Sonnet 91: Some Glory in Their Birth, Some in Their Skill
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Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body's force, Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill, Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse; And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure, Wherein it finds a joy above the rest, But these particulars are not my measure, All these I better in one general best: Thy love is better than high birth to me, Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, Of more delight than hawks or horses be, And having thee, of all men's pride I boast, Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take All this away, and me most wretched make. |
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Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body's force, |
Some people take pride and joy in the social status that they are born into, such as their title and family, and therefore the presumed honour that this bestows on them, while for some people this same level of 'glory' stems from their skill, for which here we may read education and intelligence as well as craft and artistic skill, and indeed sporting prowess; and some people get this satisfaction simply from their wealth, others again from their own physical strength...
These four qualities – birth, skill, wealth, and strength – bear a striking resemblance to those enumerated in Sonnet 37 and attributed to the young man himself: For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, or all or more, Entitled in thy parts do crowned sit, I make my love engrafted to this store. And we shall look into the significance of this in a little more detail in a moment. |
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Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
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Some people find this pride and joy of which we speak in their clothes, even if these be new-fangled – for which today we might say trashily trendy – and/or badly made...
Shakespeare somewhat tartly here lets his disdain for fashion and superficiality shine through once more. This is something we are well acquainted with by now: he has no time for make-up, wigs, or garish ostentation, and this line – which manages to bring a smile to my face every time I come across it, because it is so revealing about our poet – can actually be read in two slightly different but equally valid ways. Either, as just rendered: some people glory in these clothes which are, although of the latest fashion, actually ill made and therefore of a low quality, or, far more generally and therefore also more damning in its dismissal of fashion: some people glory in their clothes even though they are just new-fangled rubbish, meaning they are bad not because they are necessarily badly made but because they are modish and showy and in bad taste. |
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Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
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The list of potential sources for a person's 'glory' continues, some people derive this from their hawks and hounds – a common enough feature in the life of the landed gentry at the time – and some from their horse, which editors like to point out here probably may be understood to be 'their horses' in the plural – a bit like we still use 'sheep' or 'fish' to mean one or several of the species – since the kind of rich people Shakespeare here characterises would invariably have an entire stable of horses at their disposal, whereby it has also been observed that quite naturally, many people who own horses do in fact, among these, often have a favourite.
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And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest, |
And every person's character has a type of pleasure that matches it and that goes with its predilections, and in which therefore it finds a joy above all else...
The 'his' in 'his adjunct pleasure' as every so often here means 'its', and in fact Shakespeare then switches to 'it' in the subsequent line, because he is talking not about the person but about the person's 'humour'. In the classical and therefore also Renaissance understanding of human nature and temperament, the Hippocratic theory of humours was well established and deeply influential. Hippocrates, who lived approximately 460 to 370 BCE, postulated four principal fluids, known to us as humours from Latin umor, meaning body fluid, which itself stems from the Greek χυμός (chymos), meaning 'fluid' or 'sap'. These humours were thought to keep the human body in a heathy balance: blood, yellow bile or choler, black bile, from which, via Latin melancholia, we get our melancholy, originally from Greek melas, 'black', and khole, bile, and phlegm. They were associated with the four classical elements: air for blood, fire for choler, earth for melancholy, and water for phlegm. If a person's humours were unbalanced then one of them would naturally dominate their character, which is why to this day we speak of people being of a sanguine disposition, meaning that blood – Latin sanguineus – air, lightness, liveliness are their chief personality traits, or of someone being phlegmatic, meaning that they are languid, go with the flow, are not easily excitable and essentially more like water, in contrast to a choleric person who rages easily and is all fire in their belly, or indeed one who is of a melancholy, generally heavy, lethargic, even in today's language depressive disposition. Shakespeare was clearly aware of this theory and he references both the classical elements and the humours several times in his works, though 'humour' only twice in the sonnets, here and again in the next one, Sonnet 92. We shall look into this a little further in our discussion of the sonnet as a whole, because it offers a particularly interesting topic for examination. |
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But these particulars are not my measure,
All these I better in one general best: |
But these listed individual items are not the measure of my pride and joy: in other words they are not what I use to consider how fortunate or indeed how successful I am, because all of these are outdone in my life by one encompassing thing against which everything else pales into insignificance:
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Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, |
`Your love is better than high birth to me, it means more to me than any status or family honour or title I could wish for, and it is, and therefore makes me, richer than any wealth I might possess, and it is more splendid than the ostentation of magnificent clothing.
