Sonnet 118: Like as to Make Our Appetites More Keen
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Like as to make our appetites more keen
With eager compounds we our palate urge, As to prevent our maladies unseen We sicken to shun sickness when we purge, Even so, being full of your nere-cloying sweetness, To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness To be diseased ere that there was true needing. Thus policy in love t'anticipate, The ills that were not grew to faults assured And brought to medicine a healthful state Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cured. But thence I learn and find the lesson true: Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you. |
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Like as to make our appetites more keen
With eager compounds we our palate urge, |
Much as we consume bitter or pungent flavours to whet or sharpen our appetite...
For us, this might most readily bring to mind taking a bitter aperitif and/or some strong-flavoured snacks before a substantial meal to stimulate our appetite. 'Compounds' though suggests something quite medicinal, and while we can't know with any certainty what, if anything in particular, Shakespeare has in mind, the entire apothecary metaphor of this sonnet points towards some fairly powerful ingredients to whatever substance or liquid is being ingested. The last time we came across the word was in Sonnet 76, where Shakespeare spoke of "compounds strange" in the context of his own writing, comparing other poets' elaborate complexities to the supposed simple single-mindedness of his own verse. And here too, 'compounds' would appear to stand in contrast to 'simples', meaning concoctions that consist of several active ingredients, rather than just the one. |
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As to prevent our maladies unseen
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge, |
And much as we might undergo a purging procedure that makes us physically sick so as to prevent the onset of actual illnesses that we have not yet experienced any symptoms of...
Doing purges or deliberately taking emetics to induce vomiting as a prophylactic measure may strike us as somewhat extreme and is really no longer common in mainstream society today, but Shakespeare writes in an age that we might consider mostly pre-scientific – certainly pre-Newtonian science – and undergoing such purges was absolutely a practice in regular use at the time, much as Shakespeare's tone suggests when he says 'as we do this' quite generally. It ties into the humoral theory of medicine, the foundations for which were laid in Ancient Greece by Hippocrates (c.460-370 BCE), but which reaches Shakespeare's day in a form that owes much to its refinement by Galen, a Greek physician who lived and worked in the Roman Empire from circa 129 to 216 CE – so a good 500 years after Hippocrates. It held that the human body was governed by four humours or fluids – blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, which relate directly to the four classical elements air, water, fire, and earth – and that for a person to be healthy, these should all be kept in a harmonious balance with each other. We discussed humours a bit when looking at Sonnets 91 and 92, and the pair of Sonnets 44 & 45 is built entirely on the concept of the four elements Shakespeare suggests he himself is 'made of'. |
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Even so, being full of your nere-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding |
In just the same way, I, when I was satiate with your sweetness, adapted my diet to take in bitter sauces...
Food here is of course a metaphor for lovers, and these bitter sauces may therefore readily be understood to be sexual encounters who did nothing so much as leave an unpleasant aftertaste or that stand in contrast, at any rate, to the 'nere-cloying' sweetness of Shakespeare's younger lover. Most editors 'modernise' the Quarto Edition's spelling of 'nere' to 'ne'er', which may superficially appear to aid understanding but kills off a particularly provocative pun that, knowing Shakespeare, may well be intended here, because 'nere' allows for two possible readings. Either, as the emendation to 'ne'er' suggests, 'never-cloying', which would be a reassuring compliment: your sweet loveliness, no matter how much of it I metaphorically consume, never gets to be so much as to be cloying. Or 'near-cloying', which suggests almost the direct opposite and would in fact, though as part of a poem that is meant to reassure a lover less obviously appropriate, make more sense. The apologia, as this whole poem of course is, then effectively says: so as not to get sick of your abundant loveliness, which maybe can at times almost get to be too much, I have exposed myself to some bitter-tasting experiences, the better to savour and value your otherwise wholesome flavour. PRONUNCIATION: Note that even is here pronounced as one syllable: e'en. |
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And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseased ere that there was true needing. |
And so, being sick – as in having had enough – of my own wellbeing, I found it meet – as in fitting, or suitable – to make myself ill with a self-induced type of sickness before or without there being any true need for this.
