Sonnet 120: That You Were Once Unkind Befriends Me Now
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That you were once unkind befriends me now,
And for that sorrow which I then did feel Needs must I under my transgression bow, Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel. For if you were by my unkindness shaken As I by yours, y'have passed a hell of time, And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken To weigh how once I suffered in your crime. O that our night of woe might have remembered My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits, And soon to you, as you to me then, tendered The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits! But that your trespass now becomes a fee, Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me. |
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That you were once unkind befriends me now,
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The fact that you were once in the past unkind to me now stands me in good stead or comes to my aid.
Although not further specified, it is clear from the context of these sonnets that Shakespeare is referring to the period, or rather periods in their relationship when his younger lover has had affairs with other people, the 'once' thus standing for 'once upon a time', not 'once only', because we know through Shakespeare and his sonnets that there have been several such occasions. One of them, related in Sonnets 34 and 35 and 40 to 42, involved – as often we have noted on this podcast – none other than Shakespeare's own mistress, of all people. But other phases have dealt with similar transgressions on the young man's part, among them Sonnets 57 & 58 with their pained irony: Be where you list, your charter is so strong That you yourself may privilege your time To what you will, to you it doth belong, or Sonnet 61: For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, From me far off, with others all too near. And also of course, and most recently, during the extended crisis that starts dejected with Sonnet 87: Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing, and culminates in the fiercest condemnation of them all that Shakespeare finds for his young lover in 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 if you are paying close attention and thinking, ah, but some of these sonnets are addressed to a 'you' and some of them are addressed to a 'thou', must that not mean they are addressed to different people? It doesn't. Some scholars maintain it does, but it really doesn't: we have talked about this in some detail and so I won't go into it too much, but we do know that Shakespeare uses the more informal 'thou' and 'thee' and the more formal 'you' and 'ye' to the same person. There are several occasions when he does so back to back, for example in the Rival Poet sequence which nobody seriously can argue is addressed to several people, where he switches from 'thou' to 'you' between Sonnets 79 and 80 and again between Sonnets 82 and 83. And he also does exactly the same thing between Sonnets 97 and 98, which are so closely related, it seems extremely unlikely they are addressed to two different people, so this is not something that needs to worry us. The choice of the word 'befriends' here, meanwhile, suggests an additional layer of meaning such as 'makes us friends' again or 'restores or protects the friendship between us'. |
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And for that sorrow which I then did feel
Needs must I under my transgression bow, |
And because of, or even just bearing in mind, the sorrow and pain that I felt at that time, I must now subject myself to the consequences – the shame, the need to make amends, the obligation to apologise – that come with my own transgressions, to which I have been confessing and for which I have been making excuses and giving explanations over the last three poems, starting with Sonnet 117...
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Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel.
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...unless that which gives me strength were made of brass and hammered steel, making me completely impervious to pain and sorrow, or indeed the suffering of other people.
'Nerve' at the time has a somewhat different meaning to how we deploy it today: you cannot 'get on someone's nerves' in Shakespeare, and the nervous system as part of our anatomy was not yet fully understood. Shakespeare uses the word eleven times in total, and only this once in the sonnets. Usually, it carries the connotation of 'sinew', or 'tendon', even 'muscle', as in Cymbeline where Belarius speaks of the young princes in his his charge, who, not knowing who they are, even as boys exhibit the kind of conduct they are born to: The princely blood flows in his cheek, he sweats, Strains his young nerves, and puts himself in posture, (Act III, Scene 3) or more famously in Hamlet, when Horatio tries to stop the prince from following his father's beckoning ghost, and Hamlet replies: My fate cries out, And makes each petty artery in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve. (Act I, Scene 3) That said, Macbeth uses it in a sense very close to ours when he sees the ghost of Banquo and tells him that he wouldn't be afraid if he appeared in any other form: Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble: And so here, particularly in the context of the sorrow felt in the second line, we can certainly read an emotional element to these 'nerves', as well as the in Shakespeare more common physical or purely metaphorical one. |
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For if you were by my unkindness shaken
As I by yours, y'have passed a hell of time, |
Because if you were as shaken up and hurt by my unkindness to you in the same way and to the same degree as I was upset by your erstwhile unkindnesses to me, then I know you have been through hell and undergone an awful time.
