Sonnet 112: Your Love and Pity Doth th'Impression Fill
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Your love and pity doth th'impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow, For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you ore-green my bad, my good allow? You are my all the world, and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue, None else to me, nor I to none alive That my steeled sense or changes right or wrong. In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others' voices that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are: Mark how with my neglect I do dispense. You are so strongly in my purpose bred That all the world besides me thinks y'are dead. |
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Your love and pity doth th'impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow, |
The sonnet picks up directly from the plea for pity on which the previous sonnet ends and, echoing that closing couplet further, assures the young man that his pity, here now significantly paired with his love, is capable of filling or smoothing the dent that has been left on the public face of the poet by the base slander he has been exposed to.
The 'brand' received by 'my name' in the last poem is here newly imagined as the indentation left by a mark stamped into a surface. Shakespeare uses 'brow' to mean 'face' often, and here this is obviously applied metaphorically to his public face, in other words his reputation. |
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For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you ore-green my bad, my good allow? |
Because, after all, what do I care about who speaks well or ill of me, just so long as you gloss over my bad deeds and poor character traits and instead allow for my good side to shine and to prevail.
The word 'ore-green' is far less problematic than some editors make it out to be: although it doesn't appear anywhere else in Shakespeare and he appears to have coined it, its meaning is really clear: to over-green, to cover with green or pleasant, fresh foliage the blemishes of my all failings: to make me look good and healthy and wholesome again. |
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You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue, |
You are everything to me, and so I should attempt to let you be the sole source of any rebuke or compliment that I consider valid or important.
Interesting about this construction is that Shakespeare says "I must strive:" it implies that there is an effort involved in this, that his instinct – or perhaps just his human nature – would be to let everyone's opinion count; and anyone who has ever had a bad or even just mixed review will know how that can sting and how difficult it can be to steer a steady course through the buffeting gusts of a world of all too often hastily formed and harshly expressed opinions. "You are my world" is as familiar to us – not least from many a song and song title – as an expression of love and devotion as it is to Shakespeare's contemporaries: then as now it is a poetic commonplace, so for William Shakespeare to here quite naturally use "all the world" as a phrasal noun is not in the least surprising, except perhaps for just how emphatic it sounds. |
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None else to me, nor I to none alive
That my steeled sense or changes right or wrong. |
There is nobody else alive to me, nor am I alive to anybody else who can change my resolute or strong sense of what is either right or wrong, and nor should there, or should I be, as is strongly implied by "I must strive" above. So there is a subtle double meaning: there is both an observation and there is also a gentle imperative to himself.
Read as the continuation of the previous two lines, these two lines also are far less problematic than at first glance they may seem. What Shakespeare is telling his young lover, and himself in the process, is that logically – and here the logic for once absolutely makes sense – if his young man is 'all the world to him', then no-one else matters. And so nobody else can or should be able to tell Shakespeare what he is doing right or wrong, or what about him as a person is right or wrong: as long as his young lover is fine with him, everything is fine, and his young lover alone is able and, importantly, entitled to change Shakespeare's own sense of himself, and therefore also his conduct. Some editors seem to struggle with the placing – even the meaning – of the first 'or' in the second of these two lines. But that is really unnecessary. If we read the construction 'or ... or', as very often Shakespeare uses it to mean 'either ... or' and allow for a minor deployment of hyperbaton, the rhetorical device of shifting a word out of its normal, 'grammatically correct' place for prosody and rhythm, then no emendation is necessary: the line then simply yields: 'that changes my steeled sense, either of what is right or of what is wrong'. Or, put slightly differently again: Nobody else is alive to me, nor can I be alive to anybody else who can change my firm sense of what is either right or wrong. |
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In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others' voices that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are: |
I throw all care of what other people are saying into such a deep abyss that my ears are blocked entirely to both those who criticise and those who flatter me.
