Sonnet 128: How Oft When Thou, My Music, Music Playst
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How oft when thou, my music, music playst
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently swayst The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap, At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand. To be so tickled they would change their state And situation with those dancing chips, Ore whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait, Making dead wood more blessed than living lips. Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss. |
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How oft when thou, my music, music playst
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers, |
How often when you, who are like music to me or who you are my music – for which read my delight, my joy, that which gives me pleasure – how often, when you play music on that wooden instrument which is blessed because it enjoys the privilege of your caress, and whose mechanism produces its sound in response to the touch of your lovely fingers...
There is a surely intentional note of playfulness, irony, even conceitedness, not only in the repetition of the word 'music', but also in the notion of the 'blessed wood' that is being played on by the lady's 'sweet fingers'. To what extent we can say that it is also sexually suggestive is difficult for us today to say: wood is not a word that Shakespeare uses salaciously elsewhere, but the fact that he deploys it three times in this sonnet and, interestingly, nowhere else in the sonnets, may yet be significant. And if you enjoy a fine point of literary detail as much as I do, you will perhaps wonder what the rhetorical device is that Shakespeare draws on here with "when thou, my music, music playst." Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition cites Stephen Booth in his highly regarded analytically commentated edition, as identifying this as an antistasis, but that is not actually, strictly, what it is. An antistasis is the use of the same word twice in a row with different meanings, but the emphasis there is on these different meanings contradicting each other directly or at least standing in great contrast to each other: hence the Greek meaning of the word, antistasis, which is 'opposition'. But the two uses of the word 'music' in this sonnet do not stand in opposition to each other: the first instance of 'music' here is a metaphor: the loved lady is metaphorical music to the poet, whereas the second 'music' is literally music, the music she plays on the instrument. And it so happens there is no technical term for this. When antistasis is a contrastive repetition, this is really a harmonic repetition. Closest perhaps comes antanaclasis, but that usually involves a stronger, more deliberate pun than is here achieved. And so we might call this, and I freely admit to having solicited some help here from my virtual friend ChatGPT, a sympathetic antanaclasis, or perhaps a semantic echo, but not, I have to insist, no matter how much I respect Katherine Duncan-Jones or Stephen Booth, an antistasis. PRONUNCIATION: Note that blessed here has two syllables: bles-sèd. |
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when thou gently swayst
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, |
The observation of the lady playing music continues: when you with your gently swaying motion cause the strings of the instrument to sound in these harmonies which amaze or surprise my ear.
'Confounds' in other instances in Shakespeare has a much more negative, even destructive meaning. Take Sonnet 5, for example: For never-resting time leads summer on To hideous winter and confounds him there, or Sonnet 60: And Time that gave doth now his gift confound. In fact, all six instances in the Sonnets prior to this one have a meaning of destruction and undoing. Whether Shakespeare is aware of this and here deliberately uses a word that could as easily mean 'amazes' or 'surprises my ears' in a good way, as 'wrecks my ears', we cannot tell. It would be, for certain, a somewhat devious trick to be playing on his lady, especially so early on in these, to the collection, new proceedings, but knowing our Shakespeare and his puns and double meanings, it is, to say the very least, possible... |
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Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, |
How often when I thus see and hear you play on that wooden instrument do I envy the keys which nimbly leap up to kiss the tender inside of your hand.
