Sonnet 140: Be Wise as Thou Art Cruel, Do Not Press
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Be wise as thou art cruel, do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain, Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express The manner of my pity-wanting pain. If I might teach thee wit, better it were, Though not to love, yet love to tell me so, As testy sick men when their deaths be near No news but health from their physicians know. For if I should despair, I should grow mad, And in my madness might speak ill of thee, Now this ill wresting world is grown so bad, Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be. That I may not be so, nor thou belied, Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide. |
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Be wise as thou art cruel, do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain, |
Be as wise as you are cruel, or also: since you are cruel, therefore also be wise, and do not subject my quietly suffering patience to undue pressure with too much of this disdain of yours.
Editors are of a mind that 'press' here may well, apart from simply meaning 'to exert pressure on' or 'to strain', also refer to the unimaginably cruel practice of peine forte et dure, which was still very much in use in Shakespeare's day, in particular to extract a plea from defendants who were accused of a felony. It involved laying increasingly heavy weights upon their chest until they either succumbed and entered a plea or died. The reason a defendant may hold out till their gruesome and excruciatingly painful death rather than simply enter a plea was that anyone who either pleaded guilty, or who pleaded not guilty but was then found so by a jury, would forfeit their estate to the crown and thus deprive their descendants of their inheritance, whereas if they died without ever having entered a plea, they could at the very least pass on their worldly goods, which in a world without social welfare could for the dependants make the difference between being able to lead a reasonable life and being entirely destitute. If intended, this would evoke the image of the mistress laying an increasingly heavy burden of contempt for her poor poet lover on him until he finally cracked and spoke out, almost too literally 'ex-pressing' things which decorum and good manners would otherwise prevent him from saying. His patience is 'tongue-tied', as it purports not to be speaking out about its owner's suffering in the way he is about to explain, though as editors also note, the lover pining in silence for his mistress is yet another poetic commonplace, whereby Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of the Sonnets rather tartly points out that the poet's voice is in fact the only one heard throughout these many sonnets... PRONUNCIATION: Note that cruel here has two syllables: [cru-el]. |
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Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain. |
And here is the reason you shouldn't take your disdain too far with me: so that the sorrow I feel does not at the last become so much that it makes me voice not only what this pain that I feel is actually like, but, more to the point and entailing more jeopardy to you, my mistress, whence it stems, namely from your sleeping around with men.
The pain is 'pity-wanting' in two senses: firstly in that it lacks pity from you and is thus in want of pity; secondly in that it wishes for or desires pity from you and thus wants pity. |
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If I might teach thee wit,
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If I might be allowed, or if I were asked to, teach you any insight or wisdom; or, as we today might put it, if you want some advice from me:...
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better it were,
Though not to love, yet love to tell me so, |
...it would be better if you, who you are my love, were to tell me that you do love me, even though apparently you don't...
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As testy sick men when their deaths be near
No news but health from their physicians know. |
...much in the way that fretful, short-tempered, or peevish sick men will not want to hear anything other from their doctors than good news about how healthy they really are or will be again soon, when in fact they are close to death.
There is an elegant link here between the poet's patience, as in his ability to bear his suffering, and a sick man who is by definition a patient: it's a beautifully understated, because not at all expressed, yet still fully understood, pun. ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP were rhymes with near in a diphthong vowel sound sound more like our 'bear' with a slightly rolled r. |
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For if I should despair, I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee, |
Because if, under this pressure you put on me, I should after all despair, this would make me go mad, and in this madness I might then say bad things about you.
It is for this reason, of course, that it would be better for all concerned if the poet remained silent, although as Katherine Duncan-Jones further flags up: "it could be argued, if the sonnets are read sequentially, that he has already spoken ill of her in the preceding sonnets," and, for reasons we may only ever be able to guess at, in Sonnet 147 he does indeed declare himself "frantic mad" and calls his mistress "black as hell and dark as night," by which he clearly does not mean her complexion, but her character and/or her deeds. |
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Now this ill wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be. |
And the reason this would be a truly terrible thing for you is that today's world now – that world being Shakespeare's world of the late 16th, early 17th century – has turned so bad that crazed people such as I would then become, who go around badmouthing others, are actually believed by the people who listen to them, who are themselves therefore just as crazy.
