Sonnet 110: Alas, 'Tis True, I Have Gone Here and There
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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 put myself about and made myself look like a fool...
Motley is what the clown or the fool wears in the theatre; it is, as the word still suggests today, cloth made of differently coloured individual pieces, and Shakespeare is the first writer to use it as a metonym for the person wearing it. Shakespeare, as anybody else working in the theatre or indeed going to the 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. |
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Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new. |
The list of wrongdoing 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 with the heart. In Sonnet 46 he mentions "a quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart," and 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 here talking about his emotional life at least as much as, if not more than, about 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 since time memorial, perhaps including him, though it is more than a little likely that Shakespeare here refers specifically to some sexual contact between men. Colin Burrow goes as far as to suggest it may mean '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 conjectural, as Donne may or may not be as specific in his allusion as that. 'Affections new', meanwhile, and refreshingly simply, are new lovers. |
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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 was right and what was wrong.
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. |
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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, whereby 'best love' here really encompasses the whole person as a loving human being, not simply and trivially the sexual performance of the lover, as we might perhaps understand it today.
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, the person best loved by me also the person from whom I 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. |
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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 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. |
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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 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 '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 "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'. This may, of course, simply mean a friend whom I have known longer than these 'newer' – rather than 'younger' – proofs, so the comparison here may not so much be between young and old as between new and old. Still, to this day we are hardly able to speak of an 'old friend' without acknowledging that that almost by definition makes them also comparatively advanced in years, at least when compared to the time when we were new friends, though in the context of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries it behoves us well to keep an open mind about what constitutes 'old' and what 'young'. Juliet is 13 when she is supposed to marry Paris and falls in love with her Romeo, who is about 16, at the time for men an early but absolutely marriageable age. |
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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, 'breast' here of course as elswewhere in these sonnets standing for 'heart'.
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:..." And this is certainly eye-catching as it is not something Shakespeare resorts to very often. 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, in the sense 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... PRONUNCIATION: Note that both heaven and Even are here monosyllabic: hea'n and E'en. |
With his exceptionally candid and forthright Sonnet 110, William Shakespeare at once completes his apotheosis of his young lover, while at the same time confessing to him that yes, he too has had affairs with other people, but also reassuring him that these other lovers were no match for him and that they pale, compared to him, into insignificance, seeing that he is as "a god in love" to whom our poet feels and here declares himself to be inseparably tied.
The principal revelation of Sonnet 110 is not strictly news to us: it has been set up with Sonnet 109 and we here mostly find confirmed what that sonnet has already expressed, albeit coached in rather more cryptic terms. When that poem spoke of Shakespeare having "ranged," but now, like a traveller, returned to his "home of love" and alluded to "stains" that had come about from "frailties that besiege all kinds of blood," this sonnet here really leaves no room for uncertainty that appetites were ground and that other lovers were tried and tested and found inadequate by comparison.
And although these two sonnets can each stand alone, seeing that they are so closely related thematically, we have no reason not to assume that they talk of the same circumstance and therefore come about as a result of the same period of separation.
And this then principally begs the questions, not necessarily for the first time:
1 What caused this separation?
2 What caused the end of this separation?
3 Why is it after this separation, rather than any of the previous ones, that Shakespeare comes clean to his younger lover about his infidelities?
4 What prompts him at this point to say with such conviction that any emotional roaming he has indulged in is now done?
5 And of course, as always, who is the young man?
Addressing these in reverse order, we have to first of all continue to admit: we simply don't know who the young man is.
What I think is clear beyond reasonable doubt – and I'm still having discussions about this particular question, for example with one of our most loyal listeners, after very nearly fifty hours of Sonnetcast – is that we are talking about a real life person and a specific individual.
