Sonnet 122: Thy Gift, Thy Tables, Are Within My Brain
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Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain,
Full charactered with lasting memory, Which shall above that idle rank remain, Beyond all date, even to eternity, Or at the least so long as brain and heart Have faculty by nature to subsist: Till each to razed oblivion yield his part Of thee, thy record never can be missed. That poor retention could not so much hold, Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score, Therefore to give them from me was I bold To trust those tables that receive thee more: To keep an adjunct to remember thee Were to import forgetfulness in me. |
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Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain,
Full charactered with lasting memory, |
The gift that you gave me, namely the notebook or book of commonplaces, is now lodged within my brain, fully inscribed with a lasting memory...
We came across 'table' in Sonnet 24: Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled Thy beauty's form in table of my heart There, the word refers to a metaphorical painting. Here, Shakespeare uses the similarly common definition of table to mean a small tablet to write on, which in the plural then becomes a notebook, a book of tables. An example of this can be found in Act V, Scene 1 of Love's Labour's Lost, where Nathaniel, when he hears Holofernes come out with what he considers to be "A most singular and choice epithet" gets the stage direction "Draws out his table-book" to take a note of it. And in Hamlet, the prince also closely associates a table with memory, after his father's ghost parts from him with the words 'remember me': Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there; And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! (Act I, Scene 4) 'Full charactered' simply means that it is entirely filled with 'characters', as in letters, though what 'it' here is, is not further specified. Most likely and most obviously it is 'thy gift, thy tables' but it could also refer to the brain which now that I have internalised the contents of your book is metaphorically inscribed with these. |
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Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date, even to eternity, |
And this memory shall continue to last and be of higher value than the 'idle rank', for which read lowly or trivial, because indeed common status, of a mere physical book, and it shall do so beyond the end of time, even into eternity.
We have also come across 'date' to mean 'the end' or indeed 'the end of time' before. Sonnet 14, for example, urges its addressee to produce an heir: Or else of thee this I prognosticate Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date. And Sonnet 38 thinks of the young man as 'the tenth Muse', urging: And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth Eternal numbers to outlive long date. Interesting to note is that Shakespeare here implicitly contrasts the 'idle rank' of a mere notebook to the elevated status of his own verses which on numerous occasions have been predicted to outlast all other kinds of memorial or monument to his young man. Here, it is simply his own memory that will serve to retain the gift he has been given, which also explains the immediate qualification that now follows: |
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Or at the least so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist: |
Or at least this memory will last for as long as my brain and my heart are given the ability by nature to support or maintain it.
This is, incidentally, a good example of the heart and the brain being brought in close connection with each other; we've noted this on one or two occasions: thought, and therefore memory, sits as much in the heart for Shakespeare as it does in the brain. |
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Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be missed. |
And so until both my brain and my heart give up what they now hold of you – the memory, the remembrance, the ever-felt presence of you – to a state of oblivion where every reminder of you has been erased and every monument to you been razed to the ground, this record of you can never be lost or go missing.
Sonnet 25 speaks of The painful warrior famoused for fight, who After a thousand victories, once foiled Is from the book of honour razed quite, where clearly 'razed' means 'erased', but we have also had Sonnet 64 with its 'lofty towers' which by time have been 'down-razed' and so here both senses may come into play, though perhaps 'erased' more readily than 'down-razed'. And note if you will the highly unusual because very short enjambment: the Of thee of the second line belongs to the first of these two lines with the next part of the sentence then starting after the comma. |
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That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score, |
That table-book, which offers a poor means for retaining valuable memories, thoughts, feelings, could not ever hold as much as my brain and my heart can, and nor do I need a crude instrument such as a stack or bundle tallies to account for the value of your dear love.
'Tallies' are literal, physical sticks on which to mark and thereby score the amount someone owes you for goods or services provided. That Shakespeare should sound dismissive of the need for such an object is not surprising since its use would turn the 'dear love' of his young man from a genuinely cherished, valued, appreciated one to one that is simply expensive and transactional. |
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Therefore to give them from me was I bold
To trust those tables that receive thee more. |
And so I took the bold step of giving them – the tables you gave me, the notebook – away and to trust those metaphorical tables in my heart and my brain which are more capable of receiving and holding on to you.
