Sonnet 149: Canst Thou, O Cruel, Say I Love Thee Not
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Canst thou, O cruel, say I love thee not
When I against myself with thee partake? Do I not think on thee when I forgot Am of myself, all tyrant for thy sake? Who hateth thee that I do call my friend, On whom frownst thou that I do fawn upon? Nay, if thou lourst on me, do I not spend Revenge upon myself with present moan? What merit do I in myself respect That is so proud thy service to despise, When all my best doth worship thy defect, Commanded by the motion of thine eyes? But love, hate on, for now I know thy mind: Those that can see thou lovest, and I am blind. |
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Canst thou, O cruel, say I love thee not
When I against myself with thee partake? |
Can you, oh cruel mistress of mine, say that I don't love you when I take your side against my own interest or better judgement, or both?
The idea of the mistress as a cruel woman who disdains the affections of her lover is commonplace in Elizabethan England and has found its way into the Dark Lady segment of this collection on three previous occasions: in Sonnet 131 Shakespeare compares his mistress to other women who are beautiful and cruel, even though she herself lacks their traditional beauty: Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art, As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel, in Sonnet 133 he accuses her 'cruel eye' of not only robbing him of himself, but also of stealing his young lover; and in Sonnet 140 he cautions her: "Be wise as thou art cruel," as otherwise he might just snap and say outright what her many implied faults are. So hearing Shakespeare call his mistress here 'cruel', as in 'you cruel one', is not altogether surprising. Also not new is the idea of the poet taking the side of the person he loves, even against his own interest. Shakespeare previously offered to do so in relation to his young man during the crisis following the Rival Poet sequence, where he effectively gave his lover permission to leave him even though he, the lover, would in doing so be breaking an implied vow: Upon thy side against myself I'll fight And prove thee virtuous though thou art forsworn: With mine own weakness being best aquainted, Upon thy part I can set down a story Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted That thou in losing me shall win much glory. Here, 'with thee partake' certainly suggests a similar meaning of 'take your side', but there is more than a hint of the poet also physically 'partaking' of the mistress, in other words, sharing in her with her other lovers, even though this is turning out to be damaging to him in the many ways he has told us of throughout these sonnets. |
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Do I not think on thee when I forgot
Am of myself, all tyrant for thy sake? |
Here comes the evidence to support the contention that 'I against myself with thee partake':
Is it not the case that I think about or of you, even when I have entirely forgotten myself and become an uncaring tyrant who is oblivious to my own as well as to everybody else's needs, and this entirely for your sake? Edmond Malone, the 18th century editor who first rescued the Sonnets from the distortions, omissions, and falsifications inflicted on them 150 years earlier by John Benson, suggests that 'all tyrant', as 'cruel' above, refers to the mistress, and that Shakespeare here is calling her a complete tyrant, as in: 'do I not think about you, you tyrant, for your sake, even when I have forgotten myself?' This is a possible reading and some editors adopt his decision to place a comma after 'tyrant' to signal so. And this turns out one of comparatively few instances where as the reader, listener, or editor, we have to come down on one side or the other, since for the line to mean both simultaneously – you are the tyrant, my mistress, or I am the tyrant, made so by you – here really doesn't strictly make sense. If in doubt, as you will know if you've been following this podcast, I err on the side of caution and wherever possible go with the Quarto Edition, and this punctuates to suggest that I, the poet, am turned tyrant here by you, the mistress. |
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Who hateth thee that I do call my friend,
On whom frownst thou that I do fawn upon? |
Who is there who hates you whom I would call my friend? Or who is there whom you frown upon that I by contrast fawn on?
These are obviously rhetorical questions, since no such person, the poem asserts, can exist: anyone who hates you is by default my enemy and I must hate them too rather than calling them my friend; anyone whom you take a dislike to and therefore frown upon cannot be a person I shower with affection and admiration by fawning on them. In short, I am so beholden to you that I unquestioningly adopt your likes and dislikes for other people, that's how weak my love for you makes me. |
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Nay, if thou lourst on me, do I not spend
Revenge upon myself with present moan? |
No, if you scowl on me or look at me angrily do I not then expend my own revenge on myself with immediate grief or sorrow for being so unloved by you?
