Sonnet 93: So Shall I Live, Supposing Thou Art True
|
So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceived husband, so love's face May still seem love to me, though altered new: Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place. For there can live no hatred in thine eye, Therefore in that I cannot know thy change; In many's looks the false heart's history Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange, But heaven in thy creation did decree That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell, Whatever thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be, Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell. How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show. |
|
|
So shall I live, supposing thou art true
Like a deceived husband, |
The sonnet continues from Sonnet 92, which in turn built on Sonnet 91 and ended on the line:
Thou mayst be false and yet I know it not. And so, this possibly being the case, I shall live thinking or assuming or convincing myself or imagining that you are faithful to me, even if you are not, just like a husband who is being cheated on by his – at the time invariably – wife, without knowing it, or perhaps, as the 'supposing' here seems to suggest, suspecting as much but choosing to believe it not to be so. 'Live' here is pointed, because it not only means that I will generally exist in this ignorance, but that it is because of this ignorance that I will continue to live rather than die, as the previous sonnet suggested I would, at the least wrong that is done to me by you. It expresses the conundrum that my life can only end the moment your love ends – as I said it would in Sonnet 92 – if I know that your love ends. If you are being unfaithful to me "and yet I know it not," then I shall live, but I shall do so like a deceived husband. PRONUNCIATION: Note that deceived here has three syllables: de-cei-vèd. |
|
so love's face
May still seem love to me, though altered new: |
And so the outward appearance of love may in this manner still seem like actual love to me even though the genuine substance of that love has changed, or even vanished.
'Love's face' has a double meaning that is most likely intended: on the one hand it refers to, as just given, the general appearance of love itself, on the other hand it also references the face of my love, which is your face; and 'altered new' also retains a certain degree of ambiguity as it does not spell out clearly in what way the love has changed. But both these equivocacies are effectively removed in the next line and the ones that follow: |
|
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place.
|
Your outward appearance – as in your conduct towards me, the way you look at me, even speak to me, the way you seem – are giving me the impression that you and your love are still with me, when in fact your heart is elsewhere and your love directed towards someone else or to other people.
|
|
For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change; |
Because there can live no hatred in your eye, and so I cannot tell from looking into your eyes that you have changed and no longer love me.
|
|
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange, |
In many people's looks the history of their false, unfaithful heart, meaning the things they have done to betray their lover or their husband, shows in the way they look at you; it is, one might say, written in their face and in their behaviour, in their moods, their frowns, and their unusual wrinkles which here are not so much wrinkles of age but lines on the face drawn by expressions that are new and out of character.
In other words: other people can't hide it when their love has gone: they start to look, behave, speak differently, you can read it in their eyes and in their faces that they are not the same. |
|
But heaven in thy creation did decree,
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell, |
But heaven – for which here read the gods, or God, or the powers that made you – when you were created decreed or determined that your face should only ever be home to 'sweet love' for which here of course read 'loveliness' or the appearance of love...
PRONUNCIATION; Note that heaven here is pronounced as one syllable: hea'n. |
|
Whatever thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell. |
...whatever your actual thoughts or your heart's workings may be, your looks – meaning both your appearance and expressions, as well as your eyes and how you look at people – should tell of nothing other than love and sweetness.
The whole quatrain is easy enough to understand: you were made in such a way – by implication so maddeningly beautiful – that even if you are being unfaithful and thus false to me, I can't see it in you: your face and the way you look at me is always sweet and lovely. PRONUNCIATION: Note that whatever here has two syllables: whate'er. |
|
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show. |
How much does this beauty of yours become like Eve's apple if your virtue, meaning your character, your integrity, and thus your inner beauty, does not correspond to what shows on the outside: your famous outward beauty.
There have been several sonnets that have touched on this classical idea that an outward beauty should, in an ideal person be matched by an inner beauty, and in fact Sonnet 69 was one of the ones that expressed that in the young man this congruence between character and appearance was lacking. Eve's apple is the ultimate symbol of temptation and deceit, and also the symbol of original sin: In the Book of Genesis of the Bible, a serpent – symbolising cunning and deception – persuades Eve to taste the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and Eve in turn persuades her husband Adam to taste of it too. Both lose their innocence and are expelled from Paradise, cursed by God for their transgression: Adam henceforth will have to provide for himself and his offspring through sweat and labour, Eve will have to give birth to that offspring in great pain, and, aware of their shame and vulnerable in their nakedness, they have to clothe themselves and build shelter and face the eternal struggle for survival. Shakespeare here likens his young lover's compelling beauty to the calamitous fruit that, once tasted, is bound to bring about self-conscious misery and destruction; and editors also point to the proverb "an apple may be fair without and bad within," which may indeed also be alluded to here, since it encompasses in one apple – forever and not least because of the Genesis story a symbol of temptation, as we just saw – something that may be beautiful on the outside and rotten to the core on the inside, a no less damning indictment of the young man if thus intended. |
Sonnet 93 is the third of three sonnets that pivot William Shakespeare's stance towards his young lover from one of pure praise and adulation to one that not just questions his conduct and character, but begins to actively admonish him.
