Sonnet 116: Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments: love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no: it is an ever fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. |
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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments: |
Do not permit – or, as you will also often see it rendered, may it never be the case – that I allow for any objection to the marriage of true minds.
Both the vocabulary and the phrasing of this categorical opening gambit strongly recall the language of law and the language of religion, which in Shakespeare's day are intrinsically linked, most particularly when it comes to an actual, legally binding, marriage, which would be carried out in church or, if that isn't possible for any reason, then certainly by ordained clergy. The Book of Common Prayer, as its name suggests commonly in use at the time, under the heading The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony employs the same terminology when the priest addresses the couple: "I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured, that if any persons are joined together otherwise than as God's Word doth allow, their marriage is not lawful." And, as Stephen Booth points out, the phrase "Let me not" evokes the tone of Psalm 31, Verses 17 and 18: Let me not be put to shame, Lord, for I have cried out to you; but let the wicked be put to shame and be silent in the realm of the dead. Let their lying lips be silenced, for with pride and contempt they speak arrogantly against the righteous. The sonnet thus from the word go brings in the word of The Bible, which to the faithful and therefore to the vast majority of people at the time is the word of God, and this can hardly be incidental, let alone a coincidence. Shakespeare is talking about a "marriage of true minds" rather than, say, of true hearts, and although 'thought' and 'feeling' were, to him and his contemporaries, closely tied into each other, and the heart was, as we have seen on repeat occasions, considered as much the seat of thought as of emotion, the fact that here he specifies a marriage of minds that are true to each other and true in and to themselves is surely significant, because he and his young man can, at the time, form a union of like minds, but they can not, under any circumstances, be married in the traditional way. And, just in case you wonder, there is absolutely no reason why we should assume that he is talking here about anyone other than himself and his young man, because no indication of any kind to that effect is given.. This being the case, if he and his young man ever were to have had the audacity to stand in front of a priest, wishing to be married, the very first and insurmountable impediment to their marriage being lawful – aside from the fact that Shakespeare certainly, and his younger lover, depending on who it is, quite possibly, are already married to other people – would be the fact that they are both men. Shakespeare though, and this is why this sonnet is so breathtakingly bold, will admit no impediment of any kind to a marriage of true minds, which would suggest, not even this, not even the fact that they are both men and quite possibly both by now already married can get in the way of their union. This also happens to be one of the most famous examples of enjambment: the extension of a sentence beyond the end of the line, halfway into the next one. And this, too, may be significant: having made his extraordinary declaration, Shakespeare leaves no time really for breath, pause, or therefore reflection, but quickly changes, if not theme, then direction, now abandoning the subject of what may or may not be an impediment to this kind of marriage, and instead talking about the nature of true love itself: |
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love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. |
True love is not the kind of love that changes as soon as something about the other person or about the circumstances in which it finds itself changes, nor is it the kind of love that diverts its clear, unwavering course to remove itself or walk away with the person who removes themselves by going away, whether that person now is the one who is thus being loved or the one thus loving, which, at any rate, ideally would be true for both, in a marriage of true minds.
While a love "Which alters when it alteration finds" can apply to virtually any type of change, one that "bends with the remover to remove" really specifically relates to someone who is going, or has gone, away, and would therefore appear to directly reference those periods, mentioned very recently, when Shakespeare was away from his younger lover. It is, in other words, asserting that a true love does not go around trying to find attachments elsewhere, just because life has imposed a temporary separation on us. You will also come across an interpretation of "bends with the remover to remove" to mean a love that removes itself from the loved person because the loved person no longer loves you back, but that doesn't really make any sense in a 'marriage of true minds', these would then not be true minds, either true to each other or true to any promise they may have made to each other, and so I do think that this is rather something of a misunderstanding. ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP remove rhymes with love in a short 'o' sound similar to our 'dove'. |
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O no: it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken, |
Oh no, it – a true love that is deserving of its name – is like a seamark or a beacon, forever fixed on the shoreline, there to look upon the tempests that may buffet our lives, without ever being shaken by them itself.
PRONUNCIATION: Note that fixed here is pronounced as one syllable: fix-èd. |
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It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. |
The seafaring analogy continues: true love, more than a beacon, is in fact like the North Star, or the Polestar, because just like the Polestar, it guides "every wandering bark" – that is every lover out there who might otherwise get lost in the sea of humanity and human emotions – and just as with the Polestar, we cannot know the true worth or value of true love, even though we can identify it and recognise and orientate ourselves by it, much as we orientate ourselves when we are at sea, by measuring the angle at which the Polestar sits in the sky.