An alternative reading of this line also offers itself though: it can equally be understood to mean 'in order to be able to give them away, I took the bold step of entrusting them to my memory instead'. This would put a different slant on the act of giving them 'from me', as it would infer a decidedly stronger intention and therefore purpose, which to us, however, must remain unknown. |
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To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me. |
To keep an external object to help me remember you would invite and cultivate forgetfulness in me: if I were to rely on an aid to my memory, such as a notebook, then that would make me more forgetful because instead of refreshing my own thoughts of and feelings for you on a regular, maybe daily basis, I would just occasionally have to look at this thing that you gave me and thus my active memory of you would fade.
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With his curiously themed Sonnet 122, William Shakespeare tells his younger lover that although he has parted with a notebook he had received as a gift from him, its contents are in fact kept entirely in his memory, where they will remain safely stored and complete until the day he dies. This, he assures him, is a better way of holding on to them than relying on any external object or item, since doing so would only foster forgetfulness in Shakespeare and therefore weaken the young man's presence in his heart.
Of all the sonnets we have come across so far, Sonnet 122 may strike us as one of the, if not the, most perplexing. We have scratched our heads on one or two occasions when we felt that Shakespeare was straining to construct an argument or wondered whether a poem finds itself in the right place in the collection, but rarely if ever have we had to ask not only, what brings this on, but also what sense are we now to make of this?
The first question – what brings this on? – on the surface sounds easy enough to answer: taken at face value, Shakespeare's young man has at some point given him a table-book of non-further specified contents which Shakespeare has since let go of, but this does not further trouble him, and nor should it the young man, because he holds it all in his memory.
But this immediately prompts further urgent questions: what exactly was this book and what were these contents? When did Shakespeare receive it? When did he part with it and why? What did this parting with it entail: is "to give them from me" a conscious act of handing this book to someone else, or is it just a careless or accidental losing of the object? What – if anything – does this say about Will's attitude to his lover's writing? Are we even talking about a real physical object or are we talking about a metaphorical book? If the latter though, why would a poet compare one metaphorical book with another and suggest that the metaphor that lives in his heart and brain is better than the metaphor he was given? And why is this happening now: have we had an argument? Is the sonnet possibly in the wrong place in the collection and really belongs elsewhere? Or is it in exactly the right place and here serves a purpose that to us is now no longer clear...
The second question – what are we to make of this? – then depends largely on how we attempt to answer this first one with its tail of follow-up queries.
Also, this is not the first time that Shakespeare talks about what sounds to all intents and purposes like a notebook or book of commonplaces. These were widely used at the time and so it is no great wonder that they should at some point feature in these sonnets. But it begs the question: are these two sonnets and therefore the notebooks in any way related to each other?
This previous occasion finds itself precisely at midpoint of the collection and deals with an inverse situation. Sonnet 77 would seem to accompany just such an empty notebook for the collection of commonplaces, in this case given by Shakespeare to the young man. It too came somewhat out of nowhere and we even wondered at the time whether this may in fact be a sonnet composed for someone other than his young lover, a possibility we were not able to rule out entirely.
So could it similarly be the case that this sonnet here, which also appears more or less out of the blue, was written to or for someone else? And what of the possibility – as it exists certainly in theory – that this is the same book: that Shakespeare has given a notebook to the young man and received it back 'full charactered' and then proceeded to lose it. Or give it to someone else.
None of these questions, we might as well acknowledge from the off, can be answered with certainty. But our approach is, has been, and continues to be to look for what the words themselves tell us and, in the absence of certainty, to embrace likelihood as our friend. And there is one factor that may help us as we do so: context. Because context reminds us of, and forces us to take into consideration, not only constellation but also time. And time may hold at least one key to all this.
Let's start from the top of our list of inquiries:
What exactly was this book and what were these contents?
