Sonnet 134: So Now I Have Confessed That He Is Thine
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So now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I myself am mortgaged to thy will, Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still. But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, For thou art covetous, and he is kind, He learnt but surety-like to write for me, Under that bond that him as fast doth bind. The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take, Thou usurer that putst forth all to use, And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake, So him I lose through my unkind abuse. Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me, He pays the whole, and yet am I not free. |
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So now I have confessed that he is thine,
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Now that I have admitted and conceded that he, my young lover, also belongs to you...
The sonnet continues directly from the previous poem which concluded that the young man be 'locked up' in Shakespeare's heart which however in turn remained imprisoned in the lady's 'steel bosom', and that the poet himself as well as everything that belongs to him therefore belongs to his mistress, including the young man. |
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And I myself am mortgaged to thy will,
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And I myself am beholden, pledged, or 'bonded' as in bound, to your wish and desire.
This desire here clearly also has a sexual connotation, not least as 'will' at the time was a euphemism for both the male and female sexual organs, as Sonnet 135 is about to demonstrate with its near obsessive punning on 'will'. It has been suggested that 'thy will' here may also refer to either a) the lady's husband, or b) the young man, in each case presuming that their first name also is William. If the former were the case then this would imply that Shakespeare was somehow in his business dealings beholden or tied to his mistress's husband, which is possible but not evidenced elsewhere; if the latter then that would identify the young man as a William and rather narrow down the field of candidates, strongly favouring William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. This too is possible, but considering that in none of the 126 sonnets that are actually addressed to or written about the young man Shakespeare has come anywhere near as close to revealing his lover's identity, it would seem extremely unlikely for him to do so now, in such a casual manner. Also, unlike for Sonnet 135 and indeed Sonnet 136, the Quarto Edition here employs neither a capital W nor italics, both of which are there used to emphasise the multiple meanings of 'will', and so this is much more likely to be a pun here merely on the woman's increasingly strongly implied sexual rapaciousness. |
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Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still. |
Now that this is the case, that we are both thus in your possession and/or beholden to you, I will forfeit or surrender myself, so that, or on condition that, you will restore to me my other self, meaning my young lover, so he can continue to be my comfort and joy.
Shakespeare effectively reiterates the proposition made in the previous sonnet – you keep me in the prison of your heart but release him so he can be guarded by mine – but now coaches it in financially situated legal terms: I will give myself up to you as long as you give him back to me. As in the previous sonnet though, Shakespeare quickly realises that this won't work: |
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But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
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But you will not do so, nor will he be thus freed...
In both 'thou wilt not' and 'he will not' there is a subtle nuance that may be significant enough: at surface level in each case of course the phrasing means 'this is not going to happen', with the meaning centred on the future tense of 'to be'. But just underneath in each case there is also a possible implication that this is to some extent a matter of choice: it is not your will to do so, nor is it his will to be thus freed. In the case of the lady this makes somewhat more sense since this as well as several other of these sonnets strongly suggest that she is wilful and deliberate in her pursuit of both the poet and his lover. In the case of the young lover though it is less compelling, let alone convincing, not so much because he is inherently too innocent to be seduced by her, but because of the reasons the sonnet itself is about to offer: |
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For thou art covetous, and he is kind,
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Because you are covetous, and he is kind.
The Oxford Languages definition of 'covetous' is: "having or showing a great desire to possess something belonging to someone else," and this biblical meaning that goes beyond being merely 'greedy', 'possessive', or 'selfish' is surely significant. The tenth commandment in Exodus Chapter 20, in the King James Version of The Bible reads: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's. And these sonnets leave no doubt that Shakespeare sees his young lover as his and that therefore his mistress actively seeks to have something that is not rightfully hers. He, the young lover, meanwhile, is kind, not just generally, though that is implied too, but also because: |
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He learnt but surety-like to write for me
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind. |
He only learnt to sign his name as a guarantor for me on that document which binds me to you but which actually he now finds binds him just as tightly to you too.
This complex line is tricky to unpick: the fact that the young lover 'learnt' to 'write for me' suggests that he was somehow taught or instructed or asked or otherwise drafted in to act as a guarantor for the poet. What exactly a 'guarantor' is in a bond of love, remains open to interpretation: some editors read it to mean that the young man may have been asked to put in a good word for Shakespeare, which would make him a wooer on his behalf. This is possible and considering the generally assumed and accepted high status and overall connectedness of the young man would have a good chance of being effective. Others go as far as to suggest that he actually wrote love letters on behalf of the poet, which stretches our credulity a little further but also can't be entirely ruled out. In any case, the young man thus having become involved in some way or other on behalf of the poet has now led to him being equally tied to the lady, because the lady will have what she now sees herself as being entitled to: |
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The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
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You will enforce the rights and privileges afforded to you by your beauty...
