Sonnet 150: O From What Power Hast Thou This Powerful Might
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O from what power hast thou this powerful might,
With insufficiency my heart to sway, To make me give the lie to my true sight And swear that brightness doth not grace the day? Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill, That in the very refuse of thy deeds There is such strength and warrantise of skill That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds? Who taught thee how to make me love thee more, The more I hear and see just cause to hate? O though I love what others do abhor, With others thou shouldst not abhor my state: If thy unworthiness raised love in me, More worthy I to be beloved of thee. |
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O from what power hast thou this powerful might,
With insufficiency my heart to sway, |
Oh from what higher authority – implied is an external, perhaps supernatural power, such as a god or spirit – do you receive this immense capability that you have which enables you to use your own faults or deficiencies to sway my heart towards loving or admiring you.
There is only one other instance in all of Shakespeare's works where the word 'insufficiency' appears, and that is when Helena in Act II, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night's Dream uses it to refer to her own perceived lack of beauty after Lysander, previously devoted to Hermia, and following Puck's erroneous intervention, falls in love with her, while she is pining for her Demetrius: Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born? When at your hands did I deserve this scorn? Is’t not enough, is’t not enough, young man, That I did never, no, nor never can Deserve a sweet look from Demetrius’ eye, But you must flout my insufficiency? PRONUNCIATION: Note that power and powerful are here pronounced with one and two syllables respectively: [powr], [powr-ful]. |
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To make me give the lie to my true sight
And swear that brightness doth not grace the day? |
This inexplicable power of yours extends further: it makes me give the lie to my eyesight and deny what it can see truly or correctly, to the point where I swear that it is not brightness that graces the day, but, by implication, its opposite, darkness.
This too picks up on what Sonnet 147 has firmly established: For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. My eyes can in fact see the truth, which is that you are not only not 'fair' as in 'light-skinned and light-haired', but also not 'fair' as in 'beautiful', and yet you hold such sway over me that I simply cannot accept such a truth and must treat you as if you were beautiful in the traditional way that everybody else values. To understand the extent to which 'brightness' makes a day beautiful and thus graces it, we may once again want to remind ourselves that we are here in a world without electricity, indeed without much artificial light: when it is dark, it is really dark: the only light at nighttime comes from candles, torches, and fires, there are no gaslit streetlights either, so a bright sunny day with a cloudless sky is a beautiful thing to behold and to cherish. Shakespeare makes a point of contrasting the bright, clear, and therefore beautiful day with the black night also in Sonnet 28, though there to a rather different effect: I tell the day to please him: 'thou art bright, And dost him grace', when clouds do blot the heaven; So flatter I the swart-complexioned night, When sparkling stars twire not: 'thou gildst the even'. And of course the opposites of 'fair' vs 'foul' – for which ready 'beautiful' vs 'ugly' – and 'bright' vs 'dark' both in a visual and therefore aesthetic sense, but also in a moral sense have been played on since the very beginning of the Dark Lady sequence, starting with Sonnet 127. |
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Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill
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From where do you get this quality that even bad things about you become you, as in make you appear beautiful or agreeable?
Editors across the board highlight the resemblance this line – and therefore the tenor of this sonnet – bears to the way Cleopatra is characterised by Enobarbus in Act II, Scene 2 of Antony and Cleopatra: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies. For vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. For both women it is the case that their sensual or sexual magnetism is such that to their lover – in Cleopatra's case Antony, in the Dark Lady's case William Shakespeare – even their worst behaviour and character traits appear attractive. |
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That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill, That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds? |
Shakespeare now further expounds and describes: this capacity of yours goes so far that in the very worst of your actions – the refuse, as in the cast-off or rubbish of the things you do – there still resides such a strength and guarantee or assurance of your ability or skill that to my mind, and therefore also to my heart, even this, the worst in you, exceeds or surpasses everything that is best in anyone else.
