Sonnet 133: Beshrew That Heart That Makes My Heart to Groan
|
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me; Is't not enough to torture me alone, But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be? Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken, And my next self thou harder hast engrossed, Of him, myself and thee I am forsaken, A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed. Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward, But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail; Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard, Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail. And yet thou wilt, for I, being pent in thee, Perforce am thine, and all that is in me. |
|
|
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
|
Woe to or fie upon that heart – the heart in question being yours, my mistress's– which makes my heart groan with the pangs and pains of love...
'Beshrew' is a mild curse that Shakespeare uses only here in the Sonnets but often in the plays, and often in a construction such as 'beshrew thy/her/his or even my heart', in a gently rebuking or ironic, in some instances even affectionate sense. Lorenzo, in Scene 6 of Act II of The Merchant of Venice says Gratiano about Jessica: Beshrew me but I love her heartily, And in Henry IV Part 2, Act V Scene 3, having had quite a bit of wine, the too-true-to his name Robert Shallow, in the company of Falstaff says to Lord Bardolph: Honest Bardolph, welcome! If thou wantst anything and wilt not call, beshrew thy heart. The groaning here referred to, meanwhile, is much that discussed in Sonnet 131: 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. This alone establishes something of a link to Sonnet 131, but that sonnet concluded with the surprising couplet: In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds, And thence this slander as I think proceeds. And here now finally we begin to understand what Shakespeare is talking about, because the reason he is casting a curse – however mild – on his mistress's heart is next explained: |
|
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me:
|
Beshrew your heart for the deep wound it gives both me and my friend.
The wound of course being inflicted by love, as by a cupid's arrow or simply the heartache that it causes and entails, but two additional layers of meaning offer themselves readily, not necessarily in this order: one, the injury that stems from an inherent sense of betrayal in the friend now also being involved with the mistress, and two, a pun on the mistress giving her 'deep wound' to both Shakespeare and his friend, 'wound' at the time being a euphemism for 'vagina'. The ninth poem in The Passionate Pilgrim leaves us in no doubt about this 'entendre': Fair was the morn when the fair queen of love, [* * * ] Paler for sorrow than her milk-white dove, For Adon’s sake, a youngster proud and wild; Her stand she takes upon a steep-up hill; Anon Adonis comes with horn and hounds; She, silly queen, with more than love’s good will, Forbade the boy he should not pass those grounds. “Once,” quoth she, “did I see a fair sweet youth Here in these brakes deep-wounded with a boar, Deep in the thigh, a spectacle of ruth! See in my thigh,” quoth she, “here was the sore.” She showed hers: he saw more wounds than one, And blushing fled, and left her all alone. The Passionate Pilgrim is a collection of 20 poems originally published under William Shakespeare's name, though only five of them are thought certain to be his, with a further five being clearly attributed to other authors and ten being of uncertain or disputed origin. Number 9 falls into this latter category, but it is thematically close to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and stylistically also uses phrases found in Shakespeare, such as 'steep-up hill', which features in Sonnet 7 as 'steep-up heavenly hill', for example, though it is also considered more of a pastiche and may or may not, therefore, be actually Shakespeare's. Still, the use of the word 'wound' in that sense was clearly currency at the time and Shakespeare would undoubtedly have known this. The poem, incidentally, is formally also a sonnet, except for the fact that its second line is missing: both for the first quatrain to make proper sense and for the rhyme scheme and line pattern to work, there should be a line after the first one which rhymes with 'wild'. This is simply absent from the first published text dating to 1599 with no marker or blank line present, and so this is most likely a straightforward printing error resulting from the typesetter having accidentally dropped the line that was in the manuscript, of which we now of course don't know what that was. |
|
Is't not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be? |
Is it not enough for you – as is implied – to torture me alone, but must my sweetest, loveliest, dearest friend, for which here therefore absolutely read my lover, also be utterly subjected by his devotion to you, who you are, as Sonnet 131 also made clear, 'tyrannous' as you enslave men to your love?