The analogy here being made is still with the 'purge' procedure that makes a person sick before or without there being any actual need for doing so, effectively as a supposedly preventative measure. The word 'welfare' here acquires an additional layer of meaning with the also valid definition of 'enjoying an abundance of food and drink', and if the suggestion is that this food and drink is the wholesome, but perhaps, as the previous couple of lines allow for, overly, even sickeningly, sweet love of his younger lover, then this lends the notion of our poet having got 'sick of welfare' even more force. |
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Thus policy in love t'anticipate,
The ills that were not grew to faults assured |
And in this way my 'policy' in love, for which here read 'strategy' or, as Baldrick in the long-running British television series Black Adder might have put it, 'cunning plan', which was to anticipate and in doing so forestall any ills that did not actually exist at the time, backfired on me by turning into absolutely certain and patently manifest faults of mine, namely the philandering transgressions of which we have been speaking and for which I am here as in the previous sonnet trying to excuse myself...
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And brought to medicine a healthful state
Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cured. |
...and subjected to medication or to medical treatment an entirely healthy state of mine, which, although full to the brim with the goodness of your love, still sought to be 'cured' or made better by what was actually bad for me.
This, that it was actually bad for me is here implied rather than spelt out, but it is about to be expressed in as many words in the closing couplet. 'Rank', meanwhile, is an odd choice of word here to mean having an abundance or even excess of goodness. Shakespeare uses it as an adjective only twice more in the Sonnets: first in Sonnet 69 where "the rank smell of weeds" is by uncharitable gossipers added to the young man's "fair flower" of appearance with obvious and seriously negative connotations, and next quite soon in Sonnet 121 where he will be speaking of "rank thoughts" to mean thoughts that are rotten, possibly sexually unconstrained or compromised. So to be 'rank of goodness' is a contradictory thing: on the one hand it implies an profusion and abundance, on the other hand it clearly also evokes an excess, too much, indeed, of a good thing. PRONUNCIATION: Note that medicine is here pronounced as three syllables: me-di-cine. |
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But hence I learn and find the lesson true:
Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you. |
But from all of this I learn the following lesson and also find it confirmed to be in fact true: these medicines actually poison the person who in this manner fell sick of you, namely me.
In other words: these affairs or encounters with other people which I considered to be but ways of making my desire for you stronger and to forestall me getting sick of you, they actually proved to make me properly ill. As indeed was often the case at the time with the really rather rudimentary methods and substances employed in such purging as Shakespeare here compares his actions to: rather than making a person better, they often made people genuinely – and more often than not unnecessarily – unwell, occasionally even killing people. |
Sonnet 118 continues William Shakespeare's defence or explanation of his infidelities towards his younger lover with an argument that may well strike us as similarly spurious as the one deployed in Sonnet 117, even though unlike the previous poem, this one possesses an internal logic that allows him to come to a conclusion which does make some sense: so as not to get sick and tired of you, I have been tasting some bitter 'appetisers', as we might today call them, even going as far as purging myself with medicinal concoctions to ward off any such 'illness', but what I found in fact was that these 'treatments' themselves turned out to be harmful to my health and wellbeing.
The fundamental question this sonnet raises for us is the same as the one presented by Sonnet 117: Seriously? You seriously, Will, expect your young man and through him us to believe that your intention, your motivation, your actual purpose of sleeping around with other people was to prevent getting sick of him? You seriously expect me to believe that you took these other lovers just so as to whet your appetite, to sharpen your desire, for me? That what was on your mind when you seduced or were seduced by or otherwise enjoyed the company of these other people, what was foremost on your mind was I and your love for me? Seriously?
But such a line of questioning would be both simplistic and futile. It stems from a cultural and societal construct that presupposes sexual monogamy as both the norm and as the thing to aspire to in any relationship, and it treats the sonnet as principally a defence, when its overarching purpose may be much more that of an explanation by Shakespeare to both his lover and to himself of what has almost inevitably happened in the past but what does not inevitably have to happen again now or in the future.
Like Sonnet 117, Sonnet 118 on its own and out of context to us sounds borderline absurd. As part of a progression though from Sonnet 116, through Sonnets 117 and 119 to Sonnet 120, and in the context of the kind of constellation it is by necessity talking about, it can make an appreciable degree of sense, even and also to us.