These rights or titles, as in entitlements, are the ones laid out metaphorically in the bond that the poet has 'signed' and to which the young man has added his signature as a surety. |
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Thou usurer that putst forth all to use,
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And you do so because you, the mistress, are like the kind of usurer or money lender who will put forth, as in make available, everything and anything they have so as to get as much interest and therefore profit out of it as possible.
'Usurer', as we noted when discussing Sonnet 4, has broadly negative connotations in Shakespeare, because although usury or the lending of money for interest has by this time been made legal, it is still considered sinful, as Sonnet 6 then also makes clear but relativises: That use is not forbidden usury Which happies those that pay the willing loan; That's for thyself to breed another thee, Or ten times happier be it ten for one. Calling his mistress a "usurer that putst forth all to use" in the context of love is not entirely subtle, nor particularly flattering, since matters of love more often than not, and certainly here – and Tina Turner's protestation to the opposite effect four hundred years later notwithstanding – are bound up with sex, and so this would appear to imply that she has an insatiable sexual appetite and will 'put forth' as in put out or hand out everything she's got to anyone, so long as she can profit from it by satisfying her desire. |
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And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake,
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And with this greed of yours you will therefore not shy away from suing – both as in making a suit for sexual affections and as in pursuing and calling in this supposed 'debt' to you – a friend who only ever came to you – or simply became – a debtor on my behalf.
This further supports the idea that the young man had been 'employed' by Shakespeare to act or speak on his behalf, that, in other words, his involvement with the Dark Lady comes as a direct result of, and contingent upon, Shakespeare seeking to make her his mistress in the first place. |
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So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
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And so as a result of all this I lose him through this unkind treatment of mine.
Shakespeare here once more remains tantalisingly ambiguous: 'my unkind abuse' can mean any or all of three things: a) the unkind treatment that I am receiving from you, my mistress, in all this; b) the unkind treatment I have shown to my lover by imposing on him with my request to woo or intervene on my behalf; c) the unkind treatment that I have unwittingly inflicted on my lover at your hands by getting him involved and effectively handing him over to you. I would not put it beyond Shakespeare, as you will know if you've been following this podcast, to quite deliberately layer his meanings so as to apply all three, but what rather favours a) as the primary and maybe even only genuinely intended one is Sonnet 42: 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. After all, asking your friend, whom you have declared your love to and whom you may or may not, by that time, have a sexual relationship with, to help you woo a woman whom the world at large does not believe is beautiful enough to make men's hearts 'to groan' but whom you find irresistible is – depending somewhat on the emotional vectors and balance within your friendship – not strictly unkind. It may be extremely insensitive if the 'friend' is very deeply in love with you and you yourself are oblivious to this, and that would amount to an unkindness too, but that's not so much the sense we are getting, nor do we ever get the impression that the young man is one-sidedly in love with Shakespeare, if anything, we at times might sense a little almost the opposite. Whereas it is telling that Shakespeare here as in Sonnet 42 employs the term 'abuse' to describe what the mistress is doing to him by allowing his friend to 'approve her'. |
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Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me,
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free. |
And so this is the situation as it now stands: I have lost him to you too, you now possess both him and me, he – who he had come into this only ever as a guarantor for me – ends up paying the whole debt owed to you, and yet I am still not actually free from this bond that ties me to you.
The 'bond' is and remains one of love and here rather more to the point, sex: the suggestion strongly is that the young man pays the debt owed to the mistress sexually, but this, because of her implied and also expressed greed is clearly not enough: I, the poet, even though my friend who has stood surety for me is stepping in to cough up what's due, am still further obliged to you. The sexual innuendo is underlined and reinforced by the ever so slightly crude pun on 'hole', although I would stop short of suggesting, as some editors have done, that the young man 'paying the hole' here literally means he is paying for sex with the mistress. 'Whole' is all but certain to be intended as a double entendre and pun on 'hole' but the young man paying it is really far more likely to be meant metaphorically: giving it what he's got to satisfy it would seem quite enough, I warrant... |
Sonnet 134 continues the argument from Sonnet 133 and now refines the plea made by that sonnet for the young lover to be freed from the mistress's shackles and develops it effectively into a proposed bargain: since he has put his name on the same bond that ties me to you as a guarantor only, I will forfeit myself to you if you release him back to me.