The notion of the lover who is a 'slave' to his mistress, is, much as the notion of the mistress being tyrannous or a 'tyraness', a poetic commonplace. Shakespeare himself uses and somewhat subverts it in his Sonnets 57 & 58 when he positions himself as a 'slave' to his young lover, and allows an appreciable note of sarcasm to prevail in doing so, as we saw when discussing the pair of poems: Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do, till you require... A representation of William Shakespeare's state of busy-ness or otherwise we know for practically certain to be patently untrue. PRONUNCIATION: Note that slavery here has two syllables: [slave-ry]. |
|
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed, |
Your cruel eye – cruel because it enslaves us – has taken me from myself, meaning it has made me quite forget who I am and removed me from my normal way of being, it has, in a sense, made me lose myself; and my other self, or the self that is right next to me and therefore a part of me, my friend, you have ensnared or bound up with you even harder, meaning more severely or more strongly.
The idea of the younger lover being 'my [other] self' is by this point well established. Sonnet 62 most memorably concludes: Tis thee, my self, that for myself I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy days. And Sonnet 42 forgives the young man his part in what is very likely to be this very same transgression by concluding: But here's the joy: my friend and I are one. Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone. And this apparent, so as not to say obvious, overlap between the affair of Sonnets 33 through 42 and this group of sonnets here is something we will of course want to examine in quite a bit more detail. 'Engrossed' is a fascinating word in this context, and editors are somewhat at odds as to how many layers of meanings it carries, and crucially which ones. The Oxford English Dictionary offers as definitions, among several others: - "concentrate (property, privileges, functions etc.) in one's own possession, monopolize" - "require the entire use of, utilize all of" and, to us most familiar, - "absorb the whole attention of a person" This latter though comes into use only in the early 18th century, possibly late 17th, and so is in fact unlikely to be what is meant here. The sense we most get is one of the young friend having been taken into possession, though there may well be, as has also been put forward, a pun on 'gross' as in 'vulgar', 'unrefined', 'uncouth', or even 'disgusting', possibly suggesting that he has rather been debased through his association with the mistress. |
|
Of him, myself and thee I am forsaken,
|
Because of you and your actions – as is implied – I am now deprived of him, of myself, and of you.
Some editors read 'myself' here as a description of 'him', the young man, in the exact sense of Sonnet 62 above, so that the line then would read: 'of him, who is my other self, and of you I am forsaken', but that, while it makes sense there, does not really make sense here, where Shakespeare is about to doubly emphasise the triangular aspect of this quite singular constellation: |
|
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.
|
It is a 'thrice threefold' torment to be wronged, thwarted, or opposed in this way.
The 'threefold' nature of being crossed obviously stems from the loss of three entities, the friend to the mistress, the mistress to the friend, and the self to both through them finding each other, again much as Sonnet 42 makes clear. That the torment should be 'thrice' derives from this alone, but also represents an oft-used Shakespeareanism. He clearly likes the sound of 'thrice' to emphasise the magnitude of something, and uses it frequently enough, for example in Sonnet 56: As call it winter, which, being full of care, Makes summer's welcome thrice more wished, more rare. Or in Sonnet 119: So I return rebuked to my content And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent. With similar uses dotted across the plays. |
|
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward,
|
And so, that now being the case, do the following: imprison my heart in the unyielding, steel-gated confine of your bosom.
The notion of a lover's bosom, breast, or chest being a place where one's own heart is locked up tightly is, once again, commonplace. Shakespeare uses it in Sonnet 48, although there he ascribes to it a softer quality than here: Thee have I not locked up in any chest, Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art: Within the gentle closure of my breast, From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part, and he now develops the exact same theme: |
|
But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail;
|
But also do this, whereby 'this' is either one or possibly both of two things that are quite contradictory in meaning, and editors cannot agree on which:
Either, a) Let my poor heart 'bail' as in confine the heart of my friend within itself, so that while I am locked into your bosom, he is locked in mine; or, b) Let my poor heart bail out as in free the heart of my friend, so that it, my heart, then can be his guard, in other words, let me stand in for him and put up bail for him, and then keep him in my 'prison' as it were. And while in most cases of textual ambiguity, editors are content to simply put forward their case, in this instance you will find editors actively negate one or the other of these two meanings. Knowing Shakespeare, though, it is more than a little likely that he is fully aware of both possible readings and as so very often enjoys the layered intricacy of his rhetorical invention. |
|
Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard,
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail. |
Whoever keeps or imprisons me – in this case this is you, my mistress – let my heart be the guard, as in keeper, also protector, also though, then, by association and as becomes clear in a moment, prison guard, of him, my young lover; and that way you cannot then enforce your fierce torture or torment on him within what is after all my jail, over which I have jurisdiction.