As has happened once or twice before, the line is somewhat ambiguous: on its own the first and most obvious meaning yields that even the worst of your qualities or behaviour still manages to exceed the best in anyone else's, with the implication being that you also have good or excellent qualities, which would therefore naturally be even better. But in the context of this group of sonnets and of what has been said before, it can also be read as saying: you, with your utterly bad qualities, which are so bad as to deserve being called the worst there are, because of this power you have over me, you still manage to surpass in my feverish, diseased mind even the best of qualities in the best of people. There is a big difference between the two: the former allows for the mistress to be possessed also of good character traits, whereas the latter roundly dismisses her as objectively speaking both 'ugly' and 'vile'. And a similar discrepancy in possible meanings will present itself once more at the end of this sonnet. |
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Who taught thee how to make me love thee more,
The more I hear and see just cause to hate? |
Who – the same question is here rephrased in direct relation to a hypothetical person or deity – taught you how to make me love you more, the more I hear and see perfectly good and reasonable cause to hate you?
The line barely requires translation, but 'hate', here as on previous occasions, may strike us as a tad strong, and so I feel inclined to allow myself to quote myself and remind ourselves of what we observed when discussing Sonnet 89: "'Hate', it should be noted, in Shakespeare's language is not necessarily as strong a word as we mostly understand it today. Shakespeare uses it quite liberally to mean anything from an active hatred and violent aversion towards something or someone, right down to what might best be interpreted as an absence or indeed cessation of love." What is perhaps interesting though is that Sonnet 89, which follows hard on the heels of the dejected Sonnet 87 with its opening line "Farewell thou art too dear for my possessing," and thus finds itself in the midst of the second big crisis in the relationship with the young man, was, as we noted then "the first time we see the word used since the turmoil of the young lover having got off with Shakespeare's mistress." If, as is generally and reasonably assumed and as is effectively evidenced in the triangular nature of the relationship by that time, the Dark Lady Sonnets in terms of their dates of composition overlap with the Fair Youth Sonnets, then this gives the use of the word 'hate' here added force and poignancy. And we shall in a moment explore why the bigger context here is of quite great significance. |
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O though I love what others do abhor,
With others thou shouldst not abhor my state: |
Although I, in my diminished, blinded, fevered, maddened state of perfectly unreasonable love for you find myself loving someone whom other people 'abhor', for which here we may read 'dismiss', or 'detest', 'or 'hate', or 'despise', do not then by the same token 'abhor' me in the state I am in, not least – as is implied – because you put me in this state in the first place. And this implication too will in a moment gain further importance still.
'Abhor' – and on this editors similarly agree – carries a fairly obvious and therefore highly likely intentional pun on 'whore', especially with its pointed use twice in quick succession. The previous sonnet already gave us an opportunity to detect a sexual innuendo, and the sonnet that follows, Sonnet 151, will do so again in a much more blatant manner. So here we have good reason to believe that Shakespeare is deliberately using and then repeating the word 'abhor' to insinuate that the mistress is not so much being disdained or despised by others for her apparent lack of traditional beauty, but for her sexual licentiousness. In other words, Shakespeare appears here to be referring not so much to people who do not find the Dark Lady beautiful on account of her 'darkness', but to people who consider her to be sexually and morally deficient on account of the many lovers she has. We today have justifiable misgivings about the use of the term, but William Shakespeare, much as his contemporaries, is not afraid of the word 'whore': he uses it more than a hundred times in his works in one form or another, but the most relevant reference quite possibly appears in Othello, Act IV, Scene 2, where Desdemona, falsely accused by Iago of infidelity towards Othello, and naively still trusting Iago, entreats him to speak to her husband on her behalf: Unkindness may do much; And his unkindness may defeat my life, But never taint my love. I cannot say “whore,” It does abhor me now I speak the word; To do the act that might the addition earn Not the world’s mass of vanity could make me. |
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If thy unworthiness raised love in me,
More worthy I to be beloved of thee. |
If – as seems to be the case and as this sonnet itself purports to prove – your unworthiness managed, by powers I do not know or understand, to raise in me my love for you, then I am consequently all the more worthy to be loved by you.