This latter is a point worth noting and being aware of: the relationship we have with fashion and clothing today is totally different to that of the Elizabethans. The reason that clothing so strongly served as a symbol of status is that high quality garments were exceptionally expensive. This is a time well before industrial manufacture and so everything was literally made by hand as individual pieces. Dye for garments was produced from natural substances and correspondingly costly too, and so only the wealthiest could afford richly, let alone garishly, coloured clothing, which is where we get this notion of 'garments' cost' from: Primark is not something that anybody could have dreamt of at the time. |
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Of more delight than hawks or horses be,
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast, |
Your love is of more delight to me than hawks or horses, and so long as I have you I can boast of everything that makes other men proud...
The fact that Shakespeare allows himself the word 'boast', and places it in direct relation to 'pride' is interesting to say the least. If you cast your mind back to Sonnet 26, 'boasting' of his love for the young man there looked very much like it was exactly what had got him into trouble, and that sonnet, quite incidentally, also came with a clothing analogy. You will find this discussed of course in the episode on Sonnet 26, but here just to remind us is the closing couplet: Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee, Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me. And when we were talking about the especially suggestive Sonnet 52, we ventured that the word 'pride' in a constellation there with the idea of 'having' the young man, carried strong sexual connotations; in fact we postulated with Sonnet 52 that it all but 'proves' – if such a thing can be said to be possible within these sonnets – that the relationship between Shakespeare and his young man had by then acquired a physical dimension. Sonnet 52 supported this notion with several other elements which are here absent, and so we cannot claim with any great confidence that this sonnet makes similarly obvious references, but we may wish to bear in mind that with this markedly more upbeat tone may come also a return to happy times spent in each other's company, and in fact the oscillations of which we spoke when discussing the last two sonnets would appear to be reflected and borne out here: it sounds to all intents and purposes as if our young man had taken Shakespeare back, at least for the moment, because he is, as he says... |
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Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away, and me most wretched make. |
While I am thus fortunate and able to joy in my glory which I derive entirely from you, I am wretched – for which read unfortunate or unhappy – in this fact alone, that you may take all this away from me at a whim, and in doing so make me unhappiest of all.
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With Sonnet 91, William Shakespeare reclaims his place in the young man's favour, and for the first time in a while – in the published sequence since the group that contains Sonnets 71 to 76 – speaks primarily of how the young man's love privileges him, Shakespeare, above all else. It is for the most part a return to a happier, more confident, more celebratory tone, which, however, tellingly is then tempered with a closing couplet that once again conjures up the spectre of this love being taken away entirely at the young man's whim.
Sonnet 91 shows us Shakespeare the poet back at the top of his game: with his renewed confidence comes a new playfulness and dexterity. He deploys his rhetorical devices with panache, starting with a doubly doubled anaphora, by repeating the first word of a line three times at the beginning of a line and also thrice internally within the line. It has exactly the desired effect: some people enjoy this, some people love doing that, and there are so many people who find pleasure in so many things, but for me the only thing that counts is you. And not content with having set up his argument in so patently poetic a fashion, he then employs a selective correlatio to – as the term suggests – correlate these various pastimes and sources of pleasure in the first quatrain with what the young man's love means to him, in the third.