Interesting to note, though curiously ignored by editors at large, is the phrasing 'whoever keeps me'. It is perplexingly general and vague. Rather than saying, as would readily be in his powers, 'while you keep me', or 'though thou hast me', or something along those lines and thus acknowledging and affirming the situation as it clearly, according to his own account, is, it suggests that the situation may or may not be so. By saying 'whoever keeps me' Shakespeare makes that particular detail - that it is his mistress who apparently keeps him – sound almost incidental, or secondary of significance. It's the kind of phrase you might employ to relativise or weaken a given set of circumstances: 'Have you taken my pen?' 'No, I haven't.' 'Well, whoever has taken it, I wish they would give it back: I need it.' It sounds ever so slightly petulant and here also somewhat evasive. And that would seem to underline the reluctance with which the whole situation is accepted: both in the sense that my heart is in your chest, and also that my young lover too now is in your thrall. |
|
And yet thou wilt, for I, being pent in thee,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me. |
And yet, of course, you will use your power to torment him too, because I am imprisoned in you and so by necessity I am yours, and with me everything that is in me is yours, and that therefore obviously and necessarily includes him too.
|
In his astonishingly frank Sonnet 133 William Shakespeare attempts to come to terms with the fact that his young lover is also having an affair with his mistress. The sonnet in one fell swoop answers two principal questions: first, what 'black deeds' of his Dark Lady's he may be referring to in the closing couplet of Sonnet 131, and second, who the woman might be that appears in the crisis which besets his relationship with the young man between Sonnets 33 and 42. And while there is of course no external, cast-iron proof that these sonnets do constellate to form a coherent picture, Sonnet 133 is in fact only the first of several sonnets to strongly suggest they do. What it leaves no doubt about, and what subsequent sonnets will make even more explicitly clear, is that William Shakespeare is for the second time in the collection talking about a relationship that has turned triangular.
With Sonnet 132 wedging itself in-between Sonnet 131 and this poem, we may feel tempted to wonder: how sure can we be, really, that this sonnet does reference the 'black deeds' mentioned therein.
But quite apart from the fact that the act alone of giving Shakespeare and his young man both such a 'deep wound' as the lady appears to administer does have the potential, absolutely, to qualify as a bad thing to do and therefore may be considered in the language of the poet a 'black deed', he also links this sonnet directly to Sonnet 131 by connecting the vocabulary used and in fact introduced there.
True, we had heard 'groan' as a noun before, in Sonnet 50, but that was the groan of Shakespeare's horse as he responds to sometimes being, in anger, spurred. The traditional and poetically commonplace verb 'to groan' for love first appears in Sonnet 131 and is picked up intentionally and obviously in the first line of this sonnet, and this sonnet only. In other words: it's not a concept Shakespeare uses or elaborates throughout these sonnets, it enters the Sonnets with 131 from which it leads us by a direct link to Sonnet 133 where it talks about "that heart that makes my heart to groan," in contrast, of course, to the hearts of those who, as Sonnet 131 suggested, do not find their hearts made to groan by the woman always in question, those people clearly not including the young man, as now becomes apparent.
How sure, though, can we be that this 'friend' here is the same friend as the friend of the Fair Youth Sonnets? This poem does not give us much more information about him, and so based on Sonnet 133 alone we might feel hesitant. But the entire Fair Youth section of the sonnets over and over again gave us the impression, and towards the end all but confirmed, that Shakespeare, while admitting to other encounters, is talking to and about one young man who takes precedence over everybody else and who is established, by the end of the segment, as "a god in love, to whom I am confined," as the person with whom he enters a "marriage of true minds."
There are, as you will know if you've been listening to this podcast, people who question this 'narrative' – it is really more of a constellation – of one Fair Youth and one Dark Lady, but the textual evidence really gives us no reason to do so. And if we glance forward a bit, to Sonnet 144, we find that this will actually spell out in its first quatrain what we do have every reason to believe to be the case:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two spirits do suggest me still.