The constellation the sonnet is talking about, to recap this briefly since we also described in our last episode, is one of two men, one of whom is married with children, the other of whom may by this time also be married: the reason we don't know is simply that we don't know for certain who it is.
One of these men, Shakespeare, has by now made a name for himself as a poet and playwright, the other, irrespective of who precisely it is, is known to the world, the world being London society, on account of his status in this society: it is a young nobleman.
How young exactly again depends on who it is. If the Sonnet finds itself in the correct place in the collection, which by all indications it seems to do, then scholarly opinion today dates it to around 1603, maybe 1604. By this time, Shakespeare himself is turning 40, his younger lover may be around 30 if it is Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, or around 23/24 if it is William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, or somewhere in-between if it is somebody else, these two simply being the two most-cited candidates: something we'll look into in considerably more detail very soon.
For these two men – Shakespeare and his younger lover – being together permanently, living together as a couple, let alone getting married are not available options. The young nobleman, like any young man of any kind of status in this society, is fully expected to marry and have children, much as the first seventeen sonnets in the collection urged either him or some other young man to do.
Shakespeare, as he explains in Sonnet 111 has to lead his life "by public means," something he purports is bound to 'breed public manners'. Circumstances on several occasions have taken Shakespeare away from his lover, sometimes for extended periods, and as it happens both, Henry Wriothesley and William Herbert have, if the timing of this sonnet is more or less accurate, spent time relatively recently in prison, Henry Wriothesley more recently than William Herbert, for more serious offences and therefore for longer.
The world these two men inhabit makes it all but necessary that both of them have relationships elsewhere, if nothing else with their current or future wives. Or, if not necessary, then certain. Or, if not certain, then readily understood. Early Jacobean society is a complex and sexually, shall we say, fluid environment where especially those of high social status, as the young man has always been, and those who work in the theatre, as Shakespeare has been since arriving in London at the latest, enjoy considerable degrees of freedom in their behaviour, at least as long as such behaviour doesn't lead to outright scandal. The moral code of the era is strict, as we have seen, with heavy consequences indeed for those found to have transgressed, but the leeway before such transgressions were registered let alone prosecuted was wide and so in some circles of society sexual promiscuity was, if not exactly the norm, then certainly quite common.
And so if to us what Shakespeare is doing with this sonnet sounds a bit like rationalising both their behaviour up to this point and pointing towards a future in which this behaviour can be mutually acknowledged as having been a fact of life in the past and therefore forgiven, then this may well be because it is in essence his objective.
What exactly that future holds for these two men though remains to be seen and will be seen to be largely unknown: we are at Sonnet 118 of 126 that stand in the context of this relationship, and that is the other thing worth noting about this, as well as the previous, as well as the subsequent sonnet: they seem to be drawing a line not only from the 'marriage of true minds' of Sonnet 116 to their respective 'trespasses' of Sonnet 120, of which "Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me," but also underneath the relationship thus far.
The sonnets that then follow form almost something of an Epilogue to the ups and downs, the ons and offs of the love between these two men, summarising to some extent the things Shakespeare wants his younger man and the world to know and what Albin Mougeotte in the words of lyricist and composer Jerry Herman gets to belt out at the end of Act One of the 1980s stage musical La Cage Aux Folles: "I am what I am."
Shakespeare, in Sonnet 121, quoting the Bible rather than Herman, says "I am that I am," which is what God says to Moses, and from then on in he mostly reiterates and asserts that he will not let time diminish his love, that he will not forget his love, and then in a breathtakingly moving coda quietly concedes that, after all, his love will, as everything else in the world surely must, ultimately be rendered to time...
The fundamental question this sonnet raises for us is the same as the one presented by Sonnet 117: Seriously? You seriously, Will, expect your young man and through him us to believe that your intention, your motivation, your actual purpose of sleeping around with other people was to prevent getting sick of him? You seriously expect me to believe that you took these other lovers just so as to whet your appetite, to sharpen your desire, for me? That what was on your mind when you seduced or were seduced by or otherwise enjoyed the company of these other people, what was foremost on your mind was I and your love for me? Seriously?