There are pertinent political parallels to todays' 21st century world now that are too obvious to expound... This world that has gone bad is 'ill wresting' because it 'wrests' or 'tears' what people say from them and turns it bad or 'ill', and so most editors furnish the expression with a hyphen to turn it into a compound adjective, 'ill-wresting', but the Quarto Edition – which we must acknowledge, indeed emphasise, cannot be relied upon for punctuation – keeps the two words separate, and this adds a subtle but not unimportant layer of meaning: it can thus also be read as 'this ill, wresting world', a world that is in itself sick and, as Oxford Languages offers for a now mostly sadly lost definition of 'to wrest', is prone to "distort the meaning or interpretation of (something) to suit one's own interests or views." In other words, no matter how insane a bunch of lies I might in my deranged state defecate into the world, the world itself is so sick to the core and so ready to distort and twist any truth that is grappling to survive out there into what it wants to believe, that it would readily lap up virtually anything I say. Again, much as we find the situation today. Noteworthy though of course is that if the sonnets thus far and the sonnets that follow are at all to be believed then the substance of what William Shakespeare might be inclined to say about his mistress, namely that she diverts her attention to other men even when she is with him, or that generally speaking she leads a very free sexual lifestyle, would not actually be lies, it would be grounded in truth. PRONUNCIATION: Note that slanderers here has two syllables only: [slan-drers]. |
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That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide. |
And so to the end that I may not turn into such a raving lunatic, and you into someone who in this way has lies told about her, keep your eyes on me, even though your proud heart, as has been roundly established, goes out to other men, far and wide.
This connects the sonnet back directly to the previous one, Sonnet 139, which similarly pleaded that the mistress, when she is with our Will, do not look at, indeed flirt with, other men, but focus on him, at least for the duration. The phrasing here borrows from archery and thus also brings back a link to the idea of her eyes as shooting darts that are impossible to resist, which in turn evokes Cupid's arrows. In archery, you 'take a bearing' to orientate yourself in the landscape and locate the target, and then take aim to shoot, though your arrow may yet 'go wide of the mark' and thus miss the target and hit something or someone else. And a pun may well also be intended with 'belied' on 'be lied with' as in 'be lain or indeed laid with', for which in contemporary parlance a little crudely we might today simply read: 'get laid'... |
With Sonnet 140, William Shakespeare at first seems to set out on some general counsel for his mistress not to try his patience too much, as doing so might drive him mad and cause him, in his madness, to say bad things about her. The damage this could do would be exacerbated by a world that is itself full of mad people who would be inclined to believe him even if what he came out with were but scurrilous lies. Strongly implied also though is that not everything scandalous he might say about his mistress would necessarily be untrue, And with the last line of the closing couplet, he then ties his sonnet firmly back to the previous one and reiterates his request that even though she obviously has other lovers, she keep her eyes on him when they are together at least.
Every so often when discussing these sonnets, I find myself moved to remark how contemporary to us, how relevant, they feel. At one point early on, as William Shakespeare's relationship with his young lover became involuntarily triangular, I suggested that on Facebook, his relationship status would be "it's complicated."
Sonnet 140 once again reminds us that our Will, in his Renaissance London, lives an existence that is in several respects post-modern and that would not look out of place in 2025. If you imagine yourself in your late twenties, early thirties, really the equivalent today of your late teens, early twenties: you're in the most exciting, dynamic, happening place your universe has to offer, you find yourself in lust and somehow in love with this woman who makes absolutely no secret of the fact that she has many other lovers, and you just wish that when you're spending time together, she weren't on her phone all the time, chatting with them, arranging to meet them, liking their posts, finding new ones on the hookup app to, well, hook up with the moment she leaves your side.
It's a quiet sonnet, this, but a seething anger seems to be boiling up beneath the surface in Shakespeare, and we sense that the mistress is not far from pushing the button that will blow his top. It's rare, but not the first time, that we sense our poet's ire. He was outraged at his young lover's conduct in 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?
And even more so in Sonnet 95:
O what a mansion have those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where beauty's veil doth cover every blot
And all things turns to fair that eyes can see!
And of course we saw him at his most furious in his magnificent rant at the state of the world with Sonnet 66 which he opens with:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:
and then follows with a list of ills in the world that one by one and virtually without exception can be cited as what's wrong with our world today too.
But in each case, he finds the redeeming power of love. The closing couplet of Sonnet 34 which segues into 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:
The conciliatory tone of Sonnet 96 with its closing couplet that either deliberately or accidentally, maybe consciously, maybe subsconsciously echoes Sonnet 35:
How many lambs might the stern wolf betray
If like a lamb he could his looks translate,
How many gazers mightst thou lead away
If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state.
But do not so, I love thee in such sort
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.
The final line in Sonnet 66:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that to die, I leave my love alone.
Sonnet 140 almost does the inverse. It doesn't express any rage or vent any spleen, but nor can it therefore take back and forgive. Instead, it keeps its frustration, its irritation under wraps and merely hints at what may ensue if things don't change.