This, the poet immediately realises, is not, however, going to get him anywhere, because the mistress, already in possession of both, will exercise her full title in both and have them both, and so although, as the sonnet also suggests, the young man was only ever brought into her orbit on Shakespeare's behalf, he too is now lost to the mistress and pays Shakespeare's debt to her, without this being enough though to release either of them from being held captive by and thus enthralled to her.
The two sonnets can just about stand each on their own, but when considered a proper pair and looked at together, they become somewhat bigger than the sum of their parts, and so we will at the end of this episode listen to them both back to back.
Before we do so though, the most pressing issue that is raised by this second part of the deliberation contained within these two poems merits our immediate attention.
He learnt but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
What is Shakespeare here talking about? It is the most intriguing couple of lines we've come across in a while, and it is woven firmly into this now resolutely triangular constellation when Shakespeare continues:
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer that putst forth all to use,
And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake.
The reading that most readily offers itself and that editors quite generally tend to adopt is that the young man was in one way or another enlisted by Shakespeare to speak, write, plead, or in some other way act on his behalf, and that this has now backfired because the mistress simply ensnared him too.
Leaving aside for the time-being the question of 'blame', 'responsibility', or 'agency' in such a scenario, which we will come to in a moment, the sonnet thus opens up the possibility of a sequence of events that has William Shakespeare meeting his Dark Lady, finding her attractive, seeking to initiate a relationship with her, and drawing upon his young lover to help him achieve his objective.
For us today, this may sound a little outlandish, but for Shakespeare and his contemporaries it is not in fact all that eccentric a way of going about things. Mediated wooing is notably conspicuous in Shakespeare's plays, both dramatic and comedic, and it is maybe telling that on several occasions the person being wooed falls for the wooer-by-proxy.
In Twelfth Night it is Viola, disguised as Cesario, who woos Olivia on behalf of Orsino, only for Viola to fall for her, thinking that she is a man.
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Proteus is tasked with helping win Silvia for Thurio, an endeavour he appropriates for himself, though without success, since Silvia bats off his advances, knowing that he is already betrothed to his own Julia.
In Much Ado About Nothing the device is used underhand by Don Pedro to make Claudio jealous and get him to reject and shame his beloved Hero; in As You Like It Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, teaches Orlando how to woo herself, and in several other plays people become involved as intermediaries or messengers: all of which suggests not only that the audience at the time was clearly familiar with the conceit, but would also have considered its use in pursuit of love reasonably plausible.
There are good reasons for this: as we saw when discussing the last two sonnets, women were not meant to proactively chase men, and simply going up to a lady and talking to her about the weather without proper introduction was not the done thing for a gentleman. For a courtship of any kind to be successful in the higher echelons, the intervention of someone of high social status, and/or someone already connected to the woman being wooed would be extremely beneficial in many sets of circumstances.
If this is what these two sonnets are telling us – and we have to emphasise that this is by no means certain, though it does appear high on the possibility scale, so as not to call it outright likely – then this would solve a great mystery that has been lingering in the background all this time and that we have flagged up once or maybe twice but never previously been able to examine in anything resembling depth: how come the fact that William Shakespeare has a mistress is never brought up? Is never thematised, is never an issue in its own right.
Remember how this unfolds in the Fair Youth section of the sonnets, and bear in mind that chronologically we are finding ourselves here not in sequence but in parallel to these events, and that these events would appear to be happening early on in the 'story', such as it is, of the sonnets:
With Sonnet 33, soon after Sonnet 31 which told the young man that he has "all the all of me," although that may at that point still have been wishful thinking if we were to interpret it sexually, we get a first indication of bad weather on the horizon:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendour on my brow,
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine:
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
Sonnet 34 bursts the cloud and emphatically admonishes the young man for wrongdoing, a storm which passes as quickly as it approached and evaporates in a redeeming closing couplet:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
Sonnet 35 continues that very thought of forgiveness with:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
and then we get four sonnets that appear to talk about other things.
Then, with Sonnets 40 to 42, the explanation for all this upheaval: the person the young man has got off with was none other than Shakespeare's mistress:
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.
At no point prior to or for more obvious reasons in all this does Shakespeare feel the need to explain to his young man that he has a mistress, or who that mistress is, nor does he ever apologise for her, nor does he introduce her, nor does he suggest that there is anything wrong with him having a mistress. That is just taken as read.