An 'abysm' is a deep or bottomless pit, or even a metaphorical hell, and so if you throw your care into such a hole, you really are getting rid of it for good, and with considerable disdain. 'My adder's sense', meanwhile, is a particularly imaginative way for Shakespeare to refer to his hearing. It invokes both the proverb 'as deaf as an adder', and its source, Psalm 58 from The Bible which in Verses 4 and 5 says of the 'wicked' that: "... they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear: Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely." (King James Version) Adders were believed to be 'deaf', though the adder in this context is wilfully so: she "stoppeth her ear'," apparently by putting one ear to the ground and using her tail to block the other one. In nature, adders do not have ears at all, but they perceive sound through ground and airborne vibrations. In Shakespeare's case, any deafness to critic or flatterer is by necessity also deliberate, since, as he has just told us they and their words mean, and should mean, nothing to him. It is, incidentally, not unusual for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to use 'are' instead of 'is', even when the subject requires a singular, as here 'adder's sense' clearly does. PRONUNCIATION: Note that stopped here is pronounced as two syllables: stop-pèd. |
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Mark how with my neglect I do dispense.
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Note how I justify or excuse my neglect of these other voices.
'Dispense' here takes a meaning of 'to excuse' or 'to justify', and some editors see this as possibly referring also to the neglect Shakespeare has or may have shown towards his young lover, as expressed in previous sonnets, but that does nor truly offer itself here: both the preceding lines and the closing couplet that now follows do not speak of any neglect on the part of Shakespeare of his young lover, they relate entirely to his deliberate and very conscious neglect of absolutely everybody else. |
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You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides me thinks y'are dead. |
And indeed, this closing couplet is particularly fascinating, because it can mean two really radically different things, depending entirely on how we read it.
As it is written in the Quarto Edition it means: So strongly are you being nurtured and thus present and cared for in my conscious mind, in my purposeful thinking, that all the world apart from me thinks that you are dead or thinks of you with no more understanding than if you were dead, in other words: you don't properly exist to them as you exist to me. This, as editors note, makes the sonnet almost solipsistic. It strikes us as a self-centred, so as not to say egomaniacal thing for a poet to say that apart from him, all the world thinks his lover is dead – as in dead to them – principally because of how strongly he is 'bred' in his own 'purpose', whereby 'purpose' here does have this particular meaning not of 'intention' but more of the "subject of a discourse, the matter in hand," (Oxford English Dictionary, 4) of which we can therefore think as Shakespeare's intentional, active thought, and general as well as genuine concern. This 'problem', if that's what it is, leads some editors to propose various emendations, on various grounds. 1 The "y'" in "y'are dead" in the Quarto Edition may simply be a mistake that has somehow crept in and is therefore redundant and consequently simply omitted. The line then means, I think all the world besides you are dead. And we wouldn't need to worry too much about there now being a plural 'are' for the singular world, because of course we can think of the world as the plurality of people in it. This requires, not entirely incidentally, that we also then spell 'methinks' as one word to mean 'I think' and take the 'you' in 'besides you' as read, because thus implied. 2 The "y'" may be a misprint of the archaic letter þ [thorn] which is pronounced 'th' and still exists in Icelandic. This would mean the line says "that all the world besides methinks th'are dead" and could therefore yield, I think of all the world besides you that they are dead. Arguments can be made for any of these, but while to our ears perhaps less 'comfortable', the Quarto reading is in fact by some margin also the boldest and therefore strongest, as we shall examine further in a moment... |
With Sonnet 112, William Shakespeare picks up directly from Sonnet 111 in which he asked his younger lover to pity him, and he now goes one step further by telling him that it is his, the younger man's, opinion – and his opinion only – that should ever matter to Shakespeare, because not only is the young man, as Sonnets 109 and 110 expressed, his "home of love" and "a god in love" to whom he considers himself "confined" and therefore fully committed, the young man is, so Shakespeare now asserts, his everything, his "all the world," and thus quite simply the only one who matters to him.
Beyond that though, the sonnet also may well be telling us a great deal about the young lover's position towards Shakespeare and therefore about the status and character of their relationship at this advanced point in the proceedings, as we shall see.
Sonnet 112 comes along as a remarkable gesture of confidence. The same can really be said of this entire group consisting of Sonnets 109-112: they all present with a great degree of self-assurance and matter-of-it-just-so- happens-to-be-factness. Even Sonnet 111, which loosely but clearly pairs with this poem, pleads with a certain swagger. None of these sonnets, we noted, sounds in the least apologetic and none of them seems to doubt in any meaningful way that Shakespeare's young man will welcome him back home to his "most, most loving breast," as Sonnet 110 put it.
This sonnet too does not invoke a language of possibilities or uncertainties; there are no conditional verb forms. He is not saying, 'your love and pity could th'impression fill', nor does he infuse the idea that his younger lover does and will continue to 'ore-green' his bad and 'allow his good' with any great room for doubt.