This of course invites the question: will it change? If the sonnet stems from a real life experience of the mistress's behaviour, then we may wonder, can she mend her ways? Enough at least for our poet not to feel the urge to let rip about her. And to answer this question we will, of course, have to listen to the sonnets that now follow...
But the fact alone that we are asking this question signals a shift since the previous poem, Sonnet 139. There we felt our poet and therefore ourselves to be "comfortably in the domain of the classical Petrarchan sonnet," with its most striking aspect being that Shakespeare appears to have no cavil with his mistress's many lovers, but simply wishes she were truly with him when they're together. Overall, we considered Sonnet 139 to be something of a variation on well rehearsed themes.
This is not the case with Sonnet 140. Sonnet 140, which works effectively, though subtly, as a continuation of the argument of Sonnet 139, still deals in familiar themes, but it does so in a highly original way, which therefore also makes it rather specific to the case in hand.
Its originality lies in the layering of its discomfiture: 'I am really unhappy with the way you are behaving towards me. So please stop this, because if this goes too far then I will say something that will be hurtful to you.' That's the first layer, so to speak, set up in the first quatrain, the first four lines. It sets down a marker: beware.
The second layer, which comes with the second quatrain, then brings in a what we might argue to be a fairly feeble request: 'tell me that you love me even though you don't.' Or, expressed more optimistically, 'even if you don't.' This on its own sets our poet, as he himself suggests, on a par with 'testy sick men' who simply don't want to face up to the truth, in their case that they're about to die, in his case that his mistress doesn't love him.
The third layer, in the third quatrain, then drives home a much more pertinent and also more complex point: 'because if you don't humour me I shall despair, and despair will cause me to go mad, and in my madness I may badmouth you, which, as if that weren't bad enough, is made worse by the fact that we live in a mad world where mad people who badmouth other people are actually believed by even madder people.'
This not only brings in a 'global' perspective and places the relationship between our poet and his mistress in the context of a society that knows these individuals and has an ear for what goes on in their lives, but it also characterises anything bad that Shakespeare in his state of deranged despair may say about her as lies. In other words: the effect of his despair will not, according to this sonnet, be him merely blurting out some dreadful truth about her, but him also making up some lies about her. And although he will do so in his irrational state of madness, he is currently still conscious and conscientious enough to see the danger of this happening and to alert her to the impending calamity, so remedial action may still be taken and yet succeed.
And then this sudden link back to Sonnet 139: 'actually what this is all about is still your habit of making eyes at other men while you're with me. Stop this. Please..'
And with this taut state of tension we reach a plateau from which, in a sense, we no longer properly depart. There are fourteen more sonnets left in the collection. The final two stand entirely separate from the rest and have nothing directly to do with either the Dark Lady or the Fair Youth or anyone else identifiable as a person.
One, Sonnet 145, takes up a unique position, because it is the only octosyllabic sonnet in the collection and may well – so it is now widely believed – be talking not about the Dark Lady or any other mistress, but about Shakespeare's wife, Anne.
Sonnet 144 explicitly and directly once more refers to the sexual connection between the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth, and the remaining seven sonnets all in one way or another reflect on this decidedly odd and inherently awkward situation: I sort of love you against my will. I know you are not 'mine', because you have many other men you sleep with, I don't even find you beautiful, I desire you against my better judgement, and what I'm left with is this lust, yes; also though this loathing. It is a dilemma that is never properly resolved. But, this being Shakespeare, the way it isn't resolved remains forever entirely fascinating...
Every so often when discussing these sonnets, I find myself moved to remark how contemporary to us, how relevant, they feel. At one point early on, as William Shakespeare's relationship with his young lover became involuntarily triangular, I suggested that on Facebook, his relationship status would be "it's complicated."
Sonnet 140 once again reminds us that our Will, in his Renaissance London, lives an existence that is in several respects post-modern and that would not look out of place in 2025. If you imagine yourself in your late twenties, early thirties, really the equivalent today of your late teens, early twenties: you're in the most exciting, dynamic, happening place your universe has to offer, you find yourself in lust and somehow in love with this woman who makes absolutely no secret of the fact that she has many other lovers, and you just wish that when you're spending time together, she weren't on her phone all the time, chatting with them, arranging to meet them, liking their posts, finding new ones on the hookup app to, well, hook up with the moment she leaves your side.
It's a quiet sonnet, this, but a seething anger seems to be boiling up beneath the surface in Shakespeare, and we sense that the mistress is not far from pushing the button that will blow his top. It's rare, but not the first time, that we sense our poet's ire. He was outraged at his young lover's conduct in 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?