It picks up directly from the closing couplet of Sonnet 92 and imagines a situation in which the young man is unfaithful to Shakespeare without Shakespeare knowing about this, and so it compares our poet to a 'deceived husband'. In doing so it reinforces the claim made by Sonnet 92, that the young man is in effect pledged to Shakespeare for life, and it further likens their relationship to a marriage. And while this can't, of course, be read literally – not least because equal marriage did not exist at the time and Shakespeare was already married with children to Anne in Stratford-upon-Avon – it nevertheless gives us a deep insight into how William Shakespeare views himself constellated to his young lover.
This comparison of himself to a 'deceived husband', tied directly to Sonnet 92 with its "For term of life thou art assured mine" is no doubt the boldest assertion yet of Shakespeare's that he feels the young man owes him fidelity because of a promise – explicit or implicit – that has been made. As we noted with the previous sonnet, we can't know to what extent such a promise or pledge has in fact been formulated or to what extent Shakespeare may be imagining himself to have the young man thus 'assured' to him, but all of these sonnets echo three observations we've made before, most obviously around Sonnets 33 to 42 and also around Sonnets 57 and 58:
Firstly, Shakespeare considers himself and his young man to be together as one; secondly, the young man is not honouring this commitment but has close – by implication emotional as well as sexual – relationships with other people, including at one point Shakespeare's own mistress – which, incidentally, as we also of course noted at the time, by necessity means that Shakespeare too isn't entirely honouring this commitment which he presents as entirely mutual, quite apart from the fact that he is already married – and thirdly that Shakespeare is upset, angry, disappointed by what he sees as the young man's transgressions.
What is entirely different to these previous occasions is the level of leeway Shakespeare appears to be prepared to give the young man. During the mistress crisis, he was quite forgiving.
Sonnet 34:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
Sonnet 35:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done
Sonnet: 41:
Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits
When I am sometime absent from thy heart
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Even Sonnet 58, though rather more grudgingly and through gritted teeth, seemed to make at least some concession, allowing for the young man's status:
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.
This apparent 'tolerance' of the young man's escapades and general behaviour is here – and, as we shall see, in the next two sonnets –entirely absent. Which allows for a speculation – and this has to be a speculation at best – that while, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, he and his young man were always, in the classical lover's trope, one, this sense of being entitled to expect some sort of loyalty, this notion of being firmly committed to each other has since materialised. In other words, it would seem that at one point in the intervening period the relationship has acquired a more categorically 'assured' character, at least in Shakespeare's understanding of it.
What exactly it is that gives Shakespeare reason to view the relationship in this way and whether he even has good reason to do so, we cannot tell, but going by the words, and by the words only, since this has been and remains our approach, these words here really speak a new language. And if nothing else this points to and reminds us of one factor we are a bit apt to ignore: time.
We became aware, during the course of the last few sonnets, that quite naturally these sonnets must stretch over a certain period. We don't know what exactly that period is, but we do know that for many of these sonnets, although clearly not all, it must lie somewhere between approximately 1592 and 1594, with others then reaching up to 1598 and some quite possibly beyond. But this is worth bearing in mind: by now, William Shakespeare and his young man will have known and in one way or another related to each other for very likely two to three years. And this during a period when the young man very likely is turning from his late teens, early twenties into his early to mid twenties, in other words, when he is turning from a youth on the cusp of maturity into a fully-fledged, legally independent adult. And this is of great significance for our appreciation of this relationship as very naturally, very humanly dynamic and therefore evolving.
What we also do not know for certain, but have fairly strong reason to believe, is that the young man of the bulk of these sonnets is the same young man as the one who is being urged to marry in the Procreation Sequence that consists of Sonnets 1 to 17. I emphasise that there is no factual outward proof of this, and you will find scholars vociferously question it, but in our entire reading and analysis so far there has been not one good reason to assume otherwise, whilst quite to the contrary there have been many indications to suggest that this is in fact the case.