And this invites – perhaps more than directly poses – the question: whence stems this confidence? Clearly something has dented our Will's reputation. We still don't know what, and unless some astonishing new evidence suddenly surfaces, we will never know with any certainty what it is that people have been saying about him, who these people are, or what prompted their embrace of 'vulgar scandal', but what we can be pretty certain of is that something of the kind has happened, that somebody or some people have been saying or writing things about Shakespeare that tarnish his reputation. And the tone of this sonnet suggests – and it is really only that, it can do no more than suggest – that Shakespeare's young lover has shown him pity and love. Kindness. Perhaps even new assurance of support and indeed support.
Since we don't know who the young man is either, this too must remain to some extent surmise, but our approach – and I do feel I should remind ourselves of this every so often, because it is all too easy to descend into wild and wholly unfounded speculation, if one isn't careful, with these sonnets – our approach is to go by what the words themselves actually tell us, and on this occasion the words themselves are positively generous in what they offer:
1 – The way the opening line is formulated suggests that either a) the young man really has shown signs of love and pity and that therefore Shakespeare has reason now to make an observation on that basis; or b) that Shakespeare is expounding what the effect of his young man's love and pity on him is or will be or would be, were it to be granted, whereby we note with great interest as we just did a moment ago, that even if b) is the case, he is doing so with great certainty and confidence. These words, in other words, tell us, that Shakespeare clearly feels sure of the love and pity he receives or will again receive from his younger lover.
2 – The direct references to 'vulgar scandal', to 'who calls me well or ill', to 'shames and praises', to 'right or wrong', to 'critic and to flatterer' all make it clear beyond reasonable doubt that Shakespeare at the time of writing this is either experiencing, has recently experienced, or is reflecting on the experience of some reputational damage he suffered: some gossip, some slander, some public opinion that has gone against him, and since we are given no indication that this isn't current or recent, we have no reason not to believe that he is referring to events that matter to him now, at the time of writing, not at some point in the distant past.
3 The fact that this reputational damage involves the public at large, rather than, say, the opinion of his theatrical friends and rivals, of some courtiers, or of a clique of friends around the young lover, or let alone of the King is evidenced strongly too: Sonnet 111 – which this is undoubtedly connected to – speaks of 'public means' and 'public manners', this sonnet, again, speaks of 'vulgar scandal', whereby 'vulgar' in Shakespeare's day has a meaning much more of "characteristic of or belonging to ordinary people" (Oxford Languages) than today's connotations of bad taste or sexual offensiveness, and importantly this sonnet uses the phrase 'all the world' twice, once to tell the young man that he is everything to Shakespeare, and once to tell him one of two decidedly different things, and contained in this closing line lies a nugget that does nothing if not consolidate the connection between these two men.
But: its actual significance and meaning depends entirely, as we already noted, on how we read it.
So let's look at this in a little more detail and let's start with the 'alternative' or 'emended' or, dare we even suggest 'corrected' reading. Let us assume, for the moment, that either Shakespeare himself or his typesetter has made a mistake and that actually what Shakespeare meant to write was:
That all the world besides methinks they're dead.
'Methinks' in all this poses no real issue. Although used far less in ordinary language than I wish it were, we today spell it as one word to mean 'I think', but the Quarto Edition spells it as two words 'me thinkes' on several occasions: Sonnets 14, 62, 104 all do so.
In contrast, the use of "y'" by mistake in place of the letter þ [thorn] is vastly problematic as a supposition, principally because nowhere else in the Quarto Edition does Shakespeare, nor do either of the typesetters – two, it is believed, worked on the book – use the letter þ [thorn] at all. Nor is there any evidence of Shakespeare using the letter in his handwriting. It had, by Shakespeare's time, effectively fallen out of use. And this makes the idea that the typesetter read þ [thorn] in the manuscript but put 'y' extremely unlikely. So unlikely, in fact, that we can practically rule it out.
That being the case, the only grounds we would then have for emending 'y' to 'they' would be a personal preference for what then becomes the meaning of the sentence over what the meaning of the sentence otherwise is. And those were flimsy grounds indeed to argue on, and would form ice so thin that falling through it and metaphorically drowning or catching a severe chill at the very least would become almost unavoidable, were one to be brazen enough to skate on it.
