Sonnet 110: Alas, 'Tis True, I Have Gone Here and There

Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely; but by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.
Now all is done, have what shall have no end,
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confined.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most, most loving breast.

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Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,

Alas, it is true, I have gone here and there – put myself about – and made myself look like a fool...

Motley is what the clown or the fool wears in the theatre, and also the jester at court – it is, as the word still suggests today, cloth made of differently coloured pieces, and Shakespeare is the first writer to use it as a metonym for the person wearing it.

Shakespeare, as anybody else working in theatre at the time, would of course have been familiar with the figure of the motley fool, but as Colin Burrow in the Oxford Edition points out, this was a highly specialist role – the clown – which is not one that Shakespeare himself played, so the idea put forward by some editors that he may here be directly alluding to his own job as an actor does not readily apply.

What is of great interest and significance though is that he feels he has made himself a fool in the eyes of the world: it reminds us that Shakespeare and his younger lover, are in the public eye: their private affairs are not all that private, let alone secret.

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.

The list of wrongdoings continues: I have blemished my own thoughts, practically given away or certainly undervalued that which is in fact most dear and valuable to me, and I have committed 'old offences' as a result of new affections, meaning I have committed the well known, well trodden sins of desire with people I newly met and liked or even perhaps loved.

Shakespeare's dexterity comes into full play here: 'gored' can mean a) to injure or wound, as in gore with a spear, for example; b) to dress in or furnish with gores, which are triangular pieces of cloth and therefore amount to something very much like motley; c) to dishonour, since in heraldry a gore is a mark of shame given to those who have behaved or conducted themselves dishonourably in battle or contest.

Worth remembering here too is that in Shakespeare's day, thought is associated not just with the head but also, and strongly, with the heart. In Sonnet 69, which speaks of the reputational damage that his young lover has done to himself, Shakespeare tells him:

Those parts of thee that the world's eye doth view
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend,

and so when Shakespeare says that he has thus 'gored' his own 'thoughts' he is talking about his emotional, not his intellectual life.

The notion of selling one's love cheaply or expending emotion on unworthy subjects is one we are still entirely familiar with today, and there may or may not be a deliberate allusion to transactional affairs, though just how literally we may take this remains forever uncertain. The suggestion, if anything, is not that Shakespeare sold his body for money, but that he may have had sexual relations with people who do so or who at any rate will seek some favour in return for sex.

And 'old offences' may, as most editors suggest, simply or mostly refer to the same old infidelities that have always been committed by people, perhaps including him, though it is more than a little likely that Shakespeare here refers to some sexual contact between men. Colin Burrow goes as far as to suggest it may refer specifically to buggery, which was a serious crime at the time punishable by death, of which he says that it was "referred to in the period as 'old-fashioned' love," referencing John Donne's Satire 2, line 7, though this, it has to be said, is in itself somewhat conjectural, as Donne may or man not be as specific in his allusion as that.

'Affections new', meanwhile, and refreshingly simply are new lovers.

Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely,

It is most true that I have looked upon truth – for which read truthfulness or faithfulness, but also perhaps the true facts which entail my relationship with you and my dalliances elsewhere – disdainfully, or obliquely, or also with a sideways glance and acting or behaving as if I didn't know what's what.

Shakespeare has used the word 'strange' or 'strangely' with a similar meaning before; first in Sonnet 49 when he was preparing for such a time as his lover may "strangely pass" and thus behave like a stranger to him, and then again in Sonnet 89 where he told his lover that if that's what he wanted then he, Shakespeare would "acquaintance strangle and look strange," meaning that he will behave like a stranger to him.

but by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.

But, by heaven, these sidelong glances or also these occasions of swerving from the straight and narrow, rejuvenated my heart, and all these tasters or trials or experiments with other, worse or less important lovers only served to prove that you are my best love.

The phrase 'gave my heart another youth' may contain a double meaning that would make sense particularly if 'old offences' has specifically homosexual connotations: another youth may here mean not only that I was given a new, fresh lease of life by my heart being thus rejuvenated, but also that my heart received another young man – perhaps even several – while we were away from each other.

This would also still tie in very well with the idea that these tests or trials of worse lovers confirmed your position as "my best of love," whereby this in itself can mean both, of course, my best lover as well as the person for whom the best of my love is reserved and from whom I also receive the best kind of love, namely, as is implied here and made clear in a moment, a genuine, lasting, and profoundly experienced love, as compared to a series of casual encounters.

Now all is done, have what shall have no end,
Mine appetite I never more will grind

Now all of this experimenting or galavanting or 'ranging' as it was referred to in the last sonnet, is done, receive from me now the thing that will have no end, namely, though not here explicitly named, but obviously inferred, my love, because I will never more now grind my appetite, meaning I will not sharpen or whet my desires...

To 'grind' in Shakespeare's day can have nothing to do yet with our our understanding of the word, and Shakespeare and his younger lover four hundred years ago are a long way indeed from using an app to find casual partners: it means to sharpen a knife or similar object by holding it against the grindstone. But several editors point out that the knife and the sword have entirely obvious and widely recognised sexual connotations in Elizabethan England and in combination with the word 'appetite' this is as good as certain to be intended here.

On newer proof to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confined.

...I will not ever more do so, grind my appetite, on new experiments or trials just to test that in fact my older friend is – as has been shown to me – the best, because he is as a god to me when it comes to love, and he is the one to whom I am committed and locked into a relationship with.

Whether, as some editors suggest this 'confinement' here carries a note of resentment, we cannot really say; what does work is the contrast of the confinement inherent in an exclusive relationship to the freedom of movement that comes with ranging and going, as the opening line suggests, "here and there" to satisfy one's sexual appetites.

Telling though is the fact that here the younger lover is for the first time in the series called an 'older friend' which would be congruent with our understanding that these sonnets here belong to the very early 1600s, and it would also once again favour Henry Wriothesely as the young man over the then still very young William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, as it happens, and we will look into this a little further in a moment.

Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most, most loving breast.

And so, welcome me back home – as the previous sonnet put it – you, who are the best thing to me apart from heaven itself, to your pure and most, most loving breast.

Noteworthy here are three things:

First, Shakespeare once again ascribes to his young lover a purity of heart that has not always been in evidence, which means that he either simply flatters him, or that he is being ironic, or that he sees in him the capacity to forgive such meanderings as Shakespeare is confessing to, much in the way that Shakespeare has forgiven him his, and that he believes that deep down at heart, his love is as genuine and as lasting has Shakespeare's.

Secondly, as John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition highlights, the hyperbole "aptly ends a poem which inclines throughout towards comparatives and superlatives: most dear, Most true, worse essays, best of love, newer proof, older friend, the best." And this is certainly eye-catching as it is not something Shakespeare very often resorts to.

And third, as Katherine Duncan-Jones cites Stephen Booth – a highly regarded American Shakespeare scholar whose 1977 edition of The Sonnets is often referred to by subsequent editors throughout – there may be contained in this a slightly barbed compliment, because the line could in fact be read as also meaning that the younger man has the most loving breast, meaning that he has had way more lovers and been unfaithful on many more occasions than our poet.

Whether Shakespeare here undermines what otherwise – and perhaps apart from the hyperbole – sounds like an honest-enough felt sonnet, we can't know, but it is not beyond the realms of possibility, because what we can be fairly certain of is that both these men know that both of them are not exactly wallflowers when it comes to sexual proclivities...

[NOTES IN PROGRESS]