On a scale from nought to twelve, where nought is so unlikely as to be almost certainly not the case and twelve is so likely as to almost certainly be the case, I venture that we can posit with a roughly eight to nine level of confidence that we are talking about a type of book very similar to the one referred to in Sonnet 77: a book of originally empty pages that has since been filled with sayings, aphorisms, poetic commonplaces, journal style entries, just as an educated young man at the time would have carried around and used on a perhaps daily basis.
Also possible of course is that it is a collection of carefully curated poems or other writings by the young man, but that seems unlikely because of the way Shakespeare talks about this book as 'tables'. If the contents had been more specific, such as a set of sonnets composed by the young man in return for sonnets received, for example, we would reasonably expect Shakespeare to refer to them in a correspondingly more specific way.
When did Shakespeare receive it?
We don't know. But in the context of this final group of sonnets addressed to and about the young man we have good reason to believe – I would pitch this at around seven to eight, certainly above six on our scale from nought to twelve – that this was quite some time ago.
Why? Because assuming, for want of any good reason not to, that the sonnet finds itself approximately in the right place in the collection, we are now most likely in the early 1600s. Depending on who the young man is, the relationship may have started as much as ten years earlier, certainly though at least four or five years earlier, and there have been several phases in these sonnets that spoke of separation, absence, silence, a neglect on Shakespeare's part of the young man; and philandering on both sides.
And while we don't know when in the relationship the gift was received, what we can say is that in the exceptionally busy and at times really rather turbulent existence of an Elizabethan, by now therefore quite possibly also Jacobean, actor, playwright, theatre co-owner and thus entrepreneur, who frequently travels, not only when the theatres are closed because of the plague in London, but also because he has a wife and family in Stratford whom he visits regularly, who is becoming increasingly successful and so finds himself by now quite famous, and who by his own admission has maintained not only this relationship with his young man but who also has had at least dalliances, encounters, maybe affairs with other people, among them and possibly coinciding with them an intense sexual relationship with a woman whom we are about to meet as the 'Dark Lady', a notebook, no matter how cherished at the time it is received, can get lost.
It is the kind of thing that happens and that one forgets about until, years later, one is reminded of it and has to admit: I have no idea where this is now. It could be anywhere. This makes sense if we allow for the relationship with the young man – as everything we've seen so far suggests it does – to stretch over several years, with extended periods of at times enforced, at times possibly elected absences from each other.
When did he part with it and why?
It is impossible to say. Based on what we know so far, I would allow for a four to six level chance of it simply having been lost. As we just saw: the circumstances of Shakespeare's life would readily account for that. Maybe not excuse, but explain it.
Interesting though to note is that Shakespeare offers neither an apology nor an explanation. He just says he was 'bold' in letting it go. If we continue to assume, for want of any reason not to, that the sonnet is in the right place, we may feel inclined to further conjecture a possibility, aired when discussing Sonnet 107, that Shakespeare's "true love" in that sonnet, "Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom" references an imprisonment of his lover.
If that lover is Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton who was imprisoned on extremely serious charges relating to his involvement in the Earl of Essex rebellion, then 'giving from' him a book of personal and therefore potentially incriminating writings by Henry to Shakespeare might not be so unwise.
All of this though takes us far into the murky waters of supposition, since the words themselves do not tell us. We have to, therefore, treat it with extreme caution.
What did this parting with it entail...?
The wording is, like the sonnet on the whole, curious: "to give them from me was I bold." Shakespeare is the master of words in the English language of his day, who remains unsurpassed four centuries on. Can we believe that this is a slapdash construction and that he actually just lost the thing?
This now seriously urges a second thought. You cannot 'boldly' lose something by mistake. You can give something to someone else, thus making a bold gesture, you can also be bold in trusting your own memory to retain the contents of the thing you give from you. But note how Shakespeare does not say anything about passing on this book. Also why would he? And to whom? And then not make this part of the argument, the explanation? There should, in such a case, be good reason: you do not give a gift you've received to someone else without having a good reason to do so. And so Shakespeare having passed this book of tables to someone else, on our likelihood scale from one to twelve slides right down to approximately one point four.
Shakespeare speaks of giving these tables 'from me', not of losing, dropping, mislaying, displacing, let alone forgetting them – remembering them is the whole point of the sonnet – but of boldly giving them from him. This suggests: actively discarding them.