The idea put forward by some scholars that this may not be an actual lover but an amalgam of many lovers or even of the abstract conception of lovers simply doesn't wash here: that could make sense if we were looking here at a classical Petrarchan sonnet sequence of typical and typically idealised love, but the fact alone that without doubt many of these sonnets – I argue as most people do most of these sonnets – are addressed to and written about a young man rather than a woman, makes the collection highly atypical, and what makes it even more unusual, in fact radically inventive, is that the love, though in many respects idolised, is anything but 'ideal': As Professor Stephen Regan pointed out in our conversation on this podcast about the Sonnet as a Poetic Form, Shakespeare presents us, for the first time really, with a lover who is – quite in spite of his evident and evidently widely appreciated qualities – deeply flawed, and so is the woman commonly referred to as the Dark Lady, as we shall see when we come to her: this is not your typical sonnet sequence of the kind highly popular at the time when Shakespeare most likely embarked on composing it, this is an almost anti-classical, practically rebellious subversion of the traditional sonnet sequence, and therein precisely lies its immense and unique power.
And incidentally, this same avid listener also was moved to tell me that the recipient of Sonnet 109 'must be a woman' because of their emotional response to Shakespeare's infidelity on the one hand and because Shakespeare addresses them as "my rose" in that sonnet.
This may be partly my fault: I didn't quite highlight enough that while 'rose' is a powerful symbol and one that is used much and by many in the context of women, Shakespeare invokes it several times in these sonnets in relation to his male lover: he speaks of “beauty’s rose” when clearly addressing a man – quite likely the same man – in Sonnet 1, he makes an elaborate comparison between the rose and “you, beauteous and lovely youth” in Sonnet 54, he speaks of “his rose” – meaning the young man’s beauty – being true, as in genuine, in Sonnet 67, and he incidentally has Ophelia call Hamlet the “rose of the fair state," so there is plenty of precedent for Shakespeare appropriating the image and symbol of the rose for his younger lover and also for a young man of promise in his plays.
And as for the recipient's emotional response to Shakespeare's infidelity: we have no idea what it is. Shakespeare doesn't tell us: he doesn't address whether they are sad, angry, upset, outraged, disappointed, jealous, or even vaguely indifferent, or any combination of the above. The only thing he does is tell the recipient that he – and I am consciously now going back to referring to him as he, because it clearly is his young lover – should not believe that Shakespeare was truly unfaithful to him, because such 'ranging' as he has done counts for nothing compared to him, his lover, whom he values as his "home of love" in Sonnet 109, and whom he here in Sonnet 110 elevates to a "god in love, to whom I am confined," thus once more asserting that their relationship is one that is committed and – all these peccadillos on either side notwithstanding – lasting and outlasting all of these other excursions which will now cease.
How then can our poet be so sure of this? That all is done? That no more grinding of appetites elsewhere will take place? We don't know is the simple answer. A longed for reunion after an extended period of enforced separation that was meant to last till doom, such as a supposed life imprisonment that has however happily come to an end after two years, as we discussed in our last episode, would lend itself as a good reason to reassess what is of value and what isn't. But this remains speculation.
Also, if the sonnet does belong – as we have really quite good indication it does – to approximately 1603, then that is a time at which Shakespeare cuts back on his acting work and effectively ceases touring. We don't know exactly when that happens, but we do know for certain that with the elevation of his acting company to The King's Men and his status as the country's foremost playwright increasingly established, he is financially much more secure than he had been. And he is about to turn forty: a wholly respectable age for the Elizabethan gentleman, as Shakespeare by now is. So he may simply be drawing a well-timed line and be ready to start a new chapter now.
What we can say – and should emphasise – is that this isn't just a change in tone: it is a forthright confession of infidelities and a direct promise that such infidelities will no longer take place, and this sort of thing tends not to come about for no reason. So while we don't know the precise reason, we can say with a great deal of confidence that this is a turning point in the relationship, and therefore in Shakespeare's life, and therefore of prime significance.
Why now, though? This ties in directly with the previous question, of course, and the answer here too is, we don't know: we only know that this is happening now and so this now must constitute a particular set of circumstances that have not previously come about. Again, the death of the Queen and the accession to the throne of King James would qualify as such a moment. But it is not certain.
And what do we know about the period of separation: what caused it, how long it lasted, how and why it ended?
Virtually nothing. The supposition, aired with Sonnet 107, that it may be the younger man's imprisonment lends itself well, but we can't be sure, not least because we can't be sure that the lover is the young man who was imprisoned at the time, which would be Henry Wriothesley. All of this must be considered conjecture. It is plausible conjecture, certainly, but no more than that.