Worth bearing in mind at this juncture is that celestial navigation was absolutely central to a seafaring island nation like Britain at the time, and it also may or may not be significant that with this middle quatrain Shakespeare either deliberately or subconsciously seems to reference Sonnet 80, which used an elaborate and, we thought when discussing it, quite daring and sexually suggestive seafaring metaphor, comparing his own 'saucy bark' to the 'rich proud sail' that is 'of tall building and of goodly pride' that he perceived, more than likely ironically, in the Rival Poet who had at that time appeared on the scene. PRONUNCIATION: Note that wandering here is pronounced with two syllables: wan-d'ring. |
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Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come; |
Love is not a 'fool' to time, meaning it is not, like virtually everything else in the world, subject to the mockery of time, because time holds no sway over true love, even though the youthful appearance, of rosy lips and cheeks for example, fall within the circle of influence which time with its bending sickle has over everything that it will cut down eventually: such youthful freshness and beauty must over time disappear, but true love does not change because of this, it stays the course. Which in fact supports what Sonnet 104 told the young man: "To me, fair friend, you never can be old."
Time is here again personified and referred to as 'his', and as on previous occasions, it is again imagined as a figure quite similar to death, with a 'bending sickle'. In Sonnets 12 and 60 this was described as a scythe, in Sonnet 100 as a scythe and 'crooked knife'. A pun on the compass as a navigational instrument is very likely also intended here, in the context of the previous quatrain with its 'wandering bark'. |
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Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom. |
Love – again, as always here, true love – does not change with his, Time's, brief hours and weeks, but lasts until the very edge of doom, meaning right until the Day of Judgement, which is the end of the world, also referenced above in the quote from the Book of Common Prayer.
A 'normal' or 'standard' marriage lasts 'till death us do part', but Shakespeare here seems to be making a point that the love and especially the kind of love he is talking about is way more lasting and far less trivial than that: it goes beyond death until the end of time. PRONUNCIATION: Note that even here as so often is pronounced as one syllalbe: e'en. |
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If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. |
If this – what I have just said and stated as fact now – should ever turn out to be wrong, and proven to be wrong, then I have never written it or anything else for that matter, and no man has ever loved, in other words: this is the unquestionable, unassailable truth, because of course I have written, not only this sonnet but many, many more and many, many other pieces too, and I, and my lover, and many many other men and women and most certainly also people who either change or do not identify with any particular gender have loved in their time, and continue to love; it has always been and ever will be thus.
ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP, proved rhymes with loved in a short 'o' sound similar to our 'dove'. |
With his celebrated and oft-recited Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare offers not so much a definition as a characterisation of what true love is: unshakeable and unaffected by external changes or temptations, steady and dependable as a lodestar in the darkest, stormiest hour, and everlasting "even to the edge of doom."
With its religious overtones that echo the Christian marriage vows and invoke absolute certainties in a world that is inherently uncertain, it speaks to generations of lovers in a language that is direct and easy to understand. It is hardly surprising, then, that together with Sonnet 18, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day, and perhaps the nearly as famous Sonnet 29, When in Disgrace With Fortune and Men's Eyes, Sonnet 116 occupies the top spot of Shakespeare's Sonnets 'Greatest Hits', and it is also one of the most confident statements made by Shakespeare about, as much as in, his craft, poetry.
Incidentally, in all but one of the surviving 13 copies of the 1609 Quarto Edition this sonnet finds itself in the right position between Sonnets 115 and 117, but, as in the facsimile copy above, numbered 119, which is universally accepted to be a simple printing error and therefore considered of no further significance.
Sonnet 116 is a wonderful poem and it is easy to see why it is so popular and so loved. And – it is fair to say – its comparative simplicity notwithstanding, so poorly recognised for what it is. Because in some respects one could argue that Shakespeare's greatest achievement with this sonnet may well be to have made centuries of couples listen to his lines in churches up and down this and many an English-speaking country in enchanted wonder, thinking that he is talking to them about them and their love, when really he is fundamentally talking about what another great writer, Oscar Wilde, nearly three hundred years later found himself forced to defend himself for in court, quoting his own young lover, Lord Alfred ('Bosie') Douglas, who coined the phrase: "the love that dare not speak its name."