'A hell of' here really means 'as horrendous as hell itself', not, as we today might use it mock-ironically, a fabulous or grand old time. Sonnet 58 in fact speaks of Shakespeare's own infernal time when it concludes: I am to wait, though waiting so be hell, Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well. |
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And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffered in your crime. |
And I, like a tyrant who is oblivious to other people's pain, have not even taken the time and the care to consider how I myself once suffered from your misdeeds towards me.
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O that our night of woe might have remembered
My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits, |
Oh, if only this dark period of estrangement and/or separation in our relationship had reminded my most profound empathy, or my greatest capacity for feeling, just how hard I was hit by the true sorrow I felt at those previous times when you were taking yourself elsewhere...
'Remember' here as every so often in Shakespeare means 'to remind', as for example Ariel 'remembers' Prospero of the promise he had made towards him in The Tempest: Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains, Let me remember thee what thou hast promised, Which is not yet performed me. (Act I, Scene 2) |
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And soon to you, as you to me then, tendered
The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits! |
Shakespeare here does something interesting that he does occasionally: he compacts his grammar. Whether he does so intentionally and deliberately, or whether it is a lapse of concentration, we can't actually be sure: both are possible.
But this whole quatrain is one sentence, and grammatically the subject of this sentence is 'our night of woe', because it is 'our night of woe' that "might have remembered | My deepest sense how hard true sorrow hits," and then it continues "And soon to you, as you to me then, tendered | The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits!" And so technically it is 'our night of woe' that now 'tenders the humble salve which wounded bosoms fits', just as you did to me then, but that doesn't quite make sense. But implied of course is 'I wish' that our night of woe might have remembered, and so the implied subject of the sentence becomes 'I'. And then that yields two possible interpretations, both valid. Either: ... and I wish I had immediately offered to you,... or we can also read this as a consequence of the above two lines: ...if that had been the case, if I had been reminded of my own pain, then I would immediately have offered to you... that humble, healing balm which befits or suits a wounded heart, just as you did at the time. That healing balm being genuine contrition, reverse sorrow for the deeds that were done, or indeed actual tears of sorrow, much as the young man offered readily and immediately upon being admonished in Sonnet 34. Shakespeare there at first rejects them outright: Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face, For no man well of such a salve can speak That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace, But he then quickly caves in: Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds. And he confirms his forgiveness directly with the first line of Sonnet 35: No more be grieved at that which thou hast done. And the reference to Sonnet 34 is even more pronounced in the closing couplet of this poem: |
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But that your trespass now becomes a fee,
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me. |
But that thing you did then, your trespass or crime or offence to me at the time, it now turns into a payment which has been put down and which must pay off my offence or trespass towards you.
Another possible reading – though I have not seen this anywhere else and so I put it forward here with the necessary note of caution – is that the wish expressed above is carried on: oh, I wish that your trespass now, in the light of mine, may be considered a downpayment towards any transgression of mine, and now that mine is on the table, yours must settle mine as mine settles yours. In either case, our respective transgressions now must, or at the very least should and I hope and trust they will, cancel each other out, and so we are effectively quits. 'Fee' in this case here is not a demand for a fee or an invoice, but a fee that has been paid, a payment that has been made. |
With Sonnet 120 William Shakespeare draws a line under the explanations and excuses offered throughout the previous three sonnets for his own infidelities in relation to his young man, and simply reminds himself now of how awful he felt when his lover treated him in a similar way on those occasions when it was him who was sleeping around with other people. The conclusion Shakespeare comes to is that they both in turn have been through hell, and that their respective debt to each other for each other's transgressions now must surely cancel itself out.
Sonnet 120 further puts paid – if that were necessary – to the idea espoused by some that Shakespeare may have been writing these Fair Youth Sonnets to any number of people, be they now men or women: it makes clear that he understands himself to be and to have been in a committed relationship stretching over an extended time frame with one person, his young man, whose philandering he perceives as transgressions on the part of the young man who equally is allowed to view Shakespeare’s escapades as transgressions that similarly go against their understanding of what their relationship is. If either or both of them had considered theirs to be purely a casual relationship, or indeed for that matter just an ordinary friendship, this sonnet would not need to have be written, and it would therefore not make sense for it to exist.
While we have known for a long time about the young man's philandering ways – at least since Sonnet 34 for certain, but that was heavily foreshadowed by Sonnet 33 – the first we heard of Shakespeare's own now apparent promiscuity was Sonnet 109.