The instrument that is being played here by the lady, as now becomes clear, is a harpsichord, or a smaller version of it, the spinet or the virginals: a keyboard instrument in which the strings are plucked, rather than struck as they are on the pianoforte, which hadn't yet been invented at the time. Technically, the jacks on a harpsichord type instrument are the vertical pieces of wood that sit at the end of the key levers. Attached to the jacks are small tabs made of quill or today a high performance plastic, such as delrin, which pluck the string when the key is being depressed. The jacks do not, therefore, leap to kiss the inward of the player's hand no matter how tenderly the player strokes the keys, they sit inside the instrument and are virtually never touched by the player, but Shakespeare here clearly either mistakes the jacks for the keys, or he likes the association of 'jacks' with 'uncouth fellows' or 'knaves' or, as he later calls them 'saucy jacks' and really doesn't care that what he means is the 'keys' when he so mislabels them. The palm of the hand, meanwhile, was considered to be what today we might call an erogenous zone, and touching, let alone kissing it was an act or sign of great intimacy. In Othello, for example, Act I, Scene 2, Iago observes how Cassio touches Desdemona's hand. Cassio does so in support and friendship, but Iago knows that it will look compromising to someone who doesn't trust him: He takes her by the palm. Ay, well said, whisper. With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Whereby, if we are being pedantic, we should also note that the keys of a harpsichord or similar instrument do not kiss the palm of the player's hand, metaphorically or otherwise, no matter how much they leap, unless the player has terrible hand posture; they kiss, if anything, the fingertips, but, as has been pointed out, the fingertips too can be considered the inward of the hand, and in late Elizabethan early Jacobean society there is a great difference being made between kissing the tops of a person's fingers in a courtly gesture, often and properly without actually making contact, and kissing the inside tips of the fingers, which is a far more erotically charged gesture, and would certainly no longer qualify as merely polite. And if we weren't so sure whether we should read 'wood' above as having a sexually suggestive meaning, the innuendo now gradually crescendoes: 'to leap' is not in itself that saucy, but when Jacks leap to kiss a lady's fingertips, we are reminded – and it would seem deliberately – of the leaping-house, which in Shakespeare is a whore house or a brothel. |
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Whilst my poor lips, which should thy harvest reap,
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand. |
And this happens while my lips, which should be the ones that are allowed to reap the abundance of your tendernesses or your kisses, blush at the sheer boldness of the wood which behaves in such a libertine way with your hands.
By now, Shakespeare is quite liberally and provocatively mixing things up. Lips do not usually stand, nor do they usually blush. What does stand, in a man who is observing a sexually arousing scene is his 'wood', euphemistically speaking, and what may blush in such a situation is either he himself or possibly the person realising they are the cause of such an involuntary response, especially if they were a lady of some decorum, playing the appropriately named, one would hope and imagine, virginals, or the harpsichord or the spinet, of an afternoon in his otherwise perfectly couth presence, as one does... |
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To be so tickled they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips, |
In order to be tickled in this way they, my lips, would gladly, as is implied, trade places with those dancing chips: the keys of the instrument...
The fact that the lips would swap not only their situation – the place where they are in relation to the lady's fingers – but also their state, is possibly significant: the state of the lips is that they 'blushing stand', whereas the keys, here called chips, are 'dancing'. In other words, my lips and therefore by extension I would much rather be engaged in a rhythmic motion with you, than stand here paralysed and embarrassed; or possibly also, and perhaps a touch more prosaically, my lips and therefore by extension I would rather be wood and so tickled by you, than flesh in the absence of kisses. |
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Ore whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blessed than living lips. |
...across which – the keys – your fingers walk with their gentle gait, in doing so making the dead wood that the keys are made of more blessed – more privileged, more happy – than the lips of a living person, namely me.
The playing of the lady is here for the second time characterised as gentle: earlier, Shakespeare spoke of "when thou gently swayst," and here it is the "gentle gait" with which her fingers walk – rather than dance, or jump, or let alone leap – across the keyboard. It evokes the image of a meditative, serene playing, rather than a virtuosic one, with the excitement and agitation about it belonging entirely to the keys and to the poet. Here, as well as in the couplet below, the Quarto has 'their fingers', which is generally accepted to be a typical 'their/thy' confusion by the typesetter and universally corrected to 'thy'. |
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Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss. |
And since these saucy jacks, the keys, are so happy in this, in being gently stroked by your fingers and being allowed to kiss them, give them as you have been doing your fingers, and give me your lips to kiss.