That doesn't stop people from doing so though and you will find entirely credible, highly competent scholars adopt an emendation to 'they', among them John Kerrigan in the New Penguin edition that I refer to often in this podcast and indeed Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells in their decorative, reordered edition.
Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition and Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition though argue against that and follow the highly influential scholar Stephen Booth by leaving the meaning as it is, even though Duncan-Jones then spells it "you're dead" rather than 'y'are dead'.
I am strongly inclined, more than inclined, I am quite firmly directed towards agreeing with them. Directed by the two guiding principles that I espouse throughout this endeavour, because I do believe it to be incumbent upon us to do so:
1) Only mess with Shakespeare if there's no way around it, if there has to be a mistake in the text, and
2) Note and respect the evidence such as there is – and there is often a lot more than first meets the eye – and draw conclusions correspondingly, rather than trying to impose on Shakespeare your will. And there is a pun there that is almost intended, because I come across people way too often who seek primarily to force themselves, their fantasies, and their world view on Shakespeare with way too scant regard for what we actually can know.
Both Burrow and Duncan-Jones argue, to my mind correctly, that changing the meaning of the line to
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides methinks they're dead
weakens it and robs it of its astonishingly self-regarding, so as not to say, as they both do, solipsistic character. And that means it robs it of its core.
Because Shakespeare here puts himself at the centre of his young lover's existence and tells him:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides me thinks y'are dead.
Whether he is doing so with an entirely straight face or with a hint of irony, we can't directly tell, but he is putting, with this sonnet, his devotion to his younger lover on a quasi-equal and reciprocal footing with his younger lover's devotion to him. And that is immensely significant. It is, as someone with a generally more colloquial turn of phrase today might say, 'huge'.
Because it implies – more than implies then, it really strongly suggests – that these two are back together. More than ever. That after the periods of separation related to us in Sonnets 97 and 98, after the dearth of inspiration bewailed in Sonnets 100, 101, and 103, after the momentous events of Sonnet 107, and after the 'ranging' and the going 'here and there' of Sonnets 109 and 110, Shakespeare is confident in saying: 'you are my all the world, and you are so closely tied to me and my thoughts and my love, that only I can truly understand you as you are, only I 'get' you, as it were, to all the world outside you might as well not exist, compared to the way in which you exist to me.
And that is an extraordinary thing to say to anyone: it makes this one of the most powerful poems in the collection, and one that is building up, as we become more and more aware, in an almost straight line – and no pun is intended there, I assure you – to one of the most famous ones too, which will culminate in actually speaking of a 'marriage of true minds', Sonnet 116.
A couple of details are maybe worth noting:
With Sonnet 111 Shakespeare once more switches from 'thou' to 'you'. If you are new to this podcast and now think: aha! that surely means he is talking to someone else then: he isn't. We've established several occasions when it is clear that he's talking to the same person, addressing him both as 'thou' and as 'you'; and we ventured two or three times now that he may be doing so when he feels emboldened to make big claims. This is the case here: whether it is also the reason why he here uses the more formal, more respectful 'you', to signal at least some degree of deference and an awareness perhaps, of his young lover's status, we can't know for certain, but it would, once again, fit and make sense.
And the word absym is what we may refer to as a rare term. It appears only three times in all of Shakespeare's works, and in view of some of the discussions we've had around the dating of the sonnets by relating rare terms to the plays they feature in, it might be interesting – as a spot check, not to replace or repeat any systematic academic study here – to see in which of his plays Shakespeare uses abysm.
It appears in Antony & Cleopatra, Act III, Scene 8, and in The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2. These two plays, it is generally believed, were written between 1606 and 1607 in the case of Antony & Cleopatra, and between 1610 and 1611 in case of The Tempest, which would support the supposition, made most prominently by Macdonald P Jackson and adopted widely by others, that this sonnet does indeed belong to the early Jacobean era, as opposed to the late Elizabethan one, and would correspond with its placing in the collection after Sonnet 107, assuming, as most people do, that Sonnet 107 relates to the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.
Beyond that though, the sonnet also may well be telling us a great deal about the young lover's position towards Shakespeare and therefore about the status and character of their relationship at this advanced point in the proceedings, as we shall see.
Sonnet 112 comes along as a remarkable gesture of confidence. The same can really be said of this entire group consisting of Sonnets 109-112: they all present with a great degree of self-assurance and matter-of-it-just-so- happens-to-be-factness. Even Sonnet 111, which loosely but clearly pairs with this poem, pleads with a certain swagger. None of these sonnets, we noted, sounds in the least apologetic and none of them seems to doubt in any meaningful way that Shakespeare's young man will welcome him back home to his "most, most loving breast," as Sonnet 110 put it.
