?
To answer this, and many other pertinent questions, we shall, of course, have to look at these next ensuing sonnets very closely indeed...
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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!