My better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
And so to continue to treat this as a great mystery, with all manner of players potentially being involved, and to claim that the sonnets themselves were somehow unspecific as to the constellation they portray must, if not by now then certainly by then, by the time we get to Sonnet 144, be considered borderline obtuse. True, we have no proof that William Shakespeare here captures the same heartache and the same bewilderment as he does with Sonnets 33 and 34 and then explicitly with Sonnets 40, 41, and 42, but the overlap is so striking, the match so fitting, that we can say with great confidence it is extremely likely. And as we know: in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend...
Quite apart from which, as it happens, the research carried out by Macdonald P Jackson, which we have mentioned on a number of occasions now and which tries to date the sonnets by stylometric analysis, places this group of sonnets early in the sequence of composition, and this further supports the supposition – adopted widely though certainly not universally – that these Dark Lady sonnets deal with the same affair the young man embarks on in the Fair Youth sonnets.
And here it may serve us to listen once again to Sonnet 42, which addresses itself to the young man:
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet, it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief:
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her,
And for my sake, even so, doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross.
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one.
Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.
This then clears the way to a question that genuinely persists: what were they thinking? Seriously: what went on in both this young man and this unconventionally alluring woman's mind, heart, and soul to get it together like that while both being involved with our Will?
And here it is worth bearing in mind and does help to forever keep in our conscious frame of reference that this is a time of intensive living. We've said it before, it does bear saying again: London in the 1590s is a young, dynamic, fast-growing, sexually voracious place. The median age of a person living in London lies in the mid-twenties. There are, it is estimated, some 3,000 prostitutes working in London. That, if true, makes about 1 for every dozen sexually active men. This is a long pre-Victorian era and it is not a particularly prudish age. The reason Shakespeare's plays are littered with bawdy jokes, suggestive puns, and crude allusions is because they were popular and everybody knew that people want and need and do have sex.
Also, there's no porn, there's no internet, there are no hookup apps, and travel is arduous and slow. So to learn that our poet playwright who is living in digs in London two days' ride away from his family in Stratford and who finds himself infatuated – quite possibly for the first time in his life – with a gorgeous young man who nonetheless looks a bit like a girl, is also attracted to and having an intense sexual relationship with a by his own account irresistibly magnetic woman, and to then hear that said beautiful young man either already knows or gets to meet this woman and that she too finds him to be as attractive as Shakespeare finds him and he, this young man, is similarly drawn to this sensual and sensually seductive woman, is not actually all that much of a surprise.
And the timing here may be telling. Everything that we know – and we know little for certain but by now quite a bit on a level to be reasonably deduced – points towards this batch of the sonnets, much as the sonnets numbered 33 to 44, to have been written relatively early in the window that exists for the composition of these sonnets, that window opening approximately 1592 – give or take a year, perhaps – and closing shut for good and certain in 1609 when the collection is published.
We are now entering again the somewhat murky waters of speculation and supposition, but there is an intriguing line in Sonnet 40:
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all.
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call:
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
Whether it should be 'this self' or 'thyself' is a matter of scholarly debate, but if, as we continue to have reason to believe, the addressee of this sonnet is the same young man as the young man of the Procreation Sonnets – the first seventeen in the collection that tell a young man to marry and have children – then what this sonnet appears to be saying to him either way is, you are deceiving yourself by deliberately, and punningly on my name 'wilfully' tasting that which you normally refuse, and what you normally refuse – which is also why I had to write all these sonnets that now sit at the top of the collection for you – is women.
And that would invite – certainly not force, but allow – an understanding of that sonnet, as well as this, as well as even more compellingly the sonnet that follows next, to express that our Will's mistress may well be the first woman his young lover is having a sexual relationship with. And that would weirdly make sense: if you are a young aristocrat who knows you have to get married and produce an heir sooner or later, and you are, though cocky and confident, sexually inexperienced, then allowing yourself to get involved with the woman who is sleeping with your lover is not actually such a bad idea. Shakespeare, though hurt and upset, then rationalises this conduct in his Sonnet 42 by constructing a slightly self-serving excuse for him, "Thou dost love her because thou knowst I love her," which to us sounds almost delusional, but in the circumstances that these people find themselves in, culturally, socially, sexually, it isn't as far-fetched as it seems.