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With Sonnet 128, William Shakespeare employs the well-worn poetic trope of a lover who envies the musical instrument being played by his mistress its proximity to her and the delight of her touch. He either imagines or recalls watching her play a harpsichord or similar keyboard and wishes he could trade places with the keys that seem to be kissing her fingertips. But this not being possible, or – as he actually puts it – the keys enjoying themselves as much as they do, he suggests that she continue to allow the keys to kiss her fingers, while he should be allowed to kiss her lips.
Sonnet 128 is one of those poems that could, in theory, be written by almost anyone to anyone: the recipient is not characterised nor is their gender specified, which prompts some people to suggest it might also be written to a man. This is possible, but doesn't make sense if the sonnet's position in the collection is taken into account, which follows directly the introduction, with Sonnet 127, of the poet's mistress. Whether this mistress here is the same as in the previous sonnet we can't be sure, of course, and it is possible, again mostly in theory, that either Shakespeare, if he curated the 1609 collection himself, or whoever did so, simply inserted this sonnet where they felt it would fit. Certainly, we can say nothing from this sonnet about either the poet or the poem's subject other than that, according to it, he fancies her and would like to kiss her, and – depending a bit on how much we are prepared to read into the potentially more suggestive lines – that he is sexually aroused by watching her play.
In many ways, this sonnet then is even more generic than the previous one. That at least gave us an idea of how we should imagine the mistress, and it made an interesting enough, though by no means unique, argument about the nature and perception of beauty. This sonnet, by contrast, stays absolutely within an established convention, which in itself, coming from Shakespeare, and following the virtuosity of the sonnets we've been looking at until now, may seem surprising.
On previous occasions when we found Shakespeare doing something that puzzled us, we have asked ourselves: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare writing this, and doing so now?
This is a fair question in the context of Sonnet 128 too. Of all the poems we have come across so far, it is one of the least properly personal ones: it sounds like it could in fact have been composed purely as an exercise in sonnet writing, because it gives us so little of Shakespeare's specific mind, let alone his heart and soul.
And here it is interesting and relevant to note that he uses the same poetic conceit in his blood-drenched first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 4, in an extremely serious context: Lavinia, daughter of the eponymous Titus, has been mutilated with both her hands chopped off, her tongue cut out, and she has been raped by both Demetrius and Chiron, the sons of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in an act of brutal revenge for the killing of their older brother Alarbus by Titus. When Marcus, Lavinia's uncle, discovers her, he laments the dreadful crimes that have been committed against her, and says of the person who did this to her:
O, had the monster seen those lily hands
Tremble like aspen leaves upon a lute
And make the silken strings delight to kiss them,
He would not then have touched them for his life.
Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's early plays, generally believed to have been written between approximately 1589 and 1593, possibly in collaboration with George Peele. The play was certainly performed by January 1594 and published in the same year, which tallies well with an approximate date of composition for this sonnet in the early part of the 1590s, and so by the time Ben Jonson comes to satirise the lover who pines for his mistress through her instrument in 1599 he may well be aware of this and poking fun at Shakespeare who by then is well established and whom Jonson – with some friendly rivalry – holds in high esteem.
Here is his foppish character named Fastidious Brisk talking about the woman he is besotted with, Saviolina, playing the viola:
You see the subject of her sweet fingers there?
Oh, she tickles it so, that
She makes it laugh most divinely;
I'll tell you a good jest now, and yourself shall say it's a good one: I have wished myself to be that instrument, I think, a thousand times, and not so few, by heaven!
So is Sonnet 128 a serious meditation on love and desire, or a playful, slightly saucy, evocation of blushing lust, or does it deliberately serve as an unencumbered prelude to the profoundly troubled Sonnet 129 that follows? Any and all of these may be the case. The sonnet sits well where it does if we continue to assume that this group starts around the same time or even before the Fair Youth Sonnets kick in: it has a youthful, lighthearted, dextrous but not, we would probably argue, masterful tone, it employs an established poetic trope and makes it work for itself without, however, taking it anywhere, it is the kind of poem a man who has or wishes he had a mistress would write about her. And it sounds just like the kind of sonnet he would write before he had tasted those lips he so craved.