This innocuous line may be more salacious than at first meets the eye. Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition of The Sonnets quotes Stephen Booth as saying: "'to spend revenge' is most unidiomatic" and "this line is strained and strange generally." And to us it well may be. We don't, to this day, in everyday language tend to 'spend revenge' on someone. So why would Shakespeare strain his line this way. Colin Burrow in the Oxford Edition has an interesting and, knowing our Will and his predilection for sexual innuendo, not implausible explanation: "Spend can mean 'ejaculate' ('Spending his manly marrow in her arms', All's Well 2.3.278): its presence here at the end of the line and in close company with the reflexive upon myself and moan gives a strong undercurrent of self-mockery: 'I come even when you glare at me'." This may of course be reading too much into the line. On the other hand, we have occasionally observed that when Shakespeare does something unusual with his language, it tends to be for a reason. And many of these Dark Lady sonnets are laden, nay burdened, with sexual overtones, so a bawdy intention absolutely cannot be ruled out. |
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What merit do I in myself respect
That is so proud thy service to despise, |
What merit or quality of mine own do I hold in such a high regard as to hate being in your service.
Shakespeare here rhetorically ascribes the pride involved to the hypothetical merit, thus creating a curious distance between himself and his quality that is deserving of respect, and correspondingly, it is also the merit that would be 'so proud' as to disdain, or object to, being in your service. This service is not further characterised here, but in view of what has just gone before, we could be forgiven for detecting in it yet another sexual dimension: there is no quality in me that makes me too proud to have sex with you. |
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When all my best doth worship thy defect,
Commanded by the motion of thine eyes? |
When in fact everything that is best in me – which entails all my real qualities – worships your faults or your generally defective, as in flawed, character, being commanded just by the mere movement of your eyes.
This notion too is fairly commonplace: it takes but a glance or a frown, a look or a sideways motion of the lady's eye for the lover, all servant, even slave to his mistress, to obey. On its own, the sonnet offers itself to be read as a simple juxtaposition: my merit most deserving of respect bows to even your deepest flaw, this is how subservient I am; without necessarily implying that you are all defect. In the context of this collection though, it sounds to us much more like a statement of near absurd love-induced madness on my part: everything that is good about me, and by implication there is much, worships you, even though you are anything but perfect, you are as you are, mostly defective. PRONUNCIATION: Note that defect here is stressed on the second syllable to rhyme with respect above: [de-fect]. |
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But love, hate on, for now I know thy mind:
Those that can see thou lovest, and I am blind. |
But love, continue to hate me as you apparently do, because now I know how your mind and therefore your heart works: you love those who can see you for who you really are, but I am blinded by my love for you and therefore, as is the obvious conclusion, you cannot or will not respect or love me.
This somewhat sudden conclusion strongly supports a reading of the sonnet in context. It was in Sonnets 142 and 143 that we were given the impression that the mistress is chasing other men while our poet is being left to languish, in Sonnet 143 like a crying toddler whose mother has run off to catch a wayward cock. And Sonnet 148 of course closed on an almost identical rhyme, similarly invoking the lover turned unable to see properly for love: O cunning love, with tears thou keepst me blind, Lest eyes well seeing thy foul faults should find. And the closing couplet of this sonnet also succeeds in describing a well known phenomenon in the psychology of love: it can be easier and more exciting to pursue someone who is unavailable or aloof than someone who debases themselves in their blind devotion to you. |
After establishing in the previous two sonnets that he is possessed of a 'fever' that makes him 'mad' and that distorts his vision, William Shakespeare uses Sonnet 149 to further describe the effect this love for his mistress is having on him. So much is he in her thrall that no-one whom she hates can he love, no-one she admires he may disdain. Just a glance of her eyes, and he will obey. And yet, in spite of all this, she loves him not but pursues other lovers who are not so blinded by love as he.