There is nothing definitive we can conclude from this, but it is, to literally translate the French proverb and truism, the tone that makes the music, and here the tone is altogether more upbeat than we have heard our poet for a while now. He newly relishes his language and what he can do with it, and he uses words that do not blush: "And having thee, of all men's pride I boast" is not something you say to someone when you feel meek and downtrodden, even bearing in mind the caveat that then immediately follows and relativises everything that has just been said.
And so while we cannot conclude anything, certainly not for certain, we can wonder, as we have done on numerous occasions: what causes this change in tone, this turnaround, even though it be temporary. And an obvious – albeit entirely speculative, this has to be emphasised – answer is, just as we got the impression throughout the last few sonnets, that the young man is effectively toying with Shakespeare and has now given him reason to feel that all is not lost, has maybe spent time with him, has perhaps, in his own possibly somewhat vague way 'reassured' him or at least indicated to him that he is keeping his options open in either direction.
If we weigh the line that we just quoted heavily – "And having thee, of all men's pride I boast" – we may even be tempted to surmise that the young lover has once more been intimate with Shakespeare, at some level, but really all of this is and must be conjecture: everything, as you have heard me say often though not for a while now, is conjecture, except the words, and the words do nothing so much as reinvigorate this relationship to the point of putting the young man back on the pedestal where he so long belonged, at least until we get to the closing couplet.
The closing couplet in this instance does two tremendously important things: firstly, it casts a doubt over everything the sonnet has just claimed and declared, and this embeds it in the sonnets that we've been reading and listening to since Sonnet 87 with its dejected 'farewell', and so we can rest to some degree assured that this new batch of sonnets does absolutely stand in the context of a phase in Shakespeare's life that has seen that relationship sorely tested.
Secondly, it opens the hatch to Sonnet 92, which directly connects with it and continues from it, and which in turn then feeds into Sonnet 93, because Sonnet 91 in fact once more forms part of another 'triptych', metaphorically speaking, of sonnets which hang and therefore stand together and which as a group form a second layer in paving the ground for yet another group of three, Sonnets 94 to 96, which constitute what we have called something of a fightback on the part of William Shakespeare.
What Sonnet 91 also does – and none too subtly really, as we observed earlier while 'translating' it – is to contrast Shakespeare's source of 'glory', which we called his joy, his pride, and indeed his pleasure – with glory derived from things enjoyed ostensibly by all manner of people – we had the word 'some' no fewer than seven times in that first quatrain – but most of which are exactly the kinds of things our young man would find his joy in 'above all else': his birth, absolutely, we can say with great confidence that the young man is an aristocrat. His skill, certainly: if he is a young aristocrat of any note, he will be educated and skilled in things such as combat, jousting, rhetoric, possibly dancing, maybe singing, certainly riding. Wealth, almost goes without saying. Body's force: that, though more of a stretch, may possibly by now be presumed. At the time of Sonnet 20, Shakespeare compared his young man to a woman. If we are assuming, as we can and should, for reasons I have oft explained and will expound further, but not right now, that the young man of these Fair Youth Sonnets is principally one person, then our immediate reaction to 'body's force' may be to say: that probably doesn't really apply, unless we take into account that the relationship clearly stretches over some time, by now – we don't know, but we may hazard an educated guess – probably in the region, maybe even in excess of, two years, and if you've ever watched a precocious late teenager metamorphose into an athletic young man, you will not think it improbable that even 'body's force' may now be something Shakespeare's lover can boast of. Garments, we know little about, but it would be just like Shakespeare to coach a mild tease of his lover for his dress sense in a line that purports to be about others; hawks and hounds would be entirely congruent with almost any young nobleman of the day, and one or several horses are as much part of the Englishman in Elizabethan England as a car is to the average American today.