But such a line of questioning would be both simplistic and futile. It stems from a cultural and societal construct that presupposes sexual monogamy as both the norm and as the thing to aspire to in any relationship, and it treats the sonnet as principally a defence, when its overarching purpose may be much more that of an explanation by Shakespeare to both his lover and to himself of what has almost inevitably happened in the past but what does not inevitably have to happen again now or in the future.
Like Sonnet 117, Sonnet 118 on its own and out of context to us sounds borderline absurd. As part of a progression though from Sonnet 116, through Sonnets 117 and 119 to Sonnet 120, and in the context of the kind of constellation it is by necessity talking about, it can make an appreciable degree of sense, even and also to us.
The constellation the sonnet is talking about, to recap this briefly since we also described in our last episode, is one of two men, one of whom is married with children, the other of whom may by this time also be married: the reason we don't know is simply that we don't know for certain who it is.
One of these men, Shakespeare, has by now made a name for himself as a poet and playwright, the other, irrespective of who precisely it is, is known to the world, the world being London society, on account of his status in this society: it is a young nobleman.
How young exactly again depends on who it is. If the Sonnet finds itself in the correct place in the collection, which by all indications it seems to do, then scholarly opinion today dates it to around 1603, maybe 1604. By this time, Shakespeare himself is turning 40, his younger lover may be around 30 if it is Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, or around 23/24 if it is William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, or somewhere in-between if it is somebody else, these two simply being the two most-cited candidates: something we'll look into in considerably more detail very soon.
For these two men – Shakespeare and his younger lover – being together permanently, living together as a couple, let alone getting married are not available options. The young nobleman, like any young man of any kind of status in this society, is fully expected to marry and have children, much as the first seventeen sonnets in the collection urged either him or some other young man to do.
Shakespeare, as he explains in Sonnet 111 has to lead his life "by public means," something he purports is bound to 'breed public manners'. Circumstances on several occasions have taken Shakespeare away from his lover, sometimes for extended periods, and as it happens both, Henry Wriothesley and William Herbert have, if the timing of this sonnet is more or less accurate, spent time relatively recently in prison, Henry Wriothesley more recently than William Herbert, for more serious offences and therefore for longer.
The world these two men inhabit makes it all but necessary that both of them have relationships elsewhere, if nothing else with their current or future wives. Or, if not necessary, then certain. Or, if not certain, then readily understood. Early Jacobean society is a complex and sexually, shall we say, fluid environment where especially those of high social status, as the young man has always been, and those who work in the theatre, as Shakespeare has been since arriving in London at the latest, enjoy considerable degrees of freedom in their behaviour, at least as long as such behaviour doesn't lead to outright scandal. The moral code of the era is strict, as we have seen, with heavy consequences indeed for those found to have transgressed, but the leeway before such transgressions were registered let alone prosecuted was wide and so in some circles of society sexual promiscuity was, if not exactly the norm, then certainly quite common.
And so if to us what Shakespeare is doing with this sonnet sounds a bit like rationalising both their behaviour up to this point and pointing towards a future in which this behaviour can be mutually acknowledged as having been a fact of life in the past and therefore forgiven, then this may well be because it is in essence his objective.
What exactly that future holds for these two men though remains to be seen and will be seen to be largely unknown: we are at Sonnet 118 of 126 that stand in the context of this relationship, and that is the other thing worth noting about this, as well as the previous, as well as the subsequent sonnet: they seem to be drawing a line not only from the 'marriage of true minds' of Sonnet 116 to their respective 'trespasses' of Sonnet 120, of which "Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me," but also underneath the relationship thus far.
The sonnets that then follow form almost something of an Epilogue to the ups and downs, the ons and offs of the love between these two men, summarising to some extent the things Shakespeare wants his younger man and the world to know and what Albin Mougeotte in the words of lyricist and composer Jerry Herman gets to belt out at the end of Act One of the 1980s stage musical La Cage Aux Folles: "I am what I am."
Shakespeare, in Sonnet 121, quoting the Bible rather than Herman, says "I am that I am," which is what God says to Moses, and from then on in he mostly reiterates and asserts that he will not let time diminish his love, that he will not forget his love, and then in a breathtakingly moving coda quietly concedes that, after all, his love will, as everything else in the world surely must, ultimately be rendered to time...
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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!