What we learn then, from this astonishingly frank sonnet, are not tangible facts. We learn of a major circumstantial shift that has taken place: things are not as they were before, one period has ended, another has begun. The great likelihood – supported strongly by the existence of Sonnet 107 – is that this entails absolutely critical external factors that influence and codetermine William Shakespeare's life and therefore his actions and the outlook for him and his lover.
And we learn – and this is surely of greatest possible significance too – that William Shakespeare asks his lover to take him back where he feels he belongs: this new era that has now dawned, commences, for William Shakespeare 'confined' to his man. This is a million miles away from the low point of the crisis of Sonnet 87: "Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing" or the dejected admonishment of Sonnet 95:
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which like a canker in the fragrant rose
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name:
O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose.
And that suggests, if nothing else, but this would be much, that we have with Sonnet 110 reached a turning point. There are only 16 more sonnets that concern themselves with this young man, and so if this were a five act play – which some scholars will be tearing their hair out in palpitations at even hearing the thought of – then what comes next would be the fifth and final act of this extraordinarily nuanced and finely layered and not overly romantic but deeply felt psychological drama of passion, power, and possession, and it takes on a tone and atmosphere all of its own that is both conciliatory and also curiously, to things that forever are as they forever will be, resigned...
The principal revelation of Sonnet 110 is not strictly news to us: it has been set up with Sonnet 109 and we here mostly find confirmed what that sonnet has already expressed, albeit coached in rather more cryptic terms. When that poem spoke of Shakespeare having "ranged," but now, like a traveller, returned to his "home of love" and alluded to "stains" that had come about from "frailties that besiege all kinds of blood," this sonnet here really leaves no room for uncertainty that appetites were ground and that other lovers were tried and tested and found inadequate by comparison.
And although these two sonnets can each stand alone, seeing that they are so closely related thematically, we have no reason not to assume that they talk of the same circumstance and therefore come about as a result of the same period of separation.
And this then principally begs the questions, not necessarily for the first time:
1 What caused this separation?
2 What caused the end of this separation?
3 Why is it after this separation, rather than any of the previous ones, that Shakespeare comes clean to his younger lover about his infidelities?
4 What prompts him at this point to say with such conviction that any emotional roaming he has indulged in is now done?
5 And of course, as always, who is the young man?
Addressing these in reverse order, we have to first of all continue to admit: we simply don't know who the young man is.
What I think is clear beyond reasonable doubt – and I'm still having discussions about this particular question, for example with one of our most loyal listeners, after very nearly fifty hours of Sonnetcast – is that we are talking about a real life person and a specific individual.
The idea put forward by some scholars that this may not be an actual lover but an amalgam of many lovers or even of the abstract conception of lovers simply doesn't wash here: that could make sense if we were looking here at a classical Petrarchan sonnet sequence of typical and typically idealised love, but the fact alone that without doubt many of these sonnets – I argue as most people do most of these sonnets – are addressed to and written about a young man rather than a woman, makes the collection highly atypical, and what makes it even more unusual, in fact radically inventive, is that the love, though in many respects idolised, is anything but 'ideal': As Professor Stephen Regan pointed out in our conversation on this podcast about the Sonnet as a Poetic Form, Shakespeare presents us, for the first time really, with a lover who is – quite in spite of his evident and evidently widely appreciated qualities – deeply flawed, and so is the woman commonly referred to as the Dark Lady, as we shall see when we come to her: this is not your typical sonnet sequence of the kind highly popular at the time when Shakespeare most likely embarked on composing it, this is an almost anti-classical, practically rebellious subversion of the traditional sonnet sequence, and therein precisely lies its immense and unique power.
And incidentally, this same avid listener also was moved to tell me that the recipient of Sonnet 109 'must be a woman' because of their emotional response to Shakespeare's infidelity on the one hand and because Shakespeare addresses them as "my rose" in that sonnet.
This may be partly my fault: I didn't quite highlight enough that while 'rose' is a powerful symbol and one that is used much and by many in the context of women, Shakespeare invokes it several times in these sonnets in relation to his male lover: he speaks of “beauty’s rose” when clearly addressing a man – quite likely the same man – in Sonnet 1, he makes an elaborate comparison between the rose and “you, beauteous and lovely youth” in Sonnet 54, he speaks of “his rose” – meaning the young man’s beauty – being true, as in genuine, in Sonnet 67, and he incidentally has Ophelia call Hamlet the “rose of the fair state," so there is plenty of precedent for Shakespeare appropriating the image and symbol of the rose for his younger lover and also for a young man of promise in his plays.