In other words: what offers itself as a distinct possibility is that Shakespeare is not, here, comparing his source of pride and joy, his glory with that of a plethora of other people, what he is comparing it with is the young man himself. Which takes us right back to the asymmetry in the relationship we mentioned in our last episode and which would – if the case –make this a much more powerful poem than at first glance it seems. Because then it would not simply be me, the poet, saying how wonderful you are, it would be me saying: you are everything to me but – alack and alas – you find pleasure in virtually anything but me. And yet, you still have me, and I still have you. But this is not in my hands, because "thou mayst take | All this away and me most wretched make."
This, though, is not where the argument ends: it continues over a further couple of sonnets and so we must take this 'closing' couplet as what it is: a lead into what follows. And of course we will discuss what follows, as night follows day, in our next episode, on Sonnet 92.
But before we go today I want to briefly embark on a short excursion into numerical analysis and stylometry. Because you may recall – if you have been listening to Sonnetcast throughout – that in our conversation, Professor Gabriel Egan mentioned the word 'humour' to mean, as discussed above, the Hippocratic bodily fluids that therefore come to define our four temperaments.
Now, Professor Egan mentioned these in passing, he was not formulating an argument, and so I am not here attempting to respond to a point or prove or disprove what he said, I am simply casting an eye on a highly specific case of a word that he happened to throw in the air, to see where it actually lands.
What he pointed out was that the concept of 'humours' came into fashion in England towards the late 16th century and that suddenly there were a whole crop of plays that either had 'humour' in the title or mentioned humours, and Shakespeare too, having used the word only sporadically for most of the time, suddenly starts deploying it, most notably in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. And he suggested that if there were a 'humour' sonnet, then one could possibly surmise that it too may have been composed during that period. You can hear is actual words in the Special Guest episode with him around minute 52 onwards.
And so now, with 'humour' having entered the sonnets, let's have a look at what happens if we project 'humour' in the sonnets onto 'humour' in the plays. We can plot the instances of 'humour' and 'humours' in Shakespeare's plays on a graph and what we see is that between 1591 and 1597, the word crops up in several plays, but mostly only three or four times, or, as in The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, six or seven times. But then in 1598, the number of appearances increases and in about 1600 we have a real spike with The Merry Wives of Windsor, which features the word 24 times, so about four times the previous average per play.
If we could apply the method of aligning the sonnets with the plays in a simple and straightforward fashion, then this might prompt us to put forward 1598-1600 as the most likely window for the composition of this sonnet and Sonnet 92. But unfortunately, things are not quite as simple and straightforward as that: The Merry Wives of Windsor itself happens to be a play that is particularly difficult to date, with suggested years ranging from as early as 1597 to as late as 1601. Edmondson Wells, in the footsteps of Macdonald P Jackson, keep these two sonnets in a group containing Sonnets 87-103 and place this in a window dated 1594-1595, which is fairly close to where I would place them too, for all manner of reasons that we will discuss in much greater detail when we return to the dating of the sonnets in another special episode.
In this case, the word 'humour' is not rare enough in Shakespeare's canon to be able say, it would be a great coincidence if he used it several years apart, nor is it frequent enough in the sonnets to say that it would be a great coincidence if he made such prominent use of it here in isolation. And so, sadly, it turns out that the proliferation of 'humour' in the latter phase of Shakespeare's playwriting career does not help us in making any pronouncements about when this sonnet and the one that follows it were composed, which, if nothing else, may go some way to illustrate that we need to treat all of these attempts at drawing conclusions from a correlation between the plays and the poems with a healthy degree of caution mostly because, as indeed Professor Egan also emphasises, the sonnets as a whole contain so few words – about 17,000, with the word count in each poems alone reaching just over a hundred on average – that we simply may not have enough raw data to come to any firm findings through numerical analysis alone.
Sonnet 91 shows us Shakespeare the poet back at the top of his game: with his renewed confidence comes a new playfulness and dexterity. He deploys his rhetorical devices with panache, starting with a doubly doubled anaphora, by repeating the first word of a line three times at the beginning of a line and also thrice internally within the line. It has exactly the desired effect: some people enjoy this, some people love doing that, and there are so many people who find pleasure in so many things, but for me the only thing that counts is you. And not content with having set up his argument in so patently poetic a fashion, he then employs a selective correlatio to – as the term suggests – correlate these various pastimes and sources of pleasure in the first quatrain with what the young man's love means to him, in the third.