Here, too, editors are in agreement: the line offers two readings, of which one is fairly gentle, the other almost shocking in its harshness. On the surface, I, the poet, appear to be saying: even your least worthy character traits and the most flawed aspects of your personality or expressions of your conduct manage to make me love you and so in view of this great generosity of heart and mind of mine, and seeing that it is you who does this to me, I surely am worthy of at least a little love from you. Not far from the surface though there is another layer of meaning which would seem to be suggesting something rather more nocuous: since I am debasing myself to loving someone as roundly unworthy as you, I am now on your level of unworthiness and so therefore entirely worthy of your love. Or, similarly unflattering: since I go so far as loving someone so unworthy of love as you are, I am therefore all the more deserving of your love, because, as would then also be the implication, beggars can't be choosers, and you won't find many like me who love someone so despicable as you. And here too, especially in light of the previous sonnet with its potential though not certain, and the following sonnet with its near certain sexual innuendo, we may detect a borderline crude pun in 'raised love in me' to mean 'gave me an erection', though here, as in Sonnet 149, we cannot be entirely sure whether this is indeed fully intended by Shakespeare, or whether his love of puns and bawdy wordplay elsewhere prompts us here to read into the line more than there is supposed to be. |
The at first glance unspectacular Sonnet 150 sets off from the base laid down by the previous three sonnets and now wonders out loud just how the mistress with her numerous and by now well established flaws and a beauty that could – according to these poems – be most charitably described as unconventional, manages to make our poet love her at all, and apparently prize her above all others, even those who, when looked at with a clearer vision and a less feverish mind than his, are objectively much more beautiful and agreeable than she is.
The conclusion it comes to though offers not only a fairly familiar observation that as the lover so enfeebled by your powers I surely deserve some love and pity from you, but also a surprisingly stark deconstruction, so as not to say demolition, of the lady's character in its entirety.
When discussing Sonnet 149, as on several previous occasions, we asked ourselves what brings this on, on the one hand, but more pertinently, what does this now say about our poet, and we arrived at a possible understanding that with the sonnet he expresses and in a sense works through his own bewilderment at his own situation and the state his love for his mistress is putting him in.
This sense of emotional and to some extent indeed also sexual disorientation and existential bafflement is here exacerbated, and it becomes enmeshed with a renewed and reinforced note of self-chastisement, even self-disgust. And to what extent exactly this may be said to be the case depends to quite some degree on how we are disposed to read the closing couplet of this, the pre-penultimate sonnet that concerns itself with the Dark Lady. And – perhaps I should furnish this with a mild spoiler alert – neither of the two sonnets that now follow before the final two allegorical poems, will do anything to fundamentally change this impression we are now getting: our poet is, as Lorenz Hart of Rodgers and Hart might have put it "bewitched," yes, but also "bothered and bewildered."
Fascinating though is that nothing of what is being said here in this sonnet, or indeed in the two that follow, comes as all that much of a surprise. What surprises us is the apparent bluntness with which – perhaps paradoxically, seeing that it is shaded by a subtler primary meaning – William Shakespeare dismisses his mistress as 'unworthy' and the near-needy but also uncharacteristically cocky assertion that he deserves to get what he wants from her, this being, so the suggestion and suggestive tone, if not love then at the very least sex.
For our sensibility today none of this sits all that easy. We would probably prefer to detect a hint of irony or mock-admonition here, a more flirtatious tone or a mellower flow; an altogether more charming approach to this woman. Alas, it isn't forthcoming. Sonnet 150 makes our poet sound not only perplexed and perhaps a little confused but also quite miffed and more than a tad rude.
It once again invites the question, of course, what brings this on? And it once again makes the idea that this mistress is a pure invention seem increasingly far-fetched. With Sonnet 130, My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun, William Shakespeare reached something of an apex in celebrating her as a woman, not a goddess, a person who has flaws, but who can nonetheless be loved 'warts and all', someone who does not match the for most people unattainable ideal of 'perfection', but who for all her 'defects' is in a sense all the more worthy of love. Her hairs may be 'wires', her breasts may be 'dun', her breath may 'reek', but to me she is a fine person and as desirable as any of those other women who are being "belied with false compare" by their poet suitors and lovers. She is real.