And before we say anything else about this dynamic we need to briefly remind ourselves of two things which I have said on numerous occasions before, but which are always a little in danger of being forgotten, so perhaps don't stop me, but forgive me if you've heard this one before:
1) We don't know for certain when exactly these sonnets were written. Current scholarly opinion largely assumes that they were not written in the exact order in which they were first published in 1609, but what the exact order is we simply don't know. And this means we don't know for certain how much time has lapsed between the sonnets that deal with the young man's infidelities and this sonnet which very obviously refers to them. What we can say with some degree of confidence though is that some time has passed, possibly quite a bit more than had long been believed.
The research that most scholars today tend to cite when talking about the dating of The Sonnets was carried out in the late 20th century by Professor Macdonald P Jackson, whose principal and most emphatic postulate is that this particular group of sonnets we find ourselves in now, 104-126, belongs to the early 1600s, as opposed to the mid 1590s, which had previously been the generally held assumption.
If Sonnet 107 does, as many scholars believe, reference the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension to the throne of King James VI of Scotland who thus becomes James I of England, then that would put Sonnet 120 in or after 1603.
I will, of course, as I also mentioned before, dedicate an episode specifically to the Jackson research and also one to the Quarto Edition of 1609 and the questions raised by its collation itself.
2) While we don't know for certain who the young man is, we can say with a great degree of confidence that at the time Shakespeare and he get to know each other and set out on their extraordinary relationship, he is an unattached, as in single, young nobleman. This gives him at least some degree of licence in his conduct, at least as far as his legal and societal status is concerned. Shakespeare himself tells him in Sonnet 41:
Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits
When I am sometime absent from thy heart
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art:
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed...
Shakespeare may of course, not entirely mean what he is saying and be somewhat ironic, even perhaps mildly sarcastic here, but the young man at the time clearly had been behaving exactly in such a way as he believes he is entitled to, and as therefore now prompts from Shakespeare these lines.
William Shakespeare meanwhile, and this we can say with absolute certainty – as absolute as any certainty in an inherently uncertain universe can be – by that time is married to Anne Shakespeare, née Hathaway, in Stratford-upon-Avon, with children. So his relationship with the young man is in itself a 'transgression' and an infidelity towards his wife; and we also know for almost as certain that at the time of the first crisis in the collection, which is heralded by Sonnet 33, and explicitly dealt with in Sonnets 34 and 35, and then once more in Sonnets 40-42, Shakespeare was himself having an affair or a relationship with a woman: the woman his young man then gets off with, much to Shakespeare's outrage and distress.
And so Shakespeare, even before Sonnet 109, could not be considered a wallflower entirely. But Sonnet 109 marks the first time he hints at other and multiple sexual encounters, and in Sonnet 110 he actually lays his cards on the table and says outright: "Alas, tis true, I have gone here and there."
What he also says in Sonnet 110 though, and this is of no small significance, is:
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.
Now, whether we believe him or not is of course entirely up to us and will probably largely depend on our own disposition towards love, marriage, fidelity, loyalty, relationship, character, trust. These sonnets, as any great work of art, are as much a window into the author's soul as they are a mirror to ourselves, because we will forever recognise in them what most we are.
I think Shakespeare here is quite genuine. It is extremely telling that after the confessions of Sonnets 109 and, most directly, 110, we first get Sonnet 111 which offers penance and asks for pity. Sonnet 112 speaks of just such pity and of love being given – whether this be wishful thinking on the poet's part, or an acknowledgment of these having indeed been received – and it reiterates that you, my young man, are the only one whom I now even listen to.
Sonnets 113 and 114 then talk of how, when I am away from you, I see only you, which could be argued to be something of a poetic commonplace but distinguishes itself through its invocation of an alchemy or flattery that turns even misshapen creatures into beautiful cherubim for Shakespeare; and Sonnet 115 says, it turns out that I lied before when I said I couldn't love you more, because the truth is: I can, and I do. I love you even more now than I did back when, even though you are no longer quite the young man you were, as Sonnet 104 makes abundantly clear.
None of which is an apology for wrongdoings, but all of which is a consolidation of what we have.
And then?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
If the marriage of two hearts in the traditional sense is the pinnacle of traditional love, then is not the marriage of true minds the pinnacle of this rather more unorthodox love? There is no need for me to go into the detail here again about just how unorthodox this love and this sonnet correspondingly are: there very obviously is an entire episode dedicated to Sonnet 116.