Today, in many jurisdictions, that distinction is mercifully no longer made: "love is love" has eclipsed the Victorian sentiment of a same-sex attraction being so sinful and so illegal that it must at all cost remain silent and will land anyone found 'guilty' of it, as it did Oscar Wilde, in prison with hard labour, or condemns them, as it has done for centuries too and still does in many places in the world, to a violent death by state-sanctioned execution.
Shakespeare lives and writes in a world that sits somewhat precariously halfway between extremes. Neither the term 'sexuality' nor 'homosexuality' are yet in use, these are concepts that appear much later, in the 19th century. But since 1533 – two years after the birth of his father, so only a generation before him – and still under Henry VIII, the specific act of sodomy or, as it was then called, buggery was illegal and punishable by death. The law was briefly repealed under Queen Mary I in 1553, but reinstated ten years later, in 1563, by Queen Elizabeth I. So Shakespeare – born one year after that, in 1564 – grew up in a society that, in line with Christian teaching at the time, and in some interpretations to this day, saw homosexuality as a mortal sin and heinous crime.
That said, the entire Renaissance culture is infused with a new appreciation and celebration of Greek and Roman philosophy, art, and myth, to which same-sex love is completely integral, and the theatre of the day also presents Shakespeare and his contemporaries with a stage for exuberant and joyous gender-bending playfulness: an opportunity Shakespeare famously relishes and exploits to the full in several of his plays, where boy actors playing women dress up as men and then school their lovers in how to woo them if they were the woman they're in love with, as for example happens in As You Like It, though there are other, similar, instances too.
Much as with all the other sonnets in the 1609 collection, we don't know for certain when Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 116, but current scholarly opinion, on the basis of research done mostly during the late 20th century by professor Macdonald P Jackson, suggests that together with the poems grouped around it, the sonnet belongs to the early Jacobean era, which starts with the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension to the throne of Elizabeth's great-nephew, King James VI of Scotland who thus becomes King James I of England.
James does not repeal his great-grandfather's draconian law, but he does surround himself with male friends and favourites who most historians believe – although there is no actual proof – were also his lovers, most famous among them George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Scholars therefore refer to a 'homosocial' culture at the court of King James, and it may be this atmosphere that emboldens Shakespeare to talk here so openly, so plainly, and so categorically of a "marriage of true minds" to which no impediments may be admitted, not even the fundamental one at the time, that two men simply can't marry, and won't be able to, in England, for another four hundred years.
Shakespeare's genius though – in this as in many other of his writings – is to make his strongest and most audacious point so universally applicable and compelling, so humanly felt and experienced, that no-one could take umbrage at what he is saying or even successfully accuse him of the subversion he quite obviously toys with and enjoys. Because rather than picking a fight or shaking his spear at us – you will forgive me this pun, I hope – and berating his reader over how his love for his young man is as valid as any, he just reminds us, rather than tells us, because deep down we know, what we all feel when we feel we have found the one.
And so no wonder we can all agree: that's what true love is. You did write, Will, and many a human being has loved like that before you and will do so again, and on this we can all be with you. There really needs to be no argument: no error can upon you be proved, and that means that your love is not an error either, nor are you wrong about what you are saying, not even in the legal sense: Shakespeare uses the language of law to declare that to a marriage of true minds no impediments may be admitted: that is his judgement. If this judgement were to be proved error, it could be overturned or, by extension, a marriage so entered on the basis of such a judgement annulled. But that, Shakespeare is certain, is not going to happen; as certain as he is that he has written these lines and that people before him have loved.
What we should also note, and editors generally do, is that while for us Sonnet 116 stands effectively alone on a pedestal and as a pinnacle of poetic writing, it is in fact embedded in a triad of sonnets that all concern themselves with constancy, truthfulness, and the changeability on the one hand – because of its potential to grow – and the unalterability on the other hand – because of steadfastness through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad – of true love. And it does this within a set of sonnets that fully acknowledge and admit: I have been unfaithful to you, this has already been expressly said in Sonnets 109 and 110, and you have been unfaithful to me, this will be expressly said again in Sonnet 120, quite apart from the fact that it has been said before and will be said again thereafter.