Since then though, the mistress's standing in Shakespeare's esteem – and who knows maybe in the course of events also his ego – appears to have taken something of a battering. We don't know of course whether or not these sonnets within the Dark Lady segment of the collection are placed in chronological order any more than we know exactly what the chronology is of all the other sonnets, but in the series as it was published originally in 1609 what we get is this:
- With Sonnet 127, an observation that the mistress in question is 'dark', as in tan skinned, black haired, black eyed, but our poet loves her even so or all the more for it.
- This is followed by Sonnet 128 with its fairly generic lady at the virginals, and Sonnet 129 with its startling "expense of spirit in a waste of shame," its "lust in action and till action lust," and its uncompromising assessment of the reality that "All this the world well knows, yet none knows well | To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell." All of which served to already more than hint at a, shall we say, conflicted relationship William Shakespeare seems to have with sex, at least when it comes to women.
- Next the apotheosis in reverse of Sonnet 130 which humanises his mistress while mocking other poets, followed by two sonnets, 131 and 132 which further elaborate on the blackness of the mistress's external features and puts these in relation to her conduct and character too.
- Sonnets 133 and 134 then give us some explanation as to why Shakespeare would think of his mistress as having 'dark' intentions: she either has seduced or has allowed herself to be seduced by, or at any rate has in one way or another brought into her power also his young male lover.
- Sonnets 135 and 136 pun, excessively, one might argue, on the many meanings of Will, half of them sexual and broadly, some might say coarsely, plead that among all the many other 'wills', for which read 'cocks', she allows in her 'will', for which read 'vagina', she also make room for our Will's.
- Sonnets 137 right through to 142 deal with this complexity of loving or desiring someone whom one knows not to be actually all that attractive, now however mixed in with the reality that she has other lovers and appears to – either now for the first time or perhaps since the very beginning – hold back her sexual favours from me, when with other men she is portrayed as giving these out quite liberally.
- Sonnet 143 has our poet reduced to a crying toddler with his mistress chasing someone else, here helpfully symbolised by a cockerel or similar bird, and the astounding Sonnet 144 makes it clear beyond doubt that "Two loves I have, of comfort and despair," one the Fair Youth, the other the Dark Lady, and they seem to have become such good 'friends' with each other that,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell.
With 'hell' here as in Sonnet 129 a none too subtle reference also to the woman's vagina.
- Sonnet 145 is the uniquely octosyllabic poem most people now concur talks about Anne, Shakespeare's wife, rather than the mistress, and speaks of her forgiveness for his implied misdeeds that might have made her hate him; and this is then followed by a thoughtful meditation on the nature and worth of the soul compared to the body in Sonnet 146.
- Following that, we are then into the group 147-150 of which this is the 'conclusion' or at least closing iteration, since Sonnets 151 and 152 do not develop this particular argument any further, although they also don't, as we shall see, bring in any entirely new considerations, but more or less tie up a couple of 'loose ends'.
And what do we get when we let review pass in this way? We get context and we realise: all of this makes perfect sense. Of course, it may not be reasonable, let alone logical; it may not speak of a man fully at ease and at home with his emotions, let alone his desires, but the journey he charts that his mind and his heart and very obviously and explicitly his body, as in his sexual desire and experience, are going through is one that not so suddenly but quite naturally reveals itself to be intense and in parts traumatic.
We may think this odd, even quaint, perhaps. But a reality check with what London and indeed English life was like may help us appreciate whence it might stem.
Here is Peter Ackroyd – whom I cited recently as being cautious, to say the least, when talking about the Sonnets as a reflection of Shakespeare's real life experiences – on Shakespeare and sex quite generally:
"The printed reminiscences (or gossip) of his contemporaries strongly indicate that he had a reputation for philandering. ... The writer of the sonnets seemed to have been touched by the fear and horror of venereal disease, and some biographies have even suggested that Shakespeare himself died from a related venereal condition. Nothing in Shakespeare’s life or character would exclude the possibility.
The Elizabethan age was one of great open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes."
He also adds though:
"It was not always a clean or hygienic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed. It was in many respects a short and furtive act, a spilling of animal spirits."