And why would you do that? Well, you would possibly do that for example because they contained incriminating details that should not be in your possession. But we don't know.
What the words tell us with a high level of likelihood, to my mind as high as ten, eleven, is that Shakespeare actively decided to get rid of these tables for some reason or other.
What – if anything – does this say about Will's attitude to his lover's writing?
That depends on how we answer the previous two questions. If he had just lost the book, that would suggest he didn't care too much about it; but that, as we just saw, is actually extremely unlikely. What is far more likely is that Shakespeare cared a fair bit about the book, enough to commit it to his memory and to assure his lover that that's what he has done.
Are we even talking about a real physical book?
I cannot see any reason to believe otherwise, and we've already seen why: it doesn't make sense to compare one metaphor with another and to hold one so categorically above the other. This to my mind is a resounding yes: eleven point seven likely.
And why is this happening now?
An argument is possible. The tone though of the sonnet, the language employed, is reassuring, more than defensive. What it suggests – though here we are in very uncertain territory – is a younger lover who is sad, or disappointed, or taken aback at learning that his book of tables is no more: we hear no appeasement or conflict here, what we hear is mostly someone saying: don't worry, I hold this as dear in my heart as I would have held it close to my chest if I had kept it in my pocket. The words, as we read them today, offer a comforting gesture, rather than a righteous one.
And so the question
Is the sonnet in the right place in the collection?
can probably – at around the ten point mark – be answered, yes.
Whether it also entails a great and substantive mystery that to us is now lost, well, that in itself remains, for reasons that are self-evident, a mystery that may to us be simply lost.
But there is one more aspect that is worth mentioning. John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition of the sonnets discusses an apparently prevailing perception that both this sonnet and Sonnet 77 "have been urged to show that Shakespeare's sequence grew directly out of lived experience: for why else would such trivial objects as notebooks turn up there?"
Kerrigan, like many scholars of his generation, views any biographical reading of the sonnets with scepticism bordering on disdain, but after a brief detour via a French sonnet published in 1578 that bears a passing resemblance insofar as it also tells an addressee, here a lady, that the lover requires no tables other than those of his heart to record her graces, draws a somewhat frustrated conclusion that "Shakespeare found himself tackling a theme which he could not handle with assurance (because the idea of writing carried such weight); biography impinges, once more, through inelegance of argument."
I, as you will know if you have been following this podcast even at a casual level, not only tend to believe that Shakespeare probably could handle most any theme with just about sufficient assurance to make of it good poetry if he put his mind to it, but I am also convinced that while these sonnets may not yield up a strictly coherent chronological biography, they are most certainly – on our scale I would pitch this at level 11.999, possibly recurring – rooted in lived experience. And so it had not occurred to me that this sonnet and Sonnet 77 more than any other might provide evidence of this. But John Kerrigan has a point: even if you don't want the sonnet to have anything to do with Shakespeare's real life, it draws you back to just that: biography impinges. Because it is difficult indeed to think of any plausible reason why this sonnet should exist if it didn't relate to an actual object that contained actual writing by his actual lover, and at that relate to it in such a specific, yet vexingly inconclusive way.
If you have been listening to Sonnetcast for a while, you will, at two or possibly three points have heard me say that something Shakespeare is doing sounds like code. A bit like the kind of code cryptic crossword setters employ when they lift the puzzler onto an answer by dextrous manipulation of how clues are formulated. And you will also have heard me agree with scholars who say that we are still learning how to read a sonnet sequence, because some of the art to us is simply lost.
It is possible that this sonnet really does deal with an essentially trivial matter – with a notebook of no further importance – and that its position in the collection has no significance at all. On our scale of likelihood, I would put this at around three to four, who knows, perhaps even four to five. It certainly is not something we can entirely rule out, though it may be as little likely as a two or three.
If we allow for context though, and through context for time, and assume – as I believe we should, indeed must – that Shakespeare knows what he is doing, and if we accept – as we readily can, since we have ample evidence of it in these sonnets – that he layers meanings, and hides especially sensitive content in coded language and composition, then I consider it far more likely, on our scale at a ten to eleven, that this sonnet serves a purpose, that it is meant to be at number 122 and that the object it refers to is anything but trivial. The fact alone that the sonnet exists would appear to attest to that. But it is no proof.