In the long-running debate about these sonnets – ongoing ever since their first faithful re-release by Edmond Malone in 1780 – as to whether they are rooted in actual real-life experiences and based on actual real-life characters or whether they constitute a collection of abstract poetic exercises in a form popular at the time of their composition though already out of favour by the time they finally get published ten to fifteen years later in 1609, Sonnet 149 on its own and at first glance serves to strongly support the latter.
In this, it is unusual. Only once or twice before – Sonnet 128, for example with its mistress at the virginals – have we felt that a sonnet could really have been written more or less by any competent poet to any mistress, real or imagined. In the Fair Youth section of the sonnets, perhaps Sonnet 99 with its flowers that have stolen all their lovely attributes from his young lover, and the ensuing group 100 to 103 which talks of a Muse that has been absent and therefore neglected its duties and of a love that is "strengthened though more weak in seeming," attracted the attribute 'generic' in our discussion as they felt somewhat detached, so as not to say perfunctory.
Sonnet 149 shares this sense of general so-what-ness. The poet has a cruel mistress; he is besotted with her, she reduces him to a snivelling minion who has lost all faculty to determine for himself who is worthy of his respect or affection and who isn't; a mere glance of hers and he will scurry to do her bidding. Really any poet of the period with the practice of nigh on 150 sonnets under his belt – quite a few more if we count the ones in the plays – would be able to produce a poem of this kind. The most interesting element almost about it, one could argue, is the possible, though by no means certain, sexual innuendo tucked away in there.
And that justifiably begs the question: what exactly is this sonnet doing here? Is it just an exercise in sonnet-making to perhaps entertain a private audience, maybe some young noblemen around a potential patron at a country estate or at a banquet or dinner in London? Or is it something he is carrying out just for himself, to work through this conception of an unconventionally beautiful but conventionally disdainful mistress who has eyes not for him who he dotes, but for those who see her for what she is. What exactly in that case is she, and why does he dote so?
Of all the sonnets we have discussed so far – and there really are not many more now to come – it is one of the most perplexingly unengaged. What doesn't help perhaps is being shown our poet quite so helpless. In Sonnets 57 & 58, where he positions himself as 'slave' to his young lover, he does so with a healthy dose of irony. We do hear him there debase himself, but remain safe in the knowledge that he keeps control of the situation. When in Sonnet 57 he says
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require
we know he's being sarcastic. And when he continues in Sonnet 58 to give his young lover licence to
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will: to you it doth belong,
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime
we hear in the absolution as much the accusation and know: our poet is genuinely angry at being treated so badly by his lover, and he knows to express this.
Here in Sonnet 149, we get no such confidence, no such subversive spark. So, what is this sonnet doing here?
In our conversation about Shakespeare and Women, Professor Phyllis Rackin made the salient point, and other scholars have made this too, that sonnets are fundamentally about the poet, more than about the person they speak of or to. And I, throughout this podcast, have insisted and continued to maintain that we must read these sonnets in context, not in isolation. Taken together, an avenue towards understanding what the point may be of Sonnet 149 opens itself up to us.
First, the context. The sonnet sits firmly embedded in the group it forms part of. The argumentation throughout Sonnets 147, 148, 149, and indeed 150 that follows this is consistent, coherent, and clear. It may not be reasonable or entirely 'sane', but it makes sense: I am, against my will, against my better judgement, against my own interest, addicted to you: I love you or at any rate desire you even though I know my eyes are deceiving me and you are not as beautiful as you look to me, and I know that you have many faults. I know you have other lovers, I realise you respect them more than you respect me, but here I am, still, in my own way, devoted to you.
And what we learn about our poet from all this, from the tonality as much as the content, from the way he is writing quite as much as from what he is saying, is that he himself is as perplexed by it all as we are. He is, as Elvis Presley and many after him put it in the words of songwriter Mark James, "caught in a trap." He "can't walk out." And this suddenly starts to sound surprisingly real again.
Anyone who has ever been infatuated with, attracted to, for want of a subtler way of saying it, lusted after, someone who was both aloof and unapproachable but at the same time disconcertingly freewheeling in sex with other people and therefore also at times either genuinely or apparently available for sex, but even then emotionally detached and in every way possible inscrutable, will know how unsettling, how disorientating, how constantly confusing that is.