This sonnet too does not invoke a language of possibilities or uncertainties; there are no conditional verb forms. He is not saying, 'your love and pity could th'impression fill', nor does he infuse the idea that his younger lover does and will continue to 'ore-green' his bad and 'allow his good' with any great room for doubt.
And this invites – perhaps more than directly poses – the question: whence stems this confidence? Clearly something has dented our Will's reputation. We still don't know what, and unless some astonishing new evidence suddenly surfaces, we will never know with any certainty what it is that people have been saying about him, who these people are, or what prompted their embrace of 'vulgar scandal', but what we can be pretty certain of is that something of the kind has happened, that somebody or some people have been saying or writing things about Shakespeare that tarnish his reputation. And the tone of this sonnet suggests – and it is really only that, it can do no more than suggest – that Shakespeare's young lover has shown him pity and love. Kindness. Perhaps even new assurance of support and indeed support.
Since we don't know who the young man is either, this too must remain to some extent surmise, but our approach – and I do feel I should remind ourselves of this every so often, because it is all too easy to descend into wild and wholly unfounded speculation, if one isn't careful, with these sonnets – our approach is to go by what the words themselves actually tell us, and on this occasion the words themselves are positively generous in what they offer:
1 – The way the opening line is formulated suggests that either a) the young man really has shown signs of love and pity and that therefore Shakespeare has reason now to make an observation on that basis; or b) that Shakespeare is expounding what the effect of his young man's love and pity on him is or will be or would be, were it to be granted, whereby we note with great interest as we just did a moment ago, that even if b) is the case, he is doing so with great certainty and confidence. These words, in other words, tell us, that Shakespeare clearly feels sure of the love and pity he receives or will again receive from his younger lover.
2 – The direct references to 'vulgar scandal', to 'who calls me well or ill', to 'shames and praises', to 'right or wrong', to 'critic and to flatterer' all make it clear beyond reasonable doubt that Shakespeare at the time of writing this is either experiencing, has recently experienced, or is reflecting on the experience of some reputational damage he suffered: some gossip, some slander, some public opinion that has gone against him, and since we are given no indication that this isn't current or recent, we have no reason not to believe that he is referring to events that matter to him now, at the time of writing, not at some point in the distant past.
3 The fact that this reputational damage involves the public at large, rather than, say, the opinion of his theatrical friends and rivals, of some courtiers, or of a clique of friends around the young lover, or let alone of the King is evidenced strongly too: Sonnet 111 – which this is undoubtedly connected to – speaks of 'public means' and 'public manners', this sonnet, again, speaks of 'vulgar scandal', whereby 'vulgar' in Shakespeare's day has a meaning much more of "characteristic of or belonging to ordinary people" (Oxford Languages) than today's connotations of bad taste or sexual offensiveness, and importantly this sonnet uses the phrase 'all the world' twice, once to tell the young man that he is everything to Shakespeare, and once to tell him one of two decidedly different things, and contained in this closing line lies a nugget that does nothing if not consolidate the connection between these two men.
But: its actual significance and meaning depends entirely, as we already noted, on how we read it.
So let's look at this in a little more detail and let's start with the 'alternative' or 'emended' or, dare we even suggest 'corrected' reading. Let us assume, for the moment, that either Shakespeare himself or his typesetter has made a mistake and that actually what Shakespeare meant to write was:
That all the world besides methinks they're dead.
'Methinks' in all this poses no real issue. Although used far less in ordinary language than I wish it were, we today spell it as one word to mean 'I think', but the Quarto Edition spells it as two words 'me thinkes' on several occasions: Sonnets 14, 62, 104 all do so.
In contrast, the use of "y'" by mistake in place of the letter þ [thorn] is vastly problematic as a supposition, principally because nowhere else in the Quarto Edition does Shakespeare, nor do either of the typesetters – two, it is believed, worked on the book – use the letter þ [thorn] at all. Nor is there any evidence of Shakespeare using the letter in his handwriting. It had, by Shakespeare's time, effectively fallen out of use. And this makes the idea that the typesetter read þ [thorn] in the manuscript but put 'y' extremely unlikely. So unlikely, in fact, that we can practically rule it out.