What there is, though, is a lead into the next sonnet. And the next sonnet, as Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition observes, builds "on his claim in the preceding sonnet that his own steadfast love provides a better bulwark than any physical object can do," and so even though Sonnet 122 arrives apparently out of nowhere, it does not depart to nowhere: it leads us out into a further affirmation of Shakespeare's love and commitment to his young man, no matter what has happened in the past.
Of all the sonnets we have come across so far, Sonnet 122 may strike us as one of the, if not the, most perplexing. We have scratched our heads on one or two occasions when we felt that Shakespeare was straining to construct an argument or wondered whether a poem finds itself in the right place in the collection, but rarely if ever have we had to ask not only, what brings this on, but also what sense are we now to make of this?
The first question – what brings this on? – on the surface sounds easy enough to answer: taken at face value, Shakespeare's young man has at some point given him a table-book of non-further specified contents which Shakespeare has since let go of, but this does not further trouble him, and nor should it the young man, because he holds it all in his memory.
But this immediately prompts further urgent questions: what exactly was this book and what were these contents? When did Shakespeare receive it? When did he part with it and why? What did this parting with it entail: is "to give them from me" a conscious act of handing this book to someone else, or is it just a careless or accidental losing of the object? What – if anything – does this say about Will's attitude to his lover's writing? Are we even talking about a real physical object or are we talking about a metaphorical book? If the latter though, why would a poet compare one metaphorical book with another and suggest that the metaphor that lives in his heart and brain is better than the metaphor he was given? And why is this happening now: have we had an argument? Is the sonnet possibly in the wrong place in the collection and really belongs elsewhere? Or is it in exactly the right place and here serves a purpose that to us is now no longer clear...
The second question – what are we to make of this? – then depends largely on how we attempt to answer this first one with its tail of follow-up queries.
Also, this is not the first time that Shakespeare talks about what sounds to all intents and purposes like a notebook or book of commonplaces. These were widely used at the time and so it is no great wonder that they should at some point feature in these sonnets. But it begs the question: are these two sonnets and therefore the notebooks in any way related to each other?
This previous occasion finds itself precisely at midpoint of the collection and deals with an inverse situation. Sonnet 77 would seem to accompany just such an empty notebook for the collection of commonplaces, in this case given by Shakespeare to the young man. It too came somewhat out of nowhere and we even wondered at the time whether this may in fact be a sonnet composed for someone other than his young lover, a possibility we were not able to rule out entirely.
So could it similarly be the case that this sonnet here, which also appears more or less out of the blue, was written to or for someone else? And what of the possibility – as it exists certainly in theory – that this is the same book: that Shakespeare has given a notebook to the young man and received it back 'full charactered' and then proceeded to lose it. Or give it to someone else.
None of these questions, we might as well acknowledge from the off, can be answered with certainty. But our approach is, has been, and continues to be to look for what the words themselves tell us and, in the absence of certainty, to embrace likelihood as our friend. And there is one factor that may help us as we do so: context. Because context reminds us of, and forces us to take into consideration, not only constellation but also time. And time may hold at least one key to all this.
Let's start from the top of our list of inquiries:
What exactly was this book and what were these contents?
On a scale from nought to twelve, where nought is so unlikely as to be almost certainly not the case and twelve is so likely as to almost certainly be the case, I venture that we can posit with a roughly eight to nine level of confidence that we are talking about a type of book very similar to the one referred to in Sonnet 77: a book of originally empty pages that has since been filled with sayings, aphorisms, poetic commonplaces, journal style entries, just as an educated young man at the time would have carried around and used on a perhaps daily basis.
Also possible of course is that it is a collection of carefully curated poems or other writings by the young man, but that seems unlikely because of the way Shakespeare talks about this book as 'tables'. If the contents had been more specific, such as a set of sonnets composed by the young man in return for sonnets received, for example, we would reasonably expect Shakespeare to refer to them in a correspondingly more specific way.
When did Shakespeare receive it?