And even more so in Sonnet 95:
O what a mansion have those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where beauty's veil doth cover every blot
And all things turns to fair that eyes can see!
And of course we saw him at his most furious in his magnificent rant at the state of the world with Sonnet 66 which he opens with:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:
and then follows with a list of ills in the world that one by one and virtually without exception can be cited as what's wrong with our world today too.
But in each case, he finds the redeeming power of love. The closing couplet of Sonnet 34 which segues into 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:
The conciliatory tone of Sonnet 96 with its closing couplet that either deliberately or accidentally, maybe consciously, maybe subsconsciously echoes Sonnet 35:
How many lambs might the stern wolf betray
If like a lamb he could his looks translate,
How many gazers mightst thou lead away
If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state.
But do not so, I love thee in such sort
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.
The final line in Sonnet 66:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that to die, I leave my love alone.
Sonnet 140 almost does the inverse. It doesn't express any rage or vent any spleen, but nor can it therefore take back and forgive. Instead, it keeps its frustration, its irritation under wraps and merely hints at what may ensue if things don't change.
This of course invites the question: will it change? If the sonnet stems from a real life experience of the mistress's behaviour, then we may wonder, can she mend her ways? Enough at least for our poet not to feel the urge to let rip about her. And to answer this question we will, of course, have to listen to the sonnets that now follow...
But the fact alone that we are asking this question signals a shift since the previous poem, Sonnet 139. There we felt our poet and therefore ourselves to be "comfortably in the domain of the classical Petrarchan sonnet," with its most striking aspect being that Shakespeare appears to have no cavil with his mistress's many lovers, but simply wishes she were truly with him when they're together. Overall, we considered Sonnet 139 to be something of a variation on well rehearsed themes.
This is not the case with Sonnet 140. Sonnet 140, which works effectively, though subtly, as a continuation of the argument of Sonnet 139, still deals in familiar themes, but it does so in a highly original way, which therefore also makes it rather specific to the case in hand.
Its originality lies in the layering of its discomfiture: 'I am really unhappy with the way you are behaving towards me. So please stop this, because if this goes too far then I will say something that will be hurtful to you.' That's the first layer, so to speak, set up in the first quatrain, the first four lines. It sets down a marker: beware.
The second layer, which comes with the second quatrain, then brings in a what we might argue to be a fairly feeble request: 'tell me that you love me even though you don't.' Or, expressed more optimistically, 'even if you don't.' This on its own sets our poet, as he himself suggests, on a par with 'testy sick men' who simply don't want to face up to the truth, in their case that they're about to die, in his case that his mistress doesn't love him.
The third layer, in the third quatrain, then drives home a much more pertinent and also more complex point: 'because if you don't humour me I shall despair, and despair will cause me to go mad, and in my madness I may badmouth you, which, as if that weren't bad enough, is made worse by the fact that we live in a mad world where mad people who badmouth other people are actually believed by even madder people.'
This not only brings in a 'global' perspective and places the relationship between our poet and his mistress in the context of a society that knows these individuals and has an ear for what goes on in their lives, but it also characterises anything bad that Shakespeare in his state of deranged despair may say about her as lies. In other words: the effect of his despair will not, according to this sonnet, be him merely blurting out some dreadful truth about her, but him also making up some lies about her. And although he will do so in his irrational state of madness, he is currently still conscious and conscientious enough to see the danger of this happening and to alert her to the impending calamity, so remedial action may still be taken and yet succeed.
And then this sudden link back to Sonnet 139: 'actually what this is all about is still your habit of making eyes at other men while you're with me. Stop this. Please..'
And with this taut state of tension we reach a plateau from which, in a sense, we no longer properly depart. There are fourteen more sonnets left in the collection. The final two stand entirely separate from the rest and have nothing directly to do with either the Dark Lady or the Fair Youth or anyone else identifiable as a person.
One, Sonnet 145, takes up a unique position, because it is the only octosyllabic sonnet in the collection and may well – so it is now widely believed – be talking not about the Dark Lady or any other mistress, but about Shakespeare's wife, Anne.
Sonnet 144 explicitly and directly once more refers to the sexual connection between the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth, and the remaining seven sonnets all in one way or another reflect on this decidedly odd and inherently awkward situation: I sort of love you against my will. I know you are not 'mine', because you have many other men you sleep with, I don't even find you beautiful, I desire you against my better judgement, and what I'm left with is this lust, yes; also though this loathing. It is a dilemma that is never properly resolved. But, this being Shakespeare, the way it isn't resolved remains forever entirely fascinating...
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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!