And this comes to the fore over and over again in these Dark Lady sonnets. She may yet be an invention by the poet, who truly knows, but if she is, she really gets to him. No stronger expression of this can be found than in Sonnet 129:
Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action and, till action, lust,
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
which he 'resolves' in the resigned conclusion:
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Certainly metaphorically, to what extent also physically we can't say for certain, by the sounds of it though emotionally for sure, our Will with his wilful punning in Sonnets 135 and 136 and his agony over the fact that his young lover too has been ensnared, is in a sort of purgatory. And for whatever reason prompts him to do so, he works it out in his verse.
We generally assume these poems to be intended for and therefore read or heard by an audience. We treat them as written directly and immediately for third party consumption. But that may not be the case. We know it is the case for some sonnets, because they are mentioned by Frances Meres in 1598 as circulating among Shakespeare's 'private friends'. But we don't know which ones and we have no reason to believe this to be the case for all of them. Not only may some of them never before publication have been recited or presented anywhere, they may never have been shown or sent to their 'recipient'. They may be exercises in poetry writing, yes, in an abstract realm of an imaginary mistress perhaps seducing an imaginary friend? They may also be practice of what we today might call 'therapy' in a viscerally lived realm of a very real mistress in a triangular relationship with a very real friend, in the turmoil of a very real and sexually intensely lived world, with all the danger, disease – delight, yes! – but also disgust, distress, this entails. All the pleasure and all the trauma. All the guilt as well as the genuine joy.
And once we allow for this, the burden of worth on this sonnet mercifully lifts. It doesn't have to be weighed with meaning and object-orientated function. It can form part of a process that has its own meaning and purpose. And as every so often with our poet's poems, a little patience pays off: Sonnet 150 also belongs to this picture and it will clarify some, if not all. It will, in any case, help us greatly to understand what's going on in Shakespeare's heart and mind, which are forever, as we know, entwined...
In the long-running debate about these sonnets – ongoing ever since their first faithful re-release by Edmond Malone in 1780 – as to whether they are rooted in actual real-life experiences and based on actual real-life characters or whether they constitute a collection of abstract poetic exercises in a form popular at the time of their composition though already out of favour by the time they finally get published ten to fifteen years later in 1609, Sonnet 149 on its own and at first glance serves to strongly support the latter.
In this, it is unusual. Only once or twice before – Sonnet 128, for example with its mistress at the virginals – have we felt that a sonnet could really have been written more or less by any competent poet to any mistress, real or imagined. In the Fair Youth section of the sonnets, perhaps Sonnet 99 with its flowers that have stolen all their lovely attributes from his young lover, and the ensuing group 100 to 103 which talks of a Muse that has been absent and therefore neglected its duties and of a love that is "strengthened though more weak in seeming," attracted the attribute 'generic' in our discussion as they felt somewhat detached, so as not to say perfunctory.
Sonnet 149 shares this sense of general so-what-ness. The poet has a cruel mistress; he is besotted with her, she reduces him to a snivelling minion who has lost all faculty to determine for himself who is worthy of his respect or affection and who isn't; a mere glance of hers and he will scurry to do her bidding. Really any poet of the period with the practice of nigh on 150 sonnets under his belt – quite a few more if we count the ones in the plays – would be able to produce a poem of this kind. The most interesting element almost about it, one could argue, is the possible, though by no means certain, sexual innuendo tucked away in there.
And that justifiably begs the question: what exactly is this sonnet doing here? Is it just an exercise in sonnet-making to perhaps entertain a private audience, maybe some young noblemen around a potential patron at a country estate or at a banquet or dinner in London? Or is it something he is carrying out just for himself, to work through this conception of an unconventionally beautiful but conventionally disdainful mistress who has eyes not for him who he dotes, but for those who see her for what she is. What exactly in that case is she, and why does he dote so?