Shakespeare thus is not merely reminding us of what a true love is, he is also placing this true love in the context of a relationship that is far from the traditional ideal. He effectively juxtaposes a true – as in genuinely felt and experienced and cherished – love against a perfect or ideal love that for him simply doesn't exist. And yet the fact that neither he nor his lover are perfect does not mean that they cannot be true to each other in their fashion, that they cannot belong together as do two who can marry, even though they themselves can not.
One of the reasons, no doubt, this sonnet appeals as much as it does, is that it does not actually directly address the young man: it speaks in general terms about a "marriage of true minds." Some scholars take this as their cue to claim that this means the sonnet could be written for or about anyone, it could be written for Anne, his wife, it could be written for the Dark Lady, it could be written for some random lover, male, female, or trans, it could be written as an abstract celebration of love, it could be written to amuse himself or some friends or some friends of friends of some of his lovers. All and any of this to my mind, as you will know if you have been following this podcast, is nonsense. The context in which this sonnet finds itself, the way in which Shakespeare builds up to it over the last dozen sonnets, and the way he descends from this peak over the remaining ten of the sequence make it clear beyond reasonable doubt that this sonnet too is written about the relationship with his young lover, the Fair Youth.
And these last ten sonnets of the Fair Youth section do form something of a denouement. But there will be one further great highlight with the extraordinarily poignant and pointedly incomplete Sonnet 126, before the tone changes completely and the Dark Lady segment of the collection begins, and although the view from the remaining journey will not be as spectacular as it is from this summit, it will still tell us much and reveal plenty more of our Will's life and love...
With its religious overtones that echo the Christian marriage vows and invoke absolute certainties in a world that is inherently uncertain, it speaks to generations of lovers in a language that is direct and easy to understand. It is hardly surprising, then, that together with Sonnet 18, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day, and perhaps the nearly as famous Sonnet 29, When in Disgrace With Fortune and Men's Eyes, Sonnet 116 occupies the top spot of Shakespeare's Sonnets 'Greatest Hits', and it is also one of the most confident statements made by Shakespeare about, as much as in, his craft, poetry.
Incidentally, in all but one of the surviving 13 copies of the 1609 Quarto Edition this sonnet finds itself in the right position between Sonnets 115 and 117, but, as in the facsimile copy above, numbered 119, which is universally accepted to be a simple printing error and therefore considered of no further significance.
Sonnet 116 is a wonderful poem and it is easy to see why it is so popular and so loved. And – it is fair to say – its comparative simplicity notwithstanding, so poorly recognised for what it is. Because in some respects one could argue that Shakespeare's greatest achievement with this sonnet may well be to have made centuries of couples listen to his lines in churches up and down this and many an English-speaking country in enchanted wonder, thinking that he is talking to them about them and their love, when really he is fundamentally talking about what another great writer, Oscar Wilde, nearly three hundred years later found himself forced to defend himself for in court, quoting his own young lover, Lord Alfred ('Bosie') Douglas, who coined the phrase: "the love that dare not speak its name."
Today, in many jurisdictions, that distinction is mercifully no longer made: "love is love" has eclipsed the Victorian sentiment of a same-sex attraction being so sinful and so illegal that it must at all cost remain silent and will land anyone found 'guilty' of it, as it did Oscar Wilde, in prison with hard labour, or condemns them, as it has done for centuries too and still does in many places in the world, to a violent death by state-sanctioned execution.
Shakespeare lives and writes in a world that sits somewhat precariously halfway between extremes. Neither the term 'sexuality' nor 'homosexuality' are yet in use, these are concepts that appear much later, in the 19th century. But since 1533 – two years after the birth of his father, so only a generation before him – and still under Henry VIII, the specific act of sodomy or, as it was then called, buggery was illegal and punishable by death. The law was briefly repealed under Queen Mary I in 1553, but reinstated ten years later, in 1563, by Queen Elizabeth I. So Shakespeare – born one year after that, in 1564 – grew up in a society that, in line with Christian teaching at the time, and in some interpretations to this day, saw homosexuality as a mortal sin and heinous crime.
That said, the entire Renaissance culture is infused with a new appreciation and celebration of Greek and Roman philosophy, art, and myth, to which same-sex love is completely integral, and the theatre of the day also presents Shakespeare and his contemporaries with a stage for exuberant and joyous gender-bending playfulness: an opportunity Shakespeare famously relishes and exploits to the full in several of his plays, where boy actors playing women dress up as men and then school their lovers in how to woo them if they were the woman they're in love with, as for example happens in As You Like It, though there are other, similar, instances too.