We have noted this before and it too is worth reiterating and bringing back to mind now and then: there is no privacy as we know it in the England of Shakespeare. Neither in the countryside nor in the city: people know each other's business. They live in close clustered proximity, the church and the state have a say in almost everything: what you wear, when you pray, where you go, when you are out of the house and when you are at home. If you sleep around, people will know about it and talk about it: 'slander' in one form or another appears 96 times in Shakespeare's works, six of these in these sonnets, most recently in Sonnet 131:
In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
And thence this slander as I think proceeds.
And so, understandable though the constellation in fact may be, that does not mean, of course, that it is something the world 'approves' of, nor, clearly, is it something that Shakespeare finds easy to deal with. The outrage of Sonnet 34:
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds oretake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
Yielding into the conciliation of Sonnet 35:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
The conflicted sympathy and yet deep sense of betrayal of 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,
And when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed?
Aye me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth:
Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.
All of this is reflected here, and it all will continue to reverberate into Sonnet 134 and beyond...
With Sonnet 132 wedging itself in-between Sonnet 131 and this poem, we may feel tempted to wonder: how sure can we be, really, that this sonnet does reference the 'black deeds' mentioned therein.
But quite apart from the fact that the act alone of giving Shakespeare and his young man both such a 'deep wound' as the lady appears to administer does have the potential, absolutely, to qualify as a bad thing to do and therefore may be considered in the language of the poet a 'black deed', he also links this sonnet directly to Sonnet 131 by connecting the vocabulary used and in fact introduced there.
True, we had heard 'groan' as a noun before, in Sonnet 50, but that was the groan of Shakespeare's horse as he responds to sometimes being, in anger, spurred. The traditional and poetically commonplace verb 'to groan' for love first appears in Sonnet 131 and is picked up intentionally and obviously in the first line of this sonnet, and this sonnet only. In other words: it's not a concept Shakespeare uses or elaborates throughout these sonnets, it enters the Sonnets with 131 from which it leads us by a direct link to Sonnet 133 where it talks about "that heart that makes my heart to groan," in contrast, of course, to the hearts of those who, as Sonnet 131 suggested, do not find their hearts made to groan by the woman always in question, those people clearly not including the young man, as now becomes apparent.
How sure, though, can we be that this 'friend' here is the same friend as the friend of the Fair Youth Sonnets? This poem does not give us much more information about him, and so based on Sonnet 133 alone we might feel hesitant. But the entire Fair Youth section of the sonnets over and over again gave us the impression, and towards the end all but confirmed, that Shakespeare, while admitting to other encounters, is talking to and about one young man who takes precedence over everybody else and who is established, by the end of the segment, as "a god in love, to whom I am confined," as the person with whom he enters a "marriage of true minds."
There are, as you will know if you've been listening to this podcast, people who question this 'narrative' – it is really more of a constellation – of one Fair Youth and one Dark Lady, but the textual evidence really gives us no reason to do so. And if we glance forward a bit, to Sonnet 144, we find that this will actually spell out in its first quatrain what we do have every reason to believe to be the case:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two spirits do suggest me still.
My better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
And so to continue to treat this as a great mystery, with all manner of players potentially being involved, and to claim that the sonnets themselves were somehow unspecific as to the constellation they portray must, if not by now then certainly by then, by the time we get to Sonnet 144, be considered borderline obtuse. True, we have no proof that William Shakespeare here captures the same heartache and the same bewilderment as he does with Sonnets 33 and 34 and then explicitly with Sonnets 40, 41, and 42, but the overlap is so striking, the match so fitting, that we can say with great confidence it is extremely likely. And as we know: in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend...
Quite apart from which, as it happens, the research carried out by Macdonald P Jackson, which we have mentioned on a number of occasions now and which tries to date the sonnets by stylometric analysis, places this group of sonnets early in the sequence of composition, and this further supports the supposition – adopted widely though certainly not universally – that these Dark Lady sonnets deal with the same affair the young man embarks on in the Fair Youth sonnets.
And here it may serve us to listen once again to Sonnet 42, which addresses itself to the young man:
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet, it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief:
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her,
And for my sake, even so, doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross.
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one.
Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.