But what happens after that? We then get this triad of sonnets, 117, 118, 119, that to our ears fancifully, so as not to say disingenuously, tries to excuse and explain these transgressions of Shakespeare's. But although it is fair enough to call them jointly an apologia, since in rhetorical terms that is exactly what they are, our Will does not in fact apologise. He does not actually say sorry. He expresses contrition, he acknowledges his actions as 'wretched errors', and what he has tasted as 'poison'; he even speaks of an 'evil' that turns out to make a good thing better still. But he does not say 'sorry'.
And perhaps he doesn't have to. Because if Sonnet 119, the one immediately preceding this one, is correct in its assessment of the situation, then the love that had been "ruined" has been "built anew," has grown "fairer than at first, more strong, far greater:" if Sonnet 119 is to be believed then William Shakespeare finds, now, at this juncture:
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.
And now, in Sonnet 120: we're done. The expenditure on both sides has been totted up and found to be matching enough: "Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me."
It is – I emphasise and will reiterate – impossible for us to say what happens after this in Shakespeare's and his younger lover's life. What comes next is Sonnet 121 that speaks once more of slander, reputation, and perception. Then with Sonnet 122 a poem that appears to be dealing with a lost or mislaid book of commonplaces, though it may also have a more subtle meaning than that. Then, with 123, a sonnet that returns to the well-trodden theme of time not being able to diminish my love, followed by a sonnet that pitches the constancy and steadfastness of my love against the vagaries of fortunes of the body politic, with 124, and then, with 125, a sonnet that offers up my unadulterated love, free from artifice, simple and pure, by "mutual render, only me for thee."
Sonnet 126, finally, is in a category of its own and it does nothing so much as concede, as I put it also at the end of the episode on Sonnet 118, that Nature, "sovereign mistress over wrack," may be able to hold on to you for a while but not – and quite unlike my poetry, which, as we know from Sonnet 18 will last "As long as men can breathe or eyes can see" – alas, forever.
In our last episode, on Sonnet 119, I somewhat laboured a point I was making on context. And if ever we wanted proof quite positive that context matters and that these sonnets – irrespective of when exactly they were written and whether or not some of them are somewhat out of sequence, as some of them quite likely are – that these sonnets stand in context to and with each other, Sonnet 120 delivers in spades.
I consult for this podcast, and regularly refer to and cite, three principal scholarly editions of the Sonnets available at this time. They are, in order of their first publication, The New Penguin edition by John Kerrigan, The Arden Shakespeare edition by Katherine Duncan-Jones, and The Oxford Shakespeare Edition by Colin Burrow. I also refer – particularly on problematic passages or issues of great contention, to Stephen Booth's edition with his extensive analytic commentary, as well as to a couple of credible online editions, among them the fine and in most points accurate Oxquarry Books edition.
Without exception, they all agree and acknowledge that this sonnet here makes direct reference to Sonnet 34 in particular, and more generally to the sonnets that deal with the young man's transgressions cited earlier.
I emphasise this here because, as I have mentioned on one or two occasions, you will come across people – and well-informed authorities among them, for example Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells in their reordered edition of 2020 – saying this sonnet too "could be addressed to either a male or a female." Not in context.
Sonnet 120 clearly, obviously stands in the context of events that are referred to in Sonnet 34. This is evidenced not only in what clearly, obviously happened around the time of Sonnet 34, but also in the direct verbal references. To recap, Sonnet 34 speaks of a 'salve' that 'heals the wound', Sonnet 120 of 'The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits', Sonnet 34 speaks of 'th'offender's sorrow', Sonnet 120 of 'true sorrow', Sonnet 34 of a 'strong offence', Sonnet 120 of 'my transgression', Sonnet 34 concludes, we noted it above:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.
Sonnet 120, one more time:
But that your trespass now becomes a fee,
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.
Ah, someone might say, but could not Sonnet 34 be addressed to just about anyone. Not even Edmondson Wells go as far as that. Even they acknowledge: "Probably addressed to a male (because of its connection to 33)." And absolutely, reading Sonnet 34 out of context and isolating it from Sonnet 33 would be folly supreme, the two are clearly directly linked and follow on from each other. Context.