Also later, when Shakespeare, as in Sonnet 61 for example, complains:
For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.
And later still, when Shakespeare confesses, as in Sonnet 110,
Alas, tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
we don't get the idea that he is talking about her. These people to whom he "sold cheap what is most dear," as the same sonnet also suggests, are evidently an assortment of individuals who don't matter: "unknown minds" he has been "frequent" with, as he puts it in Sonnet 117.
And we did wonder at one point whether there might not be a level of hypocrisy involved in Shakespeare admonishing his young man for having 'others all too near', when clearly he himself has been keeping a mistress really rather close to him all this time.
But if, as is here being suggested, the young man was in fact involved in establishing the connection between Shakespeare and his mistress, or in soliciting her favour for him, then that would suddenly put this whole constellation in a light that makes perfect sense. Being away from home and away from his wife, the mistress for Shakespeare is just par for the course: she, at the point of initiation, presents no threat or competition to the young man, as she plays a completely different part in the triangle. The complication arises from the fact alone that the young man does not respect the boundary he would ordinarily be expected to keep, and nor does the mistress: it is their respective and mutual transgression that causes the crisis.
What this then also does – and this I put forward with great caution, because it is highly speculative and therefore far from certain – is suggest a time frame that would be compatible with the sequence of events.
The impression we are receiving thus far goes as follows, and it is but an impression of a possible and possibly plausible scenario, so do not take this as fact, but merely as a way of imagining things:
Shakespeare meets and falls for his young man and establishes a friendship close enough to be able to think of himself and his man as one, but not so as to entail either an expectation of, or an adherence to, sexual exclusivity. This could be either because the relationship is not as yet physical, or because such physicality as there is to it is not threatened or compromised by Shakespeare pursuing a sexual relationship with a mistress, or possibly, in a Renaissance blurry way, a bit of both.
In order to win the woman he fancies Shakespeare enlists the help of his beautiful and well-connected friend. The friend we know to be 'gentle', 'kind', 'beauteous', and quite possibly, when it comes to women, at that point not all that experienced. What suggests as much is the line in Sonnet 40 we took note of also in our last episode:
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
What would give such a reading some support is the curious line in this sonnet here: "He learnt but surety-like to write for me," which is obviously a metaphor, but for what exactly? The whole application here of legalese in financial and property related terms is clearly a device to talk about something else entirely, and the last line here suggests more than a tad strongly that that something else is sex.
And so we have ourselves a situation in which it is not entirely implausible that the young man whom William Shakespeare is in love with has, if not his virginity taken, then his sexuality with women, shall we say, educated, by none other than Shakespeare's mistress. And if Shakespeare is anywhere near as smitten with his young man as he sounds, and aches for him even half as much as these sonnets make us believe, then that, especially if he himself has not as yet had the joy of sex with him, would be painful indeed.
It also would be just the kind of thing a young man of the character we have got to know through the Fair Youth Sonnets would be capable of. That it is also the kind of thing the Dark Lady would be capable of is something we now seem to learn. And that takes us then, perhaps briefly at this point, to the question of 'culpability'.
Sonnets 33 and 34 and then 40-42 are allover the place when it comes to the question who is to blame for what. They first and instinctively firmly hold the young man responsible, but then find reasons to excuse him: "All men make faults," in Sonnet 35. Or Sonnet 41:
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?
And of course the 'classic' in Sonnet 42:
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.
And even this line, "Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her" would in this context appear to make sense: if he came to woo or to plead in support of Shakespeare, then that would entail, by necessity, 'approving' her for Shakespeare's sake. Though the 'approving' the young man ends up doing is evidently not of the kind Shakespeare had had in mind when calling on him thus.
These Sonnets, 131 and 133 & 134, lay the 'blame' or responsibility far more firmly at the door of the mistress, and this need not overly surprise us, since these are the poems addressed to and about her. And they still manage to acknowledge openly and honestly enough that Shakespeare himself had his own hand in bringing about the events that led to the situation as it now presents itself.
How long this situation goes on for and how exactly it is resolved, we don't know. The young man does not now get another mention until Sonnet 144, and then both these loves of Shakespeare's are brought in relation to each other in terms that will make it easy for us to understand just why Shakespeare is so upset...
Here though, to conclude our look at Sonnets 133 & 134, are the two poems back to back:
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.
So now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I myself am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still.