This then clears the way to a question that genuinely persists: what were they thinking? Seriously: what went on in both this young man and this unconventionally alluring woman's mind, heart, and soul to get it together like that while both being involved with our Will?
And here it is worth bearing in mind and does help to forever keep in our conscious frame of reference that this is a time of intensive living. We've said it before, it does bear saying again: London in the 1590s is a young, dynamic, fast-growing, sexually voracious place. The median age of a person living in London lies in the mid-twenties. There are, it is estimated, some 3,000 prostitutes working in London. That, if true, makes about 1 for every dozen sexually active men. This is a long pre-Victorian era and it is not a particularly prudish age. The reason Shakespeare's plays are littered with bawdy jokes, suggestive puns, and crude allusions is because they were popular and everybody knew that people want and need and do have sex.
Also, there's no porn, there's no internet, there are no hookup apps, and travel is arduous and slow. So to learn that our poet playwright who is living in digs in London two days' ride away from his family in Stratford and who finds himself infatuated – quite possibly for the first time in his life – with a gorgeous young man who nonetheless looks a bit like a girl, is also attracted to and having an intense sexual relationship with a by his own account irresistibly magnetic woman, and to then hear that said beautiful young man either already knows or gets to meet this woman and that she too finds him to be as attractive as Shakespeare finds him and he, this young man, is similarly drawn to this sensual and sensually seductive woman, is not actually all that much of a surprise.
And the timing here may be telling. Everything that we know – and we know little for certain but by now quite a bit on a level to be reasonably deduced – points towards this batch of the sonnets, much as the sonnets numbered 33 to 44, to have been written relatively early in the window that exists for the composition of these sonnets, that window opening approximately 1592 – give or take a year, perhaps – and closing shut for good and certain in 1609 when the collection is published.
We are now entering again the somewhat murky waters of speculation and supposition, but there is an intriguing line in Sonnet 40:
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all.
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call:
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
Whether it should be 'this self' or 'thyself' is a matter of scholarly debate, but if, as we continue to have reason to believe, the addressee of this sonnet is the same young man as the young man of the Procreation Sonnets – the first seventeen in the collection that tell a young man to marry and have children – then what this sonnet appears to be saying to him either way is, you are deceiving yourself by deliberately, and punningly on my name 'wilfully' tasting that which you normally refuse, and what you normally refuse – which is also why I had to write all these sonnets that now sit at the top of the collection for you – is women.
And that would invite – certainly not force, but allow – an understanding of that sonnet, as well as this, as well as even more compellingly the sonnet that follows next, to express that our Will's mistress may well be the first woman his young lover is having a sexual relationship with. And that would weirdly make sense: if you are a young aristocrat who knows you have to get married and produce an heir sooner or later, and you are, though cocky and confident, sexually inexperienced, then allowing yourself to get involved with the woman who is sleeping with your lover is not actually such a bad idea. Shakespeare, though hurt and upset, then rationalises this conduct in his Sonnet 42 by constructing a slightly self-serving excuse for him, "Thou dost love her because thou knowst I love her," which to us sounds almost delusional, but in the circumstances that these people find themselves in, culturally, socially, sexually, it isn't as far-fetched as it seems.
We have noted this before and it too is worth reiterating and bringing back to mind now and then: there is no privacy as we know it in the England of Shakespeare. Neither in the countryside nor in the city: people know each other's business. They live in close clustered proximity, the church and the state have a say in almost everything: what you wear, when you pray, where you go, when you are out of the house and when you are at home. If you sleep around, people will know about it and talk about it: 'slander' in one form or another appears 96 times in Shakespeare's works, six of these in these sonnets, most recently in Sonnet 131:
In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
And thence this slander as I think proceeds.
And so, understandable though the constellation in fact may be, that does not mean, of course, that it is something the world 'approves' of, nor, clearly, is it something that Shakespeare finds easy to deal with. The outrage of Sonnet 34:
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds oretake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
Yielding into the conciliation of Sonnet 35:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
The conflicted sympathy and yet deep sense of betrayal of 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,
And when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed?
Aye me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth:
Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.
All of this is reflected here, and it all will continue to reverberate into Sonnet 134 and beyond...
This project and its website are a work in progress.
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!
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!