Could the crisis further elaborated then in Sonnets 40 to 42 be a totally different one to this? In theory. But the overlaps are so pronounced, there is no reason to assume as much, and hardly anybody seriously does. And whether or not it is, it for absolutely certain involves a young man – the young man of these sonnets – and a woman, one whom Shakespeare himself lays claim to as a love of his. Context.
Sonnet 120 expresses one thing more than anything else: we're even. Let this be the end of the matter. We are, together, on a new, a different plateau now.
Whether our view of the human makes us read into this: but it's all lies and of course he's a man so he'll go off with the next person at the next opportunity because that's what men are like; or whether we read into this: a chapter is closing. A life stage has been reached. This is the end of an era in a person's life and his lover's, and therefore by necessity the commencement of a new era... That's up to us.
But there is something we do know. After this sonnet, which seeks to settle the affairs that went before and draw a line beneath them all, there are the six sonnets listed a moment ago. And then a complete change in tone. A complete change in character and personalities. A complete change in the nature of a completely different relationship, which, yes, may well be, and quite possibly is, related to the relationship we have been talking about for so long.
And the second most commonly held assumption about the order of these sonnets is simply this, I mentioned it already in the last episode: that the Dark Lady Sonnets dovetail with these Fair Youth Sonnets. And if that is the case, then what now follows is but an epilogue. Whether, and if so how, this relationship between William Shakespeare and his younger lover continues we don't know, and probably depends largely on who it is. This too, will of course be subject to a special episode, very soon. But we do know that the sonneteering for this young man – for any young man – is all but over. And there are two good reasons above all why sonneteering might come to an end. Either the relationship is now settled and requires no more, or the relationship ends.
Our Will won't tell us which it was. But nor will he leave us dangling and fending for ourselves completely in the dark: these next ensuing sonnets may give us no direct clear answer, but they will yield plenty more insight into the workings of his mind and into the nature of his soul.
Sonnet 120 further puts paid – if that were necessary – to the idea espoused by some that Shakespeare may have been writing these Fair Youth Sonnets to any number of people, be they now men or women: it makes clear that he understands himself to be and to have been in a committed relationship stretching over an extended time frame with one person, his young man, whose philandering he perceives as transgressions on the part of the young man who equally is allowed to view Shakespeare’s escapades as transgressions that similarly go against their understanding of what their relationship is. If either or both of them had considered theirs to be purely a casual relationship, or indeed for that matter just an ordinary friendship, this sonnet would not need to have be written, and it would therefore not make sense for it to exist.
While we have known for a long time about the young man's philandering ways – at least since Sonnet 34 for certain, but that was heavily foreshadowed by Sonnet 33 – the first we heard of Shakespeare's own now apparent promiscuity was Sonnet 109.
And before we say anything else about this dynamic we need to briefly remind ourselves of two things which I have said on numerous occasions before, but which are always a little in danger of being forgotten, so perhaps don't stop me, but forgive me if you've heard this one before:
1) We don't know for certain when exactly these sonnets were written. Current scholarly opinion largely assumes that they were not written in the exact order in which they were first published in 1609, but what the exact order is we simply don't know. And this means we don't know for certain how much time has lapsed between the sonnets that deal with the young man's infidelities and this sonnet which very obviously refers to them. What we can say with some degree of confidence though is that some time has passed, possibly quite a bit more than had long been believed.
The research that most scholars today tend to cite when talking about the dating of The Sonnets was carried out in the late 20th century by Professor Macdonald P Jackson, whose principal and most emphatic postulate is that this particular group of sonnets we find ourselves in now, 104-126, belongs to the early 1600s, as opposed to the mid 1590s, which had previously been the generally held assumption.
If Sonnet 107 does, as many scholars believe, reference the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension to the throne of King James VI of Scotland who thus becomes James I of England, then that would put Sonnet 120 in or after 1603.
I will, of course, as I also mentioned before, dedicate an episode specifically to the Jackson research and also one to the Quarto Edition of 1609 and the questions raised by its collation itself.
2) While we don't know for certain who the young man is, we can say with a great degree of confidence that at the time Shakespeare and he get to know each other and set out on their extraordinary relationship, he is an unattached, as in single, young nobleman. This gives him at least some degree of licence in his conduct, at least as far as his legal and societal status is concerned. Shakespeare himself tells him in Sonnet 41:
Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits
When I am sometime absent from thy heart
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art:
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed...