Much as with all the other sonnets in the 1609 collection, we don't know for certain when Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 116, but current scholarly opinion, on the basis of research done mostly during the late 20th century by professor Macdonald P Jackson, suggests that together with the poems grouped around it, the sonnet belongs to the early Jacobean era, which starts with the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension to the throne of Elizabeth's great-nephew, King James VI of Scotland who thus becomes King James I of England.
James does not repeal his great-grandfather's draconian law, but he does surround himself with male friends and favourites who most historians believe – although there is no actual proof – were also his lovers, most famous among them George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Scholars therefore refer to a 'homosocial' culture at the court of King James, and it may be this atmosphere that emboldens Shakespeare to talk here so openly, so plainly, and so categorically of a "marriage of true minds" to which no impediments may be admitted, not even the fundamental one at the time, that two men simply can't marry, and won't be able to, in England, for another four hundred years.
Shakespeare's genius though – in this as in many other of his writings – is to make his strongest and most audacious point so universally applicable and compelling, so humanly felt and experienced, that no-one could take umbrage at what he is saying or even successfully accuse him of the subversion he quite obviously toys with and enjoys. Because rather than picking a fight or shaking his spear at us – you will forgive me this pun, I hope – and berating his reader over how his love for his young man is as valid as any, he just reminds us, rather than tells us, because deep down we know, what we all feel when we feel we have found the one.
And so no wonder we can all agree: that's what true love is. You did write, Will, and many a human being has loved like that before you and will do so again, and on this we can all be with you. There really needs to be no argument: no error can upon you be proved, and that means that your love is not an error either, nor are you wrong about what you are saying, not even in the legal sense: Shakespeare uses the language of law to declare that to a marriage of true minds no impediments may be admitted: that is his judgement. If this judgement were to be proved error, it could be overturned or, by extension, a marriage so entered on the basis of such a judgement annulled. But that, Shakespeare is certain, is not going to happen; as certain as he is that he has written these lines and that people before him have loved.
What we should also note, and editors generally do, is that while for us Sonnet 116 stands effectively alone on a pedestal and as a pinnacle of poetic writing, it is in fact embedded in a triad of sonnets that all concern themselves with constancy, truthfulness, and the changeability on the one hand – because of its potential to grow – and the unalterability on the other hand – because of steadfastness through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad – of true love. And it does this within a set of sonnets that fully acknowledge and admit: I have been unfaithful to you, this has already been expressly said in Sonnets 109 and 110, and you have been unfaithful to me, this will be expressly said again in Sonnet 120, quite apart from the fact that it has been said before and will be said again thereafter.
Shakespeare thus is not merely reminding us of what a true love is, he is also placing this true love in the context of a relationship that is far from the traditional ideal. He effectively juxtaposes a true – as in genuinely felt and experienced and cherished – love against a perfect or ideal love that for him simply doesn't exist. And yet the fact that neither he nor his lover are perfect does not mean that they cannot be true to each other in their fashion, that they cannot belong together as do two who can marry, even though they themselves can not.
One of the reasons, no doubt, this sonnet appeals as much as it does, is that it does not actually directly address the young man: it speaks in general terms about a "marriage of true minds." Some scholars take this as their cue to claim that this means the sonnet could be written for or about anyone, it could be written for Anne, his wife, it could be written for the Dark Lady, it could be written for some random lover, male, female, or trans, it could be written as an abstract celebration of love, it could be written to amuse himself or some friends or some friends of friends of some of his lovers. All and any of this to my mind, as you will know if you have been following this podcast, is nonsense. The context in which this sonnet finds itself, the way in which Shakespeare builds up to it over the last dozen sonnets, and the way he descends from this peak over the remaining ten of the sequence make it clear beyond reasonable doubt that this sonnet too is written about the relationship with his young lover, the Fair Youth.
And these last ten sonnets of the Fair Youth section do form something of a denouement. But there will be one further great highlight with the extraordinarily poignant and pointedly incomplete Sonnet 126, before the tone changes completely and the Dark Lady segment of the collection begins, and although the view from the remaining journey will not be as spectacular as it is from this summit, it will still tell us much and reveal plenty more of our Will's life and love...
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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!