We don't know. But in the context of this final group of sonnets addressed to and about the young man we have good reason to believe – I would pitch this at around seven to eight, certainly above six on our scale from nought to twelve – that this was quite some time ago.
Why? Because assuming, for want of any good reason not to, that the sonnet finds itself approximately in the right place in the collection, we are now most likely in the early 1600s. Depending on who the young man is, the relationship may have started as much as ten years earlier, certainly though at least four or five years earlier, and there have been several phases in these sonnets that spoke of separation, absence, silence, a neglect on Shakespeare's part of the young man; and philandering on both sides.
And while we don't know when in the relationship the gift was received, what we can say is that in the exceptionally busy and at times really rather turbulent existence of an Elizabethan, by now therefore quite possibly also Jacobean, actor, playwright, theatre co-owner and thus entrepreneur, who frequently travels, not only when the theatres are closed because of the plague in London, but also because he has a wife and family in Stratford whom he visits regularly, who is becoming increasingly successful and so finds himself by now quite famous, and who by his own admission has maintained not only this relationship with his young man but who also has had at least dalliances, encounters, maybe affairs with other people, among them and possibly coinciding with them an intense sexual relationship with a woman whom we are about to meet as the 'Dark Lady', a notebook, no matter how cherished at the time it is received, can get lost.
It is the kind of thing that happens and that one forgets about until, years later, one is reminded of it and has to admit: I have no idea where this is now. It could be anywhere. This makes sense if we allow for the relationship with the young man – as everything we've seen so far suggests it does – to stretch over several years, with extended periods of at times enforced, at times possibly elected absences from each other.
When did he part with it and why?
It is impossible to say. Based on what we know so far, I would allow for a four to six level chance of it simply having been lost. As we just saw: the circumstances of Shakespeare's life would readily account for that. Maybe not excuse, but explain it.
Interesting though to note is that Shakespeare offers neither an apology nor an explanation. He just says he was 'bold' in letting it go. If we continue to assume, for want of any reason not to, that the sonnet is in the right place, we may feel inclined to further conjecture a possibility, aired when discussing Sonnet 107, that Shakespeare's "true love" in that sonnet, "Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom" references an imprisonment of his lover.
If that lover is Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton who was imprisoned on extremely serious charges relating to his involvement in the Earl of Essex rebellion, then 'giving from' him a book of personal and therefore potentially incriminating writings by Henry to Shakespeare might not be so unwise.
All of this though takes us far into the murky waters of supposition, since the words themselves do not tell us. We have to, therefore, treat it with extreme caution.
What did this parting with it entail...?
The wording is, like the sonnet on the whole, curious: "to give them from me was I bold." Shakespeare is the master of words in the English language of his day, who remains unsurpassed four centuries on. Can we believe that this is a slapdash construction and that he actually just lost the thing?
This now seriously urges a second thought. You cannot 'boldly' lose something by mistake. You can give something to someone else, thus making a bold gesture, you can also be bold in trusting your own memory to retain the contents of the thing you give from you. But note how Shakespeare does not say anything about passing on this book. Also why would he? And to whom? And then not make this part of the argument, the explanation? There should, in such a case, be good reason: you do not give a gift you've received to someone else without having a good reason to do so. And so Shakespeare having passed this book of tables to someone else, on our likelihood scale from one to twelve slides right down to approximately one point four.
Shakespeare speaks of giving these tables 'from me', not of losing, dropping, mislaying, displacing, let alone forgetting them – remembering them is the whole point of the sonnet – but of boldly giving them from him. This suggests: actively discarding them.
And why would you do that? Well, you would possibly do that for example because they contained incriminating details that should not be in your possession. But we don't know.
What the words tell us with a high level of likelihood, to my mind as high as ten, eleven, is that Shakespeare actively decided to get rid of these tables for some reason or other.
What – if anything – does this say about Will's attitude to his lover's writing?
That depends on how we answer the previous two questions. If he had just lost the book, that would suggest he didn't care too much about it; but that, as we just saw, is actually extremely unlikely. What is far more likely is that Shakespeare cared a fair bit about the book, enough to commit it to his memory and to assure his lover that that's what he has done.