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind,
He learnt but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer that putst forth all to use,
And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake,
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me,
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.
This, the poet immediately realises, is not, however, going to get him anywhere, because the mistress, already in possession of both, will exercise her full title in both and have them both, and so although, as the sonnet also suggests, the young man was only ever brought into her orbit on Shakespeare's behalf, he too is now lost to the mistress and pays Shakespeare's debt to her, without this being enough though to release either of them from being held captive by and thus enthralled to her.
The two sonnets can just about stand each on their own, but when considered a proper pair and looked at together, they become somewhat bigger than the sum of their parts, and so we will at the end of this episode listen to them both back to back.
Before we do so though, the most pressing issue that is raised by this second part of the deliberation contained within these two poems merits our immediate attention.
He learnt but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
What is Shakespeare here talking about? It is the most intriguing couple of lines we've come across in a while, and it is woven firmly into this now resolutely triangular constellation when Shakespeare continues:
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer that putst forth all to use,
And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake.
The reading that most readily offers itself and that editors quite generally tend to adopt is that the young man was in one way or another enlisted by Shakespeare to speak, write, plead, or in some other way act on his behalf, and that this has now backfired because the mistress simply ensnared him too.
Leaving aside for the time-being the question of 'blame', 'responsibility', or 'agency' in such a scenario, which we will come to in a moment, the sonnet thus opens up the possibility of a sequence of events that has William Shakespeare meeting his Dark Lady, finding her attractive, seeking to initiate a relationship with her, and drawing upon his young lover to help him achieve his objective.
For us today, this may sound a little outlandish, but for Shakespeare and his contemporaries it is not in fact all that eccentric a way of going about things. Mediated wooing is notably conspicuous in Shakespeare's plays, both dramatic and comedic, and it is maybe telling that on several occasions the person being wooed falls for the wooer-by-proxy.
In Twelfth Night it is Viola, disguised as Cesario, who woos Olivia on behalf of Orsino, only for Viola to fall for her, thinking that she is a man.
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Proteus is tasked with helping win Silvia for Thurio, an endeavour he appropriates for himself, though without success, since Silvia bats off his advances, knowing that he is already betrothed to his own Julia.
In Much Ado About Nothing the device is used underhand by Don Pedro to make Claudio jealous and get him to reject and shame his beloved Hero; in As You Like It Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, teaches Orlando how to woo herself, and in several other plays people become involved as intermediaries or messengers: all of which suggests not only that the audience at the time was clearly familiar with the conceit, but would also have considered its use in pursuit of love reasonably plausible.
There are good reasons for this: as we saw when discussing the last two sonnets, women were not meant to proactively chase men, and simply going up to a lady and talking to her about the weather without proper introduction was not the done thing for a gentleman. For a courtship of any kind to be successful in the higher echelons, the intervention of someone of high social status, and/or someone already connected to the woman being wooed would be extremely beneficial in many sets of circumstances.
If this is what these two sonnets are telling us – and we have to emphasise that this is by no means certain, though it does appear high on the possibility scale, so as not to call it outright likely – then this would solve a great mystery that has been lingering in the background all this time and that we have flagged up once or maybe twice but never previously been able to examine in anything resembling depth: how come the fact that William Shakespeare has a mistress is never brought up? Is never thematised, is never an issue in its own right.
Remember how this unfolds in the Fair Youth section of the sonnets, and bear in mind that chronologically we are finding ourselves here not in sequence but in parallel to these events, and that these events would appear to be happening early on in the 'story', such as it is, of the sonnets:
With Sonnet 33, soon after Sonnet 31 which told the young man that he has "all the all of me," although that may at that point still have been wishful thinking if we were to interpret it sexually, we get a first indication of bad weather on the horizon:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendour on my brow,
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine:
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
Sonnet 34 bursts the cloud and emphatically admonishes the young man for wrongdoing, a storm which passes as quickly as it approached and evaporates in a redeeming closing couplet:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
Sonnet 35 continues that very thought of forgiveness with:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
and then we get four sonnets that appear to talk about other things.
Then, with Sonnets 40 to 42, the explanation for all this upheaval: the person the young man has got off with was none other than Shakespeare's mistress:
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.
At no point prior to or for more obvious reasons in all this does Shakespeare feel the need to explain to his young man that he has a mistress, or who that mistress is, nor does he ever apologise for her, nor does he introduce her, nor does he suggest that there is anything wrong with him having a mistress. That is just taken as read.