There is nothing definitive we can conclude from this, but it is, to literally translate the French proverb and truism, the tone that makes the music, and here the tone is altogether more upbeat than we have heard our poet for a while now. He newly relishes his language and what he can do with it, and he uses words that do not blush: "And having thee, of all men's pride I boast" is not something you say to someone when you feel meek and downtrodden, even bearing in mind the caveat that then immediately follows and relativises everything that has just been said.
And so while we cannot conclude anything, certainly not for certain, we can wonder, as we have done on numerous occasions: what causes this change in tone, this turnaround, even though it be temporary. And an obvious – albeit entirely speculative, this has to be emphasised – answer is, just as we got the impression throughout the last few sonnets, that the young man is effectively toying with Shakespeare and has now given him reason to feel that all is not lost, has maybe spent time with him, has perhaps, in his own possibly somewhat vague way 'reassured' him or at least indicated to him that he is keeping his options open in either direction.
If we weigh the line that we just quoted heavily – "And having thee, of all men's pride I boast" – we may even be tempted to surmise that the young lover has once more been intimate with Shakespeare, at some level, but really all of this is and must be conjecture: everything, as you have heard me say often though not for a while now, is conjecture, except the words, and the words do nothing so much as reinvigorate this relationship to the point of putting the young man back on the pedestal where he so long belonged, at least until we get to the closing couplet.
The closing couplet in this instance does two tremendously important things: firstly, it casts a doubt over everything the sonnet has just claimed and declared, and this embeds it in the sonnets that we've been reading and listening to since Sonnet 87 with its dejected 'farewell', and so we can rest to some degree assured that this new batch of sonnets does absolutely stand in the context of a phase in Shakespeare's life that has seen that relationship sorely tested.
Secondly, it opens the hatch to Sonnet 92, which directly connects with it and continues from it, and which in turn then feeds into Sonnet 93, because Sonnet 91 in fact once more forms part of another 'triptych', metaphorically speaking, of sonnets which hang and therefore stand together and which as a group form a second layer in paving the ground for yet another group of three, Sonnets 94 to 96, which constitute what we have called something of a fightback on the part of William Shakespeare.
What Sonnet 91 also does – and none too subtly really, as we observed earlier while 'translating' it – is to contrast Shakespeare's source of 'glory', which we called his joy, his pride, and indeed his pleasure – with glory derived from things enjoyed ostensibly by all manner of people – we had the word 'some' no fewer than seven times in that first quatrain – but most of which are exactly the kinds of things our young man would find his joy in 'above all else': his birth, absolutely, we can say with great confidence that the young man is an aristocrat. His skill, certainly: if he is a young aristocrat of any note, he will be educated and skilled in things such as combat, jousting, rhetoric, possibly dancing, maybe singing, certainly riding. Wealth, almost goes without saying. Body's force: that, though more of a stretch, may possibly by now be presumed. At the time of Sonnet 20, Shakespeare compared his young man to a woman. If we are assuming, as we can and should, for reasons I have oft explained and will expound further, but not right now, that the young man of these Fair Youth Sonnets is principally one person, then our immediate reaction to 'body's force' may be to say: that probably doesn't really apply, unless we take into account that the relationship clearly stretches over some time, by now – we don't know, but we may hazard an educated guess – probably in the region, maybe even in excess of, two years, and if you've ever watched a precocious late teenager metamorphose into an athletic young man, you will not think it improbable that even 'body's force' may now be something Shakespeare's lover can boast of. Garments, we know little about, but it would be just like Shakespeare to coach a mild tease of his lover for his dress sense in a line that purports to be about others; hawks and hounds would be entirely congruent with almost any young nobleman of the day, and one or several horses are as much part of the Englishman in Elizabethan England as a car is to the average American today.
