Sonnet 131: Thou Art as Tyrannous, so as Thou Art
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Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel, For well thou knowst, to my dear doting heart Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel. Yet in good faith some say that thee behold, Thy face hath not the power to make love groan, To say they err, I dare not be so bold, Although I swear it to myself alone; And to be sure that is not false I swear, A thousand groans but thinking on thy face, One on another's neck, do witness bear: Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place. In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds, And thence this slander as I think proceeds. |
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Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel, |
You are as all-powerful, and as merciless in the way you inhabit your power, such as you are, with – as is here merely implied but certainly meant – your unconventional or non-traditional kind of beauty, as are all those other women whose universally acknowledged and celebrated beauty makes them proud and, in their attitude to their admirers, cruel.
The 'cruel', 'tyrannous' beauty who can only be longed for but never really attained or, as Sonnet 129 might put it, 'possessed', is a stock character of the classical or Petrarchan sonnet form. Petrarch himself calls his beloved Laura 'pitiless and 'fierce' (Canzoniere 140), and in his letters speaks of 'tyrant love' (Epistoles familiares, Book I, Letter 6), and editors generally point to both Edmund Spenser, who in Sonnet 10 of his 1595 sonnet cycle Amoretti calls his mistress a 'tyraness' and Philip Sidney with his famous Astrophel and Stella, published in 1591 but circulating in manuscript form long before then, where in Sonnet 2 he says "I call it praise to suffer tyranny." Shakespeare, we noted once or twice before, is extremely likely to have read or heard Sidney's poems in particular, and in fact we mentioned him not long ago in the context of Sonnet 127, which bears a striking resemblance to Sidney's Sonnet 7. Calling his lady 'tyrannous', then, is not an unusual thing to do, it is a poetic trope that Shakespeare's readers would readily have recognised and that positions Shakespeare's mistress in a long line of ladies eulogised. |
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For well thou knowst, to my dear doting heart,
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel. |
Because you know full well that to my loving, doting heart you are the most beautiful and most precious jewel.
The sentence hides few mysteries and no surprises, but it confirms what the closing couplet of Sonnet 130 already stated: as far as I'm concerned, you're gorgeous, no matter what the world may think. And what the world may think is now further expounded: |
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Yet in good faith some say that thee behold,
Thy face hath not the power to make love groan, |
And yet some people who look at you say that your face does not have the power to elicit sighs of love.
'In good faith' here is somewhat ambiguous, because it is not clear from the sentence nor from the Quarto Edition's punctuation – which is erratic and therefore unreliable in any case – whether this assertion is Shakespeare's or whether it belongs to those who disparage the woman's beauty. If the former, it acts as an emphasis of what the poet himself notes: 'yet, indeed it is the case that some people say this'; if the latter it amplifies and to some extent validates their observation: 'they say this sincerely and really mean it, and, as is implied, have some reason to say so', which then lends further ambiguity to what follows in the next few lines. For love to 'groan', meanwhile, is once more a poetic commonplace. 'Groan' then as now is really an expression of pain – we have so far come across it in Sonnet 50, where Shakespeare's horse groans from the spur "That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide," but Rosalind in As You Like It, Act III, Scene 2 gives a typical example of how a lover is meant to groan as they pine for the object of their love: Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of time as well as a clock. And indeed, 'a thousand groans' are about to feature in this sonnet, while just around the corner Sonnet 133 opens with the line "Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan." |
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To say they err, I dare not be so bold,
Although I swear it to myself alone. |
I would not be so bold as to say – to them directly or in public, as is implied – that these people are wrong who talk about your face in those terms, even though I swear it to myself when I am alone.
Shakespeare here again shows an acute awareness not only of the generally held perception of what is beautiful and of the way in which some people disparage the appearance of his mistress, but also of his own blindness to her obvious flaws. The whole of Sonnet 130 plays on this: she is objectively speaking imperfect, but to his loving – here 'doting' – eyes, she is the rarest beauty there is. It creates, this, a self-conscious distance between him and his love which will be given expression several more times in the remaining sonnets, as we shall see. |
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And to be sure that is not false I swear,
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This has either or both of two meanings:
a) And to prove that it is not false – as in not a lie – that I swear this to myself, the thing that I speak of next happens, or b) And for certain that which I swear is not false, because the thing that I speak of next happens. The Quarto once more has no punctuation, and so many editors steer the interpretation towards their preferred reading by adding commas where they then fit, but as is so often the case, Shakespeare may here very well be shooting for both and enjoy the double layering of meanings. |
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A thousand groans but thinking on thy face,
One on another's neck, do witness bear: Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place. |
And what I speak of next is this: a thousand such love groans as these people say your face could not elicit from anyone come from me when I just think of your face, let alone see it, and they do so one after the other, and they bear witness to that which I swear, which is that in my judgment your black makes you the most beautiful woman, as is implied, there is.