Shakespeare may of course, not entirely mean what he is saying and be somewhat ironic, even perhaps mildly sarcastic here, but the young man at the time clearly had been behaving exactly in such a way as he believes he is entitled to, and as therefore now prompts from Shakespeare these lines.
William Shakespeare meanwhile, and this we can say with absolute certainty – as absolute as any certainty in an inherently uncertain universe can be – by that time is married to Anne Shakespeare, née Hathaway, in Stratford-upon-Avon, with children. So his relationship with the young man is in itself a 'transgression' and an infidelity towards his wife; and we also know for almost as certain that at the time of the first crisis in the collection, which is heralded by Sonnet 33, and explicitly dealt with in Sonnets 34 and 35, and then once more in Sonnets 40-42, Shakespeare was himself having an affair or a relationship with a woman: the woman his young man then gets off with, much to Shakespeare's outrage and distress.
And so Shakespeare, even before Sonnet 109, could not be considered a wallflower entirely. But Sonnet 109 marks the first time he hints at other and multiple sexual encounters, and in Sonnet 110 he actually lays his cards on the table and says outright: "Alas, tis true, I have gone here and there."
What he also says in Sonnet 110 though, and this is of no small significance, is:
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.
Now, whether we believe him or not is of course entirely up to us and will probably largely depend on our own disposition towards love, marriage, fidelity, loyalty, relationship, character, trust. These sonnets, as any great work of art, are as much a window into the author's soul as they are a mirror to ourselves, because we will forever recognise in them what most we are.
I think Shakespeare here is quite genuine. It is extremely telling that after the confessions of Sonnets 109 and, most directly, 110, we first get Sonnet 111 which offers penance and asks for pity. Sonnet 112 speaks of just such pity and of love being given – whether this be wishful thinking on the poet's part, or an acknowledgment of these having indeed been received – and it reiterates that you, my young man, are the only one whom I now even listen to.
Sonnets 113 and 114 then talk of how, when I am away from you, I see only you, which could be argued to be something of a poetic commonplace but distinguishes itself through its invocation of an alchemy or flattery that turns even misshapen creatures into beautiful cherubim for Shakespeare; and Sonnet 115 says, it turns out that I lied before when I said I couldn't love you more, because the truth is: I can, and I do. I love you even more now than I did back when, even though you are no longer quite the young man you were, as Sonnet 104 makes abundantly clear.
None of which is an apology for wrongdoings, but all of which is a consolidation of what we have.
And then?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
If the marriage of two hearts in the traditional sense is the pinnacle of traditional love, then is not the marriage of true minds the pinnacle of this rather more unorthodox love? There is no need for me to go into the detail here again about just how unorthodox this love and this sonnet correspondingly are: there very obviously is an entire episode dedicated to Sonnet 116.
But what happens after that? We then get this triad of sonnets, 117, 118, 119, that to our ears fancifully, so as not to say disingenuously, tries to excuse and explain these transgressions of Shakespeare's. But although it is fair enough to call them jointly an apologia, since in rhetorical terms that is exactly what they are, our Will does not in fact apologise. He does not actually say sorry. He expresses contrition, he acknowledges his actions as 'wretched errors', and what he has tasted as 'poison'; he even speaks of an 'evil' that turns out to make a good thing better still. But he does not say 'sorry'.
And perhaps he doesn't have to. Because if Sonnet 119, the one immediately preceding this one, is correct in its assessment of the situation, then the love that had been "ruined" has been "built anew," has grown "fairer than at first, more strong, far greater:" if Sonnet 119 is to be believed then William Shakespeare finds, now, at this juncture:
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.
And now, in Sonnet 120: we're done. The expenditure on both sides has been totted up and found to be matching enough: "Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me."
It is – I emphasise and will reiterate – impossible for us to say what happens after this in Shakespeare's and his younger lover's life. What comes next is Sonnet 121 that speaks once more of slander, reputation, and perception. Then with Sonnet 122 a poem that appears to be dealing with a lost or mislaid book of commonplaces, though it may also have a more subtle meaning than that. Then, with 123, a sonnet that returns to the well-trodden theme of time not being able to diminish my love, followed by a sonnet that pitches the constancy and steadfastness of my love against the vagaries of fortunes of the body politic, with 124, and then, with 125, a sonnet that offers up my unadulterated love, free from artifice, simple and pure, by "mutual render, only me for thee."