Also later, when Shakespeare, as in Sonnet 61 for example, complains:
For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.
And later still, when Shakespeare confesses, as in Sonnet 110,
Alas, tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
we don't get the idea that he is talking about her. These people to whom he "sold cheap what is most dear," as the same sonnet also suggests, are evidently an assortment of individuals who don't matter: "unknown minds" he has been "frequent" with, as he puts it in Sonnet 117.
And we did wonder at one point whether there might not be a level of hypocrisy involved in Shakespeare admonishing his young man for having 'others all too near', when clearly he himself has been keeping a mistress really rather close to him all this time.
But if, as is here being suggested, the young man was in fact involved in establishing the connection between Shakespeare and his mistress, or in soliciting her favour for him, then that would suddenly put this whole constellation in a light that makes perfect sense. Being away from home and away from his wife, the mistress for Shakespeare is just par for the course: she, at the point of initiation, presents no threat or competition to the young man, as she plays a completely different part in the triangle. The complication arises from the fact alone that the young man does not respect the boundary he would ordinarily be expected to keep, and nor does the mistress: it is their respective and mutual transgression that causes the crisis.
What this then also does – and this I put forward with great caution, because it is highly speculative and therefore far from certain – is suggest a time frame that would be compatible with the sequence of events.
The impression we are receiving thus far goes as follows, and it is but an impression of a possible and possibly plausible scenario, so do not take this as fact, but merely as a way of imagining things:
Shakespeare meets and falls for his young man and establishes a friendship close enough to be able to think of himself and his man as one, but not so as to entail either an expectation of, or an adherence to, sexual exclusivity. This could be either because the relationship is not as yet physical, or because such physicality as there is to it is not threatened or compromised by Shakespeare pursuing a sexual relationship with a mistress, or possibly, in a Renaissance blurry way, a bit of both.
In order to win the woman he fancies Shakespeare enlists the help of his beautiful and well-connected friend. The friend we know to be 'gentle', 'kind', 'beauteous', and quite possibly, when it comes to women, at that point not all that experienced. What suggests as much is the line in Sonnet 40 we took note of also in our last episode:
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
What would give such a reading some support is the curious line in this sonnet here: "He learnt but surety-like to write for me," which is obviously a metaphor, but for what exactly? The whole application here of legalese in financial and property related terms is clearly a device to talk about something else entirely, and the last line here suggests more than a tad strongly that that something else is sex.
And so we have ourselves a situation in which it is not entirely implausible that the young man whom William Shakespeare is in love with has, if not his virginity taken, then his sexuality with women, shall we say, educated, by none other than Shakespeare's mistress. And if Shakespeare is anywhere near as smitten with his young man as he sounds, and aches for him even half as much as these sonnets make us believe, then that, especially if he himself has not as yet had the joy of sex with him, would be painful indeed.
It also would be just the kind of thing a young man of the character we have got to know through the Fair Youth Sonnets would be capable of. That it is also the kind of thing the Dark Lady would be capable of is something we now seem to learn. And that takes us then, perhaps briefly at this point, to the question of 'culpability'.
Sonnets 33 and 34 and then 40-42 are allover the place when it comes to the question who is to blame for what. They first and instinctively firmly hold the young man responsible, but then find reasons to excuse him: "All men make faults," in Sonnet 35. Or Sonnet 41:
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?
And of course the 'classic' in Sonnet 42:
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.
And even this line, "Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her" would in this context appear to make sense: if he came to woo or to plead in support of Shakespeare, then that would entail, by necessity, 'approving' her for Shakespeare's sake. Though the 'approving' the young man ends up doing is evidently not of the kind Shakespeare had had in mind when calling on him thus.
These Sonnets, 131 and 133 & 134, lay the 'blame' or responsibility far more firmly at the door of the mistress, and this need not overly surprise us, since these are the poems addressed to and about her. And they still manage to acknowledge openly and honestly enough that Shakespeare himself had his own hand in bringing about the events that led to the situation as it now presents itself.
How long this situation goes on for and how exactly it is resolved, we don't know. The young man does not now get another mention until Sonnet 144, and then both these loves of Shakespeare's are brought in relation to each other in terms that will make it easy for us to understand just why Shakespeare is so upset...
Here though, to conclude our look at Sonnets 133 & 134, are the two poems back to back:
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.
So now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I myself am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still.
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind,
He learnt but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer that putst forth all to use,
And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake,
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me,
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.
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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!