And as for the recipient's emotional response to Shakespeare's infidelity: we have no idea what it is. Shakespeare doesn't tell us: he doesn't address whether they are sad, angry, upset, outraged, disappointed, jealous, or even vaguely indifferent, or any combination of the above. The only thing he does is tell the recipient that he – and I am consciously now going back to referring to him as he, because it clearly is his young lover – should not believe that Shakespeare was truly unfaithful to him, because such 'ranging' as he has done counts for nothing compared to him, his lover, whom he values as his "home of love" in Sonnet 109, and whom he here in Sonnet 110 elevates to a "god in love, to whom I am confined," thus once more asserting that their relationship is one that is committed and – all these peccadillos on either side notwithstanding – lasting and outlasting all of these other excursions which will now cease.
How then can our poet be so sure of this? That all is done? That no more grinding of appetites elsewhere will take place? We don't know is the simple answer. A longed for reunion after an extended period of enforced separation that was meant to last till doom, such as a supposed life imprisonment that has however happily come to an end after two years, as we discussed in our last episode, would lend itself as a good reason to reassess what is of value and what isn't. But this remains speculation.
Also, if the sonnet does belong – as we have really quite good indication it does – to approximately 1603, then that is a time at which Shakespeare cuts back on his acting work and effectively ceases touring. We don't know exactly when that happens, but we do know for certain that with the elevation of his acting company to The King's Men and his status as the country's foremost playwright increasingly established, he is financially much more secure than he had been. And he is about to turn forty: a wholly respectable age for the Elizabethan gentleman, as Shakespeare by now is. So he may simply be drawing a well-timed line and be ready to start a new chapter now.
What we can say – and should emphasise – is that this isn't just a change in tone: it is a forthright confession of infidelities and a direct promise that such infidelities will no longer take place, and this sort of thing tends not to come about for no reason. So while we don't know the precise reason, we can say with a great deal of confidence that this is a turning point in the relationship, and therefore in Shakespeare's life, and therefore of prime significance.
Why now, though? This ties in directly with the previous question, of course, and the answer here too is, we don't know: we only know that this is happening now and so this now must constitute a particular set of circumstances that have not previously come about. Again, the death of the Queen and the accession to the throne of King James would qualify as such a moment. But it is not certain.
And what do we know about the period of separation: what caused it, how long it lasted, how and why it ended?
Virtually nothing. The supposition, aired with Sonnet 107, that it may be the younger man's imprisonment lends itself well, but we can't be sure, not least because we can't be sure that the lover is the young man who was imprisoned at the time, which would be Henry Wriothesley. All of this must be considered conjecture. It is plausible conjecture, certainly, but no more than that.
What we learn then, from this astonishingly frank sonnet, are not tangible facts. We learn of a major circumstantial shift that has taken place: things are not as they were before, one period has ended, another has begun. The great likelihood – supported strongly by the existence of Sonnet 107 – is that this entails absolutely critical external factors that influence and codetermine William Shakespeare's life and therefore his actions and the outlook for him and his lover.
And we learn – and this is surely of greatest possible significance too – that William Shakespeare asks his lover to take him back where he feels he belongs: this new era that has now dawned, commences, for William Shakespeare 'confined' to his man. This is a million miles away from the low point of the crisis of Sonnet 87: "Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing" or the dejected admonishment of Sonnet 95:
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which like a canker in the fragrant rose
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name:
O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose.
And that suggests, if nothing else, but this would be much, that we have with Sonnet 110 reached a turning point. There are only 16 more sonnets that concern themselves with this young man, and so if this were a five act play – which some scholars will be tearing their hair out in palpitations at even hearing the thought of – then what comes next would be the fifth and final act of this extraordinarily nuanced and finely layered and not overly romantic but deeply felt psychological drama of passion, power, and possession, and it takes on a tone and atmosphere all of its own that is both conciliatory and also curiously, to things that forever are as they forever will be, resigned...
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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!