[Peter Ackroyd: Shakespeare The Biography, pp 294-5]
One wonders, on reflection, not so much that our Will here in these sonnets is so troubled, but how, in these conditions, he or anyone ever really was up to it, or got it up...
And the fact that he did, or purports to have done or wanted to, does suggest that he was, as Peter Ackroyd along with other biographers suggests, a highly sexed man who was, however, like many of whom this is true, not always and not only happy about this evidently emotionally, but also physically, and quite viscerally messy life of his.
And if you feel now that this is all well and good but we really need some more evidence of this, of sex being writ large in Shakespeare's life and commanding him rather more than he it, then Sonnet 151 will, you may be glad to hear, readily stand to attention...
The conclusion it comes to though offers not only a fairly familiar observation that as the lover so enfeebled by your powers I surely deserve some love and pity from you, but also a surprisingly stark deconstruction, so as not to say demolition, of the lady's character in its entirety.
When discussing Sonnet 149, as on several previous occasions, we asked ourselves what brings this on, on the one hand, but more pertinently, what does this now say about our poet, and we arrived at a possible understanding that with the sonnet he expresses and in a sense works through his own bewilderment at his own situation and the state his love for his mistress is putting him in.
This sense of emotional and to some extent indeed also sexual disorientation and existential bafflement is here exacerbated, and it becomes enmeshed with a renewed and reinforced note of self-chastisement, even self-disgust. And to what extent exactly this may be said to be the case depends to quite some degree on how we are disposed to read the closing couplet of this, the pre-penultimate sonnet that concerns itself with the Dark Lady. And – perhaps I should furnish this with a mild spoiler alert – neither of the two sonnets that now follow before the final two allegorical poems, will do anything to fundamentally change this impression we are now getting: our poet is, as Lorenz Hart of Rodgers and Hart might have put it "bewitched," yes, but also "bothered and bewildered."
Fascinating though is that nothing of what is being said here in this sonnet, or indeed in the two that follow, comes as all that much of a surprise. What surprises us is the apparent bluntness with which – perhaps paradoxically, seeing that it is shaded by a subtler primary meaning – William Shakespeare dismisses his mistress as 'unworthy' and the near-needy but also uncharacteristically cocky assertion that he deserves to get what he wants from her, this being, so the suggestion and suggestive tone, if not love then at the very least sex.
For our sensibility today none of this sits all that easy. We would probably prefer to detect a hint of irony or mock-admonition here, a more flirtatious tone or a mellower flow; an altogether more charming approach to this woman. Alas, it isn't forthcoming. Sonnet 150 makes our poet sound not only perplexed and perhaps a little confused but also quite miffed and more than a tad rude.
It once again invites the question, of course, what brings this on? And it once again makes the idea that this mistress is a pure invention seem increasingly far-fetched. With Sonnet 130, My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun, William Shakespeare reached something of an apex in celebrating her as a woman, not a goddess, a person who has flaws, but who can nonetheless be loved 'warts and all', someone who does not match the for most people unattainable ideal of 'perfection', but who for all her 'defects' is in a sense all the more worthy of love. Her hairs may be 'wires', her breasts may be 'dun', her breath may 'reek', but to me she is a fine person and as desirable as any of those other women who are being "belied with false compare" by their poet suitors and lovers. She is real.
Since then though, the mistress's standing in Shakespeare's esteem – and who knows maybe in the course of events also his ego – appears to have taken something of a battering. We don't know of course whether or not these sonnets within the Dark Lady segment of the collection are placed in chronological order any more than we know exactly what the chronology is of all the other sonnets, but in the series as it was published originally in 1609 what we get is this:
- With Sonnet 127, an observation that the mistress in question is 'dark', as in tan skinned, black haired, black eyed, but our poet loves her even so or all the more for it.
- This is followed by Sonnet 128 with its fairly generic lady at the virginals, and Sonnet 129 with its startling "expense of spirit in a waste of shame," its "lust in action and till action lust," and its uncompromising assessment of the reality that "All this the world well knows, yet none knows well | To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell." All of which served to already more than hint at a, shall we say, conflicted relationship William Shakespeare seems to have with sex, at least when it comes to women.