Whereas the Sonnet that now follows, Sonnet 129, most categorically, decidedly, does not sound like that...
Sonnet 128 is one of those poems that could, in theory, be written by almost anyone to anyone: the recipient is not characterised nor is their gender specified, which prompts some people to suggest it might also be written to a man. This is possible, but doesn't make sense if the sonnet's position in the collection is taken into account, which follows directly the introduction, with Sonnet 127, of the poet's mistress. Whether this mistress here is the same as in the previous sonnet we can't be sure, of course, and it is possible, again mostly in theory, that either Shakespeare, if he curated the 1609 collection himself, or whoever did so, simply inserted this sonnet where they felt it would fit. Certainly, we can say nothing from this sonnet about either the poet or the poem's subject other than that, according to it, he fancies her and would like to kiss her, and – depending a bit on how much we are prepared to read into the potentially more suggestive lines – that he is sexually aroused by watching her play.
In many ways, this sonnet then is even more generic than the previous one. That at least gave us an idea of how we should imagine the mistress, and it made an interesting enough, though by no means unique, argument about the nature and perception of beauty. This sonnet, by contrast, stays absolutely within an established convention, which in itself, coming from Shakespeare, and following the virtuosity of the sonnets we've been looking at until now, may seem surprising.
On previous occasions when we found Shakespeare doing something that puzzled us, we have asked ourselves: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare writing this, and doing so now?
This is a fair question in the context of Sonnet 128 too. Of all the poems we have come across so far, it is one of the least properly personal ones: it sounds like it could in fact have been composed purely as an exercise in sonnet writing, because it gives us so little of Shakespeare's specific mind, let alone his heart and soul.
And here it is interesting and relevant to note that he uses the same poetic conceit in his blood-drenched first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 4, in an extremely serious context: Lavinia, daughter of the eponymous Titus, has been mutilated with both her hands chopped off, her tongue cut out, and she has been raped by both Demetrius and Chiron, the sons of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in an act of brutal revenge for the killing of their older brother Alarbus by Titus. When Marcus, Lavinia's uncle, discovers her, he laments the dreadful crimes that have been committed against her, and says of the person who did this to her:
O, had the monster seen those lily hands
Tremble like aspen leaves upon a lute
And make the silken strings delight to kiss them,
He would not then have touched them for his life.
Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's early plays, generally believed to have been written between approximately 1589 and 1593, possibly in collaboration with George Peele. The play was certainly performed by January 1594 and published in the same year, which tallies well with an approximate date of composition for this sonnet in the early part of the 1590s, and so by the time Ben Jonson comes to satirise the lover who pines for his mistress through her instrument in 1599 he may well be aware of this and poking fun at Shakespeare who by then is well established and whom Jonson – with some friendly rivalry – holds in high esteem.
Here is his foppish character named Fastidious Brisk talking about the woman he is besotted with, Saviolina, playing the viola:
You see the subject of her sweet fingers there?
Oh, she tickles it so, that
She makes it laugh most divinely;
I'll tell you a good jest now, and yourself shall say it's a good one: I have wished myself to be that instrument, I think, a thousand times, and not so few, by heaven!
So is Sonnet 128 a serious meditation on love and desire, or a playful, slightly saucy, evocation of blushing lust, or does it deliberately serve as an unencumbered prelude to the profoundly troubled Sonnet 129 that follows? Any and all of these may be the case. The sonnet sits well where it does if we continue to assume that this group starts around the same time or even before the Fair Youth Sonnets kick in: it has a youthful, lighthearted, dextrous but not, we would probably argue, masterful tone, it employs an established poetic trope and makes it work for itself without, however, taking it anywhere, it is the kind of poem a man who has or wishes he had a mistress would write about her. And it sounds just like the kind of sonnet he would write before he had tasted those lips he so craved.
Whereas the Sonnet that now follows, Sonnet 129, most categorically, decidedly, does not sound like that...
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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!