That being the case, the only grounds we would then have for emending 'y' to 'they' would be a personal preference for what then becomes the meaning of the sentence over what the meaning of the sentence otherwise is. And those were flimsy grounds indeed to argue on, and would form ice so thin that falling through it and metaphorically drowning or catching a severe chill at the very least would become almost unavoidable, were one to be brazen enough to skate on it.
That doesn't stop people from doing so though and you will find entirely credible, highly competent scholars adopt an emendation to 'they', among them John Kerrigan in the New Penguin edition that I refer to often in this podcast and indeed Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells in their decorative, reordered edition.
Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition and Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition though argue against that and follow the highly influential scholar Stephen Booth by leaving the meaning as it is, even though Duncan-Jones then spells it "you're dead" rather than 'y'are dead'.
I am strongly inclined, more than inclined, I am quite firmly directed towards agreeing with them. Directed by the two guiding principles that I espouse throughout this endeavour, because I do believe it to be incumbent upon us to do so:
1) Only mess with Shakespeare if there's no way around it, if there has to be a mistake in the text, and
2) Note and respect the evidence such as there is – and there is often a lot more than first meets the eye – and draw conclusions correspondingly, rather than trying to impose on Shakespeare your will. And there is a pun there that is almost intended, because I come across people way too often who seek primarily to force themselves, their fantasies, and their world view on Shakespeare with way too scant regard for what we actually can know.
Both Burrow and Duncan-Jones argue, to my mind correctly, that changing the meaning of the line to
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides methinks they're dead
weakens it and robs it of its astonishingly self-regarding, so as not to say, as they both do, solipsistic character. And that means it robs it of its core.
Because Shakespeare here puts himself at the centre of his young lover's existence and tells him:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides me thinks y'are dead.
Whether he is doing so with an entirely straight face or with a hint of irony, we can't directly tell, but he is putting, with this sonnet, his devotion to his younger lover on a quasi-equal and reciprocal footing with his younger lover's devotion to him. And that is immensely significant. It is, as someone with a generally more colloquial turn of phrase today might say, 'huge'.
Because it implies – more than implies then, it really strongly suggests – that these two are back together. More than ever. That after the periods of separation related to us in Sonnets 97 and 98, after the dearth of inspiration bewailed in Sonnets 100, 101, and 103, after the momentous events of Sonnet 107, and after the 'ranging' and the going 'here and there' of Sonnets 109 and 110, Shakespeare is confident in saying: 'you are my all the world, and you are so closely tied to me and my thoughts and my love, that only I can truly understand you as you are, only I 'get' you, as it were, to all the world outside you might as well not exist, compared to the way in which you exist to me.
And that is an extraordinary thing to say to anyone: it makes this one of the most powerful poems in the collection, and one that is building up, as we become more and more aware, in an almost straight line – and no pun is intended there, I assure you – to one of the most famous ones too, which will culminate in actually speaking of a 'marriage of true minds', Sonnet 116.
A couple of details are maybe worth noting:
With Sonnet 111 Shakespeare once more switches from 'thou' to 'you'. If you are new to this podcast and now think: aha! that surely means he is talking to someone else then: he isn't. We've established several occasions when it is clear that he's talking to the same person, addressing him both as 'thou' and as 'you'; and we ventured two or three times now that he may be doing so when he feels emboldened to make big claims. This is the case here: whether it is also the reason why he here uses the more formal, more respectful 'you', to signal at least some degree of deference and an awareness perhaps, of his young lover's status, we can't know for certain, but it would, once again, fit and make sense.
And the word absym is what we may refer to as a rare term. It appears only three times in all of Shakespeare's works, and in view of some of the discussions we've had around the dating of the sonnets by relating rare terms to the plays they feature in, it might be interesting – as a spot check, not to replace or repeat any systematic academic study here – to see in which of his plays Shakespeare uses abysm.
It appears in Antony & Cleopatra, Act III, Scene 8, and in The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2. These two plays, it is generally believed, were written between 1606 and 1607 in the case of Antony & Cleopatra, and between 1610 and 1611 in case of The Tempest, which would support the supposition, made most prominently by Macdonald P Jackson and adopted widely by others, that this sonnet does indeed belong to the early Jacobean era, as opposed to the late Elizabethan one, and would correspond with its placing in the collection after Sonnet 107, assuming, as most people do, that Sonnet 107 relates to the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.
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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!