- Next the apotheosis in reverse of Sonnet 130 which humanises his mistress while mocking other poets, followed by two sonnets, 131 and 132 which further elaborate on the blackness of the mistress's external features and puts these in relation to her conduct and character too.
- Sonnets 133 and 134 then give us some explanation as to why Shakespeare would think of his mistress as having 'dark' intentions: she either has seduced or has allowed herself to be seduced by, or at any rate has in one way or another brought into her power also his young male lover.
- Sonnets 135 and 136 pun, excessively, one might argue, on the many meanings of Will, half of them sexual and broadly, some might say coarsely, plead that among all the many other 'wills', for which read 'cocks', she allows in her 'will', for which read 'vagina', she also make room for our Will's.
- Sonnets 137 right through to 142 deal with this complexity of loving or desiring someone whom one knows not to be actually all that attractive, now however mixed in with the reality that she has other lovers and appears to – either now for the first time or perhaps since the very beginning – hold back her sexual favours from me, when with other men she is portrayed as giving these out quite liberally.
- Sonnet 143 has our poet reduced to a crying toddler with his mistress chasing someone else, here helpfully symbolised by a cockerel or similar bird, and the astounding Sonnet 144 makes it clear beyond doubt that "Two loves I have, of comfort and despair," one the Fair Youth, the other the Dark Lady, and they seem to have become such good 'friends' with each other that,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell.
With 'hell' here as in Sonnet 129 a none too subtle reference also to the woman's vagina.
- Sonnet 145 is the uniquely octosyllabic poem most people now concur talks about Anne, Shakespeare's wife, rather than the mistress, and speaks of her forgiveness for his implied misdeeds that might have made her hate him; and this is then followed by a thoughtful meditation on the nature and worth of the soul compared to the body in Sonnet 146.
- Following that, we are then into the group 147-150 of which this is the 'conclusion' or at least closing iteration, since Sonnets 151 and 152 do not develop this particular argument any further, although they also don't, as we shall see, bring in any entirely new considerations, but more or less tie up a couple of 'loose ends'.
And what do we get when we let review pass in this way? We get context and we realise: all of this makes perfect sense. Of course, it may not be reasonable, let alone logical; it may not speak of a man fully at ease and at home with his emotions, let alone his desires, but the journey he charts that his mind and his heart and very obviously and explicitly his body, as in his sexual desire and experience, are going through is one that not so suddenly but quite naturally reveals itself to be intense and in parts traumatic.
We may think this odd, even quaint, perhaps. But a reality check with what London and indeed English life was like may help us appreciate whence it might stem.
Here is Peter Ackroyd – whom I cited recently as being cautious, to say the least, when talking about the Sonnets as a reflection of Shakespeare's real life experiences – on Shakespeare and sex quite generally:
"The printed reminiscences (or gossip) of his contemporaries strongly indicate that he had a reputation for philandering. ... The writer of the sonnets seemed to have been touched by the fear and horror of venereal disease, and some biographies have even suggested that Shakespeare himself died from a related venereal condition. Nothing in Shakespeare’s life or character would exclude the possibility.
The Elizabethan age was one of great open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes."
He also adds though:
"It was not always a clean or hygienic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed. It was in many respects a short and furtive act, a spilling of animal spirits."
[Peter Ackroyd: Shakespeare The Biography, pp 294-5]
One wonders, on reflection, not so much that our Will here in these sonnets is so troubled, but how, in these conditions, he or anyone ever really was up to it, or got it up...
And the fact that he did, or purports to have done or wanted to, does suggest that he was, as Peter Ackroyd along with other biographers suggests, a highly sexed man who was, however, like many of whom this is true, not always and not only happy about this evidently emotionally, but also physically, and quite viscerally messy life of his.
And if you feel now that this is all well and good but we really need some more evidence of this, of sex being writ large in Shakespeare's life and commanding him rather more than he it, then Sonnet 151 will, you may be glad to hear, readily stand to attention...
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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!