Of all the sonnets we have discussed so far – and there really are not many more now to come – it is one of the most perplexingly unengaged. What doesn't help perhaps is being shown our poet quite so helpless. In Sonnets 57 & 58, where he positions himself as 'slave' to his young lover, he does so with a healthy dose of irony. We do hear him there debase himself, but remain safe in the knowledge that he keeps control of the situation. When in Sonnet 57 he says
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require
we know he's being sarcastic. And when he continues in Sonnet 58 to give his young lover licence to
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will: to you it doth belong,
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime
we hear in the absolution as much the accusation and know: our poet is genuinely angry at being treated so badly by his lover, and he knows to express this.
Here in Sonnet 149, we get no such confidence, no such subversive spark. So, what is this sonnet doing here?
In our conversation about Shakespeare and Women, Professor Phyllis Rackin made the salient point, and other scholars have made this too, that sonnets are fundamentally about the poet, more than about the person they speak of or to. And I, throughout this podcast, have insisted and continued to maintain that we must read these sonnets in context, not in isolation. Taken together, an avenue towards understanding what the point may be of Sonnet 149 opens itself up to us.
First, the context. The sonnet sits firmly embedded in the group it forms part of. The argumentation throughout Sonnets 147, 148, 149, and indeed 150 that follows this is consistent, coherent, and clear. It may not be reasonable or entirely 'sane', but it makes sense: I am, against my will, against my better judgement, against my own interest, addicted to you: I love you or at any rate desire you even though I know my eyes are deceiving me and you are not as beautiful as you look to me, and I know that you have many faults. I know you have other lovers, I realise you respect them more than you respect me, but here I am, still, in my own way, devoted to you.
And what we learn about our poet from all this, from the tonality as much as the content, from the way he is writing quite as much as from what he is saying, is that he himself is as perplexed by it all as we are. He is, as Elvis Presley and many after him put it in the words of songwriter Mark James, "caught in a trap." He "can't walk out." And this suddenly starts to sound surprisingly real again.
Anyone who has ever been infatuated with, attracted to, for want of a subtler way of saying it, lusted after, someone who was both aloof and unapproachable but at the same time disconcertingly freewheeling in sex with other people and therefore also at times either genuinely or apparently available for sex, but even then emotionally detached and in every way possible inscrutable, will know how unsettling, how disorientating, how constantly confusing that is.
And this comes to the fore over and over again in these Dark Lady sonnets. She may yet be an invention by the poet, who truly knows, but if she is, she really gets to him. No stronger expression of this can be found than in Sonnet 129:
Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action and, till action, lust,
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
which he 'resolves' in the resigned conclusion:
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Certainly metaphorically, to what extent also physically we can't say for certain, by the sounds of it though emotionally for sure, our Will with his wilful punning in Sonnets 135 and 136 and his agony over the fact that his young lover too has been ensnared, is in a sort of purgatory. And for whatever reason prompts him to do so, he works it out in his verse.
We generally assume these poems to be intended for and therefore read or heard by an audience. We treat them as written directly and immediately for third party consumption. But that may not be the case. We know it is the case for some sonnets, because they are mentioned by Frances Meres in 1598 as circulating among Shakespeare's 'private friends'. But we don't know which ones and we have no reason to believe this to be the case for all of them. Not only may some of them never before publication have been recited or presented anywhere, they may never have been shown or sent to their 'recipient'. They may be exercises in poetry writing, yes, in an abstract realm of an imaginary mistress perhaps seducing an imaginary friend? They may also be practice of what we today might call 'therapy' in a viscerally lived realm of a very real mistress in a triangular relationship with a very real friend, in the turmoil of a very real and sexually intensely lived world, with all the danger, disease – delight, yes! – but also disgust, distress, this entails. All the pleasure and all the trauma. All the guilt as well as the genuine joy.
And once we allow for this, the burden of worth on this sonnet mercifully lifts. It doesn't have to be weighed with meaning and object-orientated function. It can form part of a process that has its own meaning and purpose. And as every so often with our poet's poems, a little patience pays off: Sonnet 150 also belongs to this picture and it will clarify some, if not all. It will, in any case, help us greatly to understand what's going on in Shakespeare's heart and mind, which are forever, as we know, entwined...
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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!