Like the first of these Dark Lady Sonnets, Sonnet 127, this line again plays on the juxtaposition of 'black' as in 'dark' versus 'fair' as in 'light coloured', with 'fair' also meaning 'beautiful' and therefore representing the opposite of a 'black' as in 'ugly'. 'One on another's neck' means one hard on the heels of another or one upon the other, and editors here generally refer to the proverb "one misfortune comes on the neck of another," which, as it happens, lends the line a subtle edge, though the association with 'misfortune' may here be incidental, of course. Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of the Sonnets also points out that "to 'fall on one's neck' is a biblical term for a loving embrace," citing Genesis Chapter 33, Verse 4 and Chapter 45, Verse 14, which read, respectively: And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept. And: And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept; and Benjamin wept upon his neck. As well as Acts 20.37: And they all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him, But these are all in fact fraternal embraces that really have zero erotic connotations and so I consider it extremely unlikely that Shakespeare here is referring to these passages in the Bible when talking about his highly sexually charged mistress. Also, and perhaps even more to the point, his thousand groans come from merely thinking of her face and not when he is with her, embracing her. |
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In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
And thence this slander as I think proceeds. |
You are not black – as in 'ugly' or 'bad' or as here comes strongly into play 'evil' or 'immoral' – in anything except in your actions, and it is from those, I suppose, that the slander reported on you above truly stems.
Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition of the Sonnets points to the courtroom drama that is being played out here with the language of law setting the tone: 'swear', 'witness', 'judgement', 'slander'. And here Shakespeare in a surprise move switches from defending his mistress against her accusers who say she is not beautiful enough to make someone fall in love with her, to declaring, no, no, that's not the point. As far as I'm concerned you are the most beautiful there is, your beauty may be unorthodox, but that's not the problem. The problem is what you do. |
Sonnet 131 connects directly to Sonnet 130 and now invokes a further poetic trope, that of the tyrannous mistress who makes her admirer to groan for love, even though this woman is – as Sonnet 130 made clear – categorically different to those other beauties traditionally so characterised, and, as this poem also is fairly quick to point out, her beauty is not universally considered to have the capacity to make a man thus suffer an aching desire for her.
Shakespeare then once again plays on his awareness of this circumstance and again acknowledges, indeed asserts, that as far as he is concerned she fully has that power so ascribed to other ladies with their light-skinned, fair-haired beauty, and that her darker skin and black hair to him constitute the most beautiful thing there is, only to then in the closing couplet ambush her with a surprising twist: it is not, he startlingly declares, your outward appearance that is black, as in 'ugly', it is your deeds that make you so, and that, as far as I can tell, is where you get your bad reputation from.
The most obvious question that this sonnet therefore poses of course is: what has Shakespeare's mistress done to invite not only such opprobrium of his, but also such slander as he is talking about? It cannot just be the fact that she makes Shakespeare 'suffer' in his love for her, because that is not a deed, that is just a state of being, and one traditionally and generally admired in ladies; it is, after all what this whole tradition of the aloof beauty rests upon: the suffering has to be exacerbated and made intolerable through her conduct
And while this sonnet here provides no further clue, and nor does Sonnet 132, with Sonnet 133 it will become abundantly clear what 'black' deeds of his mistress Shakespeare so strongly disapproves of and is so deeply hurt by. Shakespeare presents us here with something of a cliff hanger and – either subconsciously, or accidentally, or forever the dramatist – keeps us dangling for an entire sonnet to come before revealing it all.
For the entirety of Sonnet 132 Shakespeare returns to the notion – also already established in Sonnet 127 – that his lady's eyes are like mourners, and he pleads with her to allow her heart to similarly show pity on him, presumably for the same suffering her actions cause him and, as is then implied, to cease or ease them. And so we are put in limbo for another full fourteen lines after this, having to make do with the central insight this sonnet provides, which is simply that there are black deeds the lady commits. And this in turn furnishes our poet with an additional register of play on words, because 'black' is now already no longer just juxtaposed with 'fair' to mean both the opposite of 'light coloured' or 'white' and also of 'beautiful' and thus signify – in the eyes of some beholders though not, emphatically, his – 'ugly', but it acquires a moral and ethical dimension: black deeds are unequivocally bad.