Are we even talking about a real physical book?
I cannot see any reason to believe otherwise, and we've already seen why: it doesn't make sense to compare one metaphor with another and to hold one so categorically above the other. This to my mind is a resounding yes: eleven point seven likely.
And why is this happening now?
An argument is possible. The tone though of the sonnet, the language employed, is reassuring, more than defensive. What it suggests – though here we are in very uncertain territory – is a younger lover who is sad, or disappointed, or taken aback at learning that his book of tables is no more: we hear no appeasement or conflict here, what we hear is mostly someone saying: don't worry, I hold this as dear in my heart as I would have held it close to my chest if I had kept it in my pocket. The words, as we read them today, offer a comforting gesture, rather than a righteous one.
And so the question
Is the sonnet in the right place in the collection?
can probably – at around the ten point mark – be answered, yes.
Whether it also entails a great and substantive mystery that to us is now lost, well, that in itself remains, for reasons that are self-evident, a mystery that may to us be simply lost.
But there is one more aspect that is worth mentioning. John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition of the sonnets discusses an apparently prevailing perception that both this sonnet and Sonnet 77 "have been urged to show that Shakespeare's sequence grew directly out of lived experience: for why else would such trivial objects as notebooks turn up there?"
Kerrigan, like many scholars of his generation, views any biographical reading of the sonnets with scepticism bordering on disdain, but after a brief detour via a French sonnet published in 1578 that bears a passing resemblance insofar as it also tells an addressee, here a lady, that the lover requires no tables other than those of his heart to record her graces, draws a somewhat frustrated conclusion that "Shakespeare found himself tackling a theme which he could not handle with assurance (because the idea of writing carried such weight); biography impinges, once more, through inelegance of argument."
I, as you will know if you have been following this podcast even at a casual level, not only tend to believe that Shakespeare probably could handle most any theme with just about sufficient assurance to make of it good poetry if he put his mind to it, but I am also convinced that while these sonnets may not yield up a strictly coherent chronological biography, they are most certainly – on our scale I would pitch this at level 11.999, possibly recurring – rooted in lived experience. And so it had not occurred to me that this sonnet and Sonnet 77 more than any other might provide evidence of this. But John Kerrigan has a point: even if you don't want the sonnet to have anything to do with Shakespeare's real life, it draws you back to just that: biography impinges. Because it is difficult indeed to think of any plausible reason why this sonnet should exist if it didn't relate to an actual object that contained actual writing by his actual lover, and at that relate to it in such a specific, yet vexingly inconclusive way.
If you have been listening to Sonnetcast for a while, you will, at two or possibly three points have heard me say that something Shakespeare is doing sounds like code. A bit like the kind of code cryptic crossword setters employ when they lift the puzzler onto an answer by dextrous manipulation of how clues are formulated. And you will also have heard me agree with scholars who say that we are still learning how to read a sonnet sequence, because some of the art to us is simply lost.
It is possible that this sonnet really does deal with an essentially trivial matter – with a notebook of no further importance – and that its position in the collection has no significance at all. On our scale of likelihood, I would put this at around three to four, who knows, perhaps even four to five. It certainly is not something we can entirely rule out, though it may be as little likely as a two or three.
If we allow for context though, and through context for time, and assume – as I believe we should, indeed must – that Shakespeare knows what he is doing, and if we accept – as we readily can, since we have ample evidence of it in these sonnets – that he layers meanings, and hides especially sensitive content in coded language and composition, then I consider it far more likely, on our scale at a ten to eleven, that this sonnet serves a purpose, that it is meant to be at number 122 and that the object it refers to is anything but trivial. The fact alone that the sonnet exists would appear to attest to that. But it is no proof.
What there is, though, is a lead into the next sonnet. And the next sonnet, as Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition observes, builds "on his claim in the preceding sonnet that his own steadfast love provides a better bulwark than any physical object can do," and so even though Sonnet 122 arrives apparently out of nowhere, it does not depart to nowhere: it leads us out into a further affirmation of Shakespeare's love and commitment to his young man, no matter what has happened in the past.
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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!