Sonnet 126, finally, is in a category of its own and it does nothing so much as concede, as I put it also at the end of the episode on Sonnet 118, that Nature, "sovereign mistress over wrack," may be able to hold on to you for a while but not – and quite unlike my poetry, which, as we know from Sonnet 18 will last "As long as men can breathe or eyes can see" – alas, forever.
In our last episode, on Sonnet 119, I somewhat laboured a point I was making on context. And if ever we wanted proof quite positive that context matters and that these sonnets – irrespective of when exactly they were written and whether or not some of them are somewhat out of sequence, as some of them quite likely are – that these sonnets stand in context to and with each other, Sonnet 120 delivers in spades.
I consult for this podcast, and regularly refer to and cite, three principal scholarly editions of the Sonnets available at this time. They are, in order of their first publication, The New Penguin edition by John Kerrigan, The Arden Shakespeare edition by Katherine Duncan-Jones, and The Oxford Shakespeare Edition by Colin Burrow. I also refer – particularly on problematic passages or issues of great contention, to Stephen Booth's edition with his extensive analytic commentary, as well as to a couple of credible online editions, among them the fine and in most points accurate Oxquarry Books edition.
Without exception, they all agree and acknowledge that this sonnet here makes direct reference to Sonnet 34 in particular, and more generally to the sonnets that deal with the young man's transgressions cited earlier.
I emphasise this here because, as I have mentioned on one or two occasions, you will come across people – and well-informed authorities among them, for example Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells in their reordered edition of 2020 – saying this sonnet too "could be addressed to either a male or a female." Not in context.
Sonnet 120 clearly, obviously stands in the context of events that are referred to in Sonnet 34. This is evidenced not only in what clearly, obviously happened around the time of Sonnet 34, but also in the direct verbal references. To recap, Sonnet 34 speaks of a 'salve' that 'heals the wound', Sonnet 120 of 'The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits', Sonnet 34 speaks of 'th'offender's sorrow', Sonnet 120 of 'true sorrow', Sonnet 34 of a 'strong offence', Sonnet 120 of 'my transgression', Sonnet 34 concludes, we noted it above:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.
Sonnet 120, one more time:
But that your trespass now becomes a fee,
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.
Ah, someone might say, but could not Sonnet 34 be addressed to just about anyone. Not even Edmondson Wells go as far as that. Even they acknowledge: "Probably addressed to a male (because of its connection to 33)." And absolutely, reading Sonnet 34 out of context and isolating it from Sonnet 33 would be folly supreme, the two are clearly directly linked and follow on from each other. Context.
Could the crisis further elaborated then in Sonnets 40 to 42 be a totally different one to this? In theory. But the overlaps are so pronounced, there is no reason to assume as much, and hardly anybody seriously does. And whether or not it is, it for absolutely certain involves a young man – the young man of these sonnets – and a woman, one whom Shakespeare himself lays claim to as a love of his. Context.
Sonnet 120 expresses one thing more than anything else: we're even. Let this be the end of the matter. We are, together, on a new, a different plateau now.
Whether our view of the human makes us read into this: but it's all lies and of course he's a man so he'll go off with the next person at the next opportunity because that's what men are like; or whether we read into this: a chapter is closing. A life stage has been reached. This is the end of an era in a person's life and his lover's, and therefore by necessity the commencement of a new era... That's up to us.
But there is something we do know. After this sonnet, which seeks to settle the affairs that went before and draw a line beneath them all, there are the six sonnets listed a moment ago. And then a complete change in tone. A complete change in character and personalities. A complete change in the nature of a completely different relationship, which, yes, may well be, and quite possibly is, related to the relationship we have been talking about for so long.
And the second most commonly held assumption about the order of these sonnets is simply this, I mentioned it already in the last episode: that the Dark Lady Sonnets dovetail with these Fair Youth Sonnets. And if that is the case, then what now follows is but an epilogue. Whether, and if so how, this relationship between William Shakespeare and his younger lover continues we don't know, and probably depends largely on who it is. This too, will of course be subject to a special episode, very soon. But we do know that the sonneteering for this young man – for any young man – is all but over. And there are two good reasons above all why sonneteering might come to an end. Either the relationship is now settled and requires no more, or the relationship ends.
Our Will won't tell us which it was. But nor will he leave us dangling and fending for ourselves completely in the dark: these next ensuing sonnets may give us no direct clear answer, but they will yield plenty more insight into the workings of his mind and into the nature of his soul.
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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!