Sonnet 131 then serves us as a first indicator that this Dark Lady in question is somebody who is not only 'unorthodox' in her beauty – a beauty which Shakespeare now for the third time describes as one the world generally didn't or in fact still doesn't recognise and that he is aware lies therefore mostly in his, the beholder's, eyes – but also someone who is deeply flawed in her character.
You may recall our conversation early on in this podcast with Professor Stephen Regan who pointed out that one of many factors that make William Shakespeare's sonnet cycle so highly unusual as to be unique is that not only does it speak to and about two loves, one of whom, and by some margin the more prominent one, being a man, but that both these characters are anything but perfect. They are both drawn in the multitude of their human frailties just as much as in their irresistible charms.
And this is a theme that from now on in will come to dominate these sonnets: the conflict in William Shakespeare's heart and mind, his body and soul, between what he sees in and knows about his mistress and, most viscerally felt and most painfully experienced, what she does to him and his physical and emotional state and therefore wellbeing.
And indeed, if what these sonnets are soon to tell us about Shakespeare's mistress is true – as we have every reason to believe it is – then even by today's standards, her actions – allowing for the fact that she can scarcely be held solely responsible for them alone – are still truly shocking, even, if we have any empathy for our poet Will at all, upsetting.
Shakespeare then once again plays on his awareness of this circumstance and again acknowledges, indeed asserts, that as far as he is concerned she fully has that power so ascribed to other ladies with their light-skinned, fair-haired beauty, and that her darker skin and black hair to him constitute the most beautiful thing there is, only to then in the closing couplet ambush her with a surprising twist: it is not, he startlingly declares, your outward appearance that is black, as in 'ugly', it is your deeds that make you so, and that, as far as I can tell, is where you get your bad reputation from.
The most obvious question that this sonnet therefore poses of course is: what has Shakespeare's mistress done to invite not only such opprobrium of his, but also such slander as he is talking about? It cannot just be the fact that she makes Shakespeare 'suffer' in his love for her, because that is not a deed, that is just a state of being, and one traditionally and generally admired in ladies; it is, after all what this whole tradition of the aloof beauty rests upon: the suffering has to be exacerbated and made intolerable through her conduct
And while this sonnet here provides no further clue, and nor does Sonnet 132, with Sonnet 133 it will become abundantly clear what 'black' deeds of his mistress Shakespeare so strongly disapproves of and is so deeply hurt by. Shakespeare presents us here with something of a cliff hanger and – either subconsciously, or accidentally, or forever the dramatist – keeps us dangling for an entire sonnet to come before revealing it all.
For the entirety of Sonnet 132 Shakespeare returns to the notion – also already established in Sonnet 127 – that his lady's eyes are like mourners, and he pleads with her to allow her heart to similarly show pity on him, presumably for the same suffering her actions cause him and, as is then implied, to cease or ease them. And so we are put in limbo for another full fourteen lines after this, having to make do with the central insight this sonnet provides, which is simply that there are black deeds the lady commits. And this in turn furnishes our poet with an additional register of play on words, because 'black' is now already no longer just juxtaposed with 'fair' to mean both the opposite of 'light coloured' or 'white' and also of 'beautiful' and thus signify – in the eyes of some beholders though not, emphatically, his – 'ugly', but it acquires a moral and ethical dimension: black deeds are unequivocally bad.
Sonnet 131 then serves us as a first indicator that this Dark Lady in question is somebody who is not only 'unorthodox' in her beauty – a beauty which Shakespeare now for the third time describes as one the world generally didn't or in fact still doesn't recognise and that he is aware lies therefore mostly in his, the beholder's, eyes – but also someone who is deeply flawed in her character.
You may recall our conversation early on in this podcast with Professor Stephen Regan who pointed out that one of many factors that make William Shakespeare's sonnet cycle so highly unusual as to be unique is that not only does it speak to and about two loves, one of whom, and by some margin the more prominent one, being a man, but that both these characters are anything but perfect. They are both drawn in the multitude of their human frailties just as much as in their irresistible charms.
And this is a theme that from now on in will come to dominate these sonnets: the conflict in William Shakespeare's heart and mind, his body and soul, between what he sees in and knows about his mistress and, most viscerally felt and most painfully experienced, what she does to him and his physical and emotional state and therefore wellbeing.
And indeed, if what these sonnets are soon to tell us about Shakespeare's mistress is true – as we have every reason to believe it is – then even by today's standards, her actions – allowing for the fact that she can scarcely be held solely responsible for them alone – are still truly shocking, even, if we have any empathy for our poet Will at all, upsetting.
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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!