In other words: what offers itself as a distinct possibility is that Shakespeare is not, here, comparing his source of pride and joy, his glory with that of a plethora of other people, what he is comparing it with is the young man himself. Which takes us right back to the asymmetry in the relationship we mentioned in our last episode and which would – if the case –make this a much more powerful poem than at first glance it seems. Because then it would not simply be me, the poet, saying how wonderful you are, it would be me saying: you are everything to me but – alack and alas – you find pleasure in virtually anything but me. And yet, you still have me, and I still have you. But this is not in my hands, because "thou mayst take | All this away and me most wretched make."
This, though, is not where the argument ends: it continues over a further couple of sonnets and so we must take this 'closing' couplet as what it is: a lead into what follows. And of course we will discuss what follows, as night follows day, in our next episode, on Sonnet 92.
But before we go today I want to briefly embark on a short excursion into numerical analysis and stylometry. Because you may recall – if you have been listening to Sonnetcast throughout – that in our conversation, Professor Gabriel Egan mentioned the word 'humour' to mean, as discussed above, the Hippocratic bodily fluids that therefore come to define our four temperaments.
Now, Professor Egan mentioned these in passing, he was not formulating an argument, and so I am not here attempting to respond to a point or prove or disprove what he said, I am simply casting an eye on a highly specific case of a word that he happened to throw in the air, to see where it actually lands.
What he pointed out was that the concept of 'humours' came into fashion in England towards the late 16th century and that suddenly there were a whole crop of plays that either had 'humour' in the title or mentioned humours, and Shakespeare too, having used the word only sporadically for most of the time, suddenly starts deploying it, most notably in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. And he suggested that if there were a 'humour' sonnet, then one could possibly surmise that it too may have been composed during that period. You can hear is actual words in the Special Guest episode with him around minute 52 onwards.
And so now, with 'humour' having entered the sonnets, let's have a look at what happens if we project 'humour' in the sonnets onto 'humour' in the plays. We can plot the instances of 'humour' and 'humours' in Shakespeare's plays on a graph and what we see is that between 1591 and 1597, the word crops up in several plays, but mostly only three or four times, or, as in The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, six or seven times. But then in 1598, the number of appearances increases and in about 1600 we have a real spike with The Merry Wives of Windsor, which features the word 24 times, so about four times the previous average per play.
If we could apply the method of aligning the sonnets with the plays in a simple and straightforward fashion, then this might prompt us to put forward 1598-1600 as the most likely window for the composition of this sonnet and Sonnet 92. But unfortunately, things are not quite as simple and straightforward as that: The Merry Wives of Windsor itself happens to be a play that is particularly difficult to date, with suggested years ranging from as early as 1597 to as late as 1601. Edmondson Wells, in the footsteps of Macdonald P Jackson, keep these two sonnets in a group containing Sonnets 87-103 and place this in a window dated 1594-1595, which is fairly close to where I would place them too, for all manner of reasons that we will discuss in much greater detail when we return to the dating of the sonnets in another special episode.
In this case, the word 'humour' is not rare enough in Shakespeare's canon to be able say, it would be a great coincidence if he used it several years apart, nor is it frequent enough in the sonnets to say that it would be a great coincidence if he made such prominent use of it here in isolation. And so, sadly, it turns out that the proliferation of 'humour' in the latter phase of Shakespeare's playwriting career does not help us in making any pronouncements about when this sonnet and the one that follows it were composed, which, if nothing else, may go some way to illustrate that we need to treat all of these attempts at drawing conclusions from a correlation between the plays and the poems with a healthy degree of caution mostly because, as indeed Professor Egan also emphasises, the sonnets as a whole contain so few words – about 17,000, with the word count in each poems alone reaching just over a hundred on average – that we simply may not have enough raw data to come to any firm findings through numerical analysis alone.
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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!