If it is the case, then there are any number of scenarios in which one can imagine an immensely privileged, somewhat petulant youth who is obstinate in his refusal to marry, and who is receiving all this attention and adoration from an obviously extremely gifted and also increasingly now recognised poet, to at one point in their relationship express to him – perhaps jokingly, perhaps seriously, perhaps somewhere in-between – that he will be his forever; that rather than marrying any of the society ladies throwing themselves at him or being foisted on him by people around him, he would 'assure' himself to his friend and lover 'for term of life'. But here we are finding ourselves once more in the realm of supposition and conjecture, and so before we drift altogether too far into these waters which are fraught with peril, let's steer our little ship of exploration back into the words themselves, which are not conjecture but which lie in front of us in literal or metaphorical black and white, and which do something else that is rather interesting.
They go from a generic possibility in Sonnet 91 "That thou mayst take all this [love] away," to a rather more specific "Thou mayst be false [and betray me] and yet I know it not" in Sonnet 92, to what comes close to observing an established fact in Sonnet 93. It is still coached in terms of a hypothesis: "If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show." But the way Shakespeare builds up to it suggests to us that this is in fact so, that the young man's 'sweet virtue' really does not correspond to his immaculate beauty, which hardly can surprise us by now.
And listen to this one more time:
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell
Whatever thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
Someone might be forgiven for replying to this: 'are you saying my heart is false'? And the answer would have to be: 'that is exactly what I'm saying.' Because that is exactly what I'm saying here, if I am Shakespeare.
And there is one final detail that is worth paying attention to, briefly. In this closing couplet
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.
the verb 'grow', as we saw above, means 'become': this is a small but significant nuance. Shakespeare presents the young man's beauty – of which we have heard a great deal by now, this being the 58th time within the sonnets that the word 'beauty', 'beautiful', 'beauties' or 'beauteous' appears – as, on the one hand, something organic, something that grows, and therefore on the other hand and by the same token as something changeable, something that can turn from one thing into something else. And what Shakespeare is making abundantly clear is that this young man's apparently legendary beauty is in acute danger of turning from the wholesome, surely at some point in his young life innocent, untarnished thing that it was into the embodiment of the ur-breach of trust: the ultimate symbol of betrayal and jeopardy.
And this sense of danger, this sense of the young man being capable of doing great harm to those around him, and of the young man himself through his conduct putting himself at extreme risk of being corrupted is exactly the subject of the sonnet that comes next and the one that then follows...
It picks up directly from the closing couplet of Sonnet 92 and imagines a situation in which the young man is unfaithful to Shakespeare without Shakespeare knowing about this, and so it compares our poet to a 'deceived husband'. In doing so it reinforces the claim made by Sonnet 92, that the young man is in effect pledged to Shakespeare for life, and it further likens their relationship to a marriage. And while this can't, of course, be read literally – not least because equal marriage did not exist at the time and Shakespeare was already married with children to Anne in Stratford-upon-Avon – it nevertheless gives us a deep insight into how William Shakespeare views himself constellated to his young lover.
This comparison of himself to a 'deceived husband', tied directly to Sonnet 92 with its "For term of life thou art assured mine" is no doubt the boldest assertion yet of Shakespeare's that he feels the young man owes him fidelity because of a promise – explicit or implicit – that has been made. As we noted with the previous sonnet, we can't know to what extent such a promise or pledge has in fact been formulated or to what extent Shakespeare may be imagining himself to have the young man thus 'assured' to him, but all of these sonnets echo three observations we've made before, most obviously around Sonnets 33 to 42 and also around Sonnets 57 and 58:
Firstly, Shakespeare considers himself and his young man to be together as one; secondly, the young man is not honouring this commitment but has close – by implication emotional as well as sexual – relationships with other people, including at one point Shakespeare's own mistress – which, incidentally, as we also of course noted at the time, by necessity means that Shakespeare too isn't entirely honouring this commitment which he presents as entirely mutual, quite apart from the fact that he is already married – and thirdly that Shakespeare is upset, angry, disappointed by what he sees as the young man's transgressions.
What is entirely different to these previous occasions is the level of leeway Shakespeare appears to be prepared to give the young man. During the mistress crisis, he was quite forgiving.
Sonnet 34:
Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
Sonnet 35:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done
Sonnet: 41:
Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits
When I am sometime absent from thy heart
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Even Sonnet 58, though rather more grudgingly and through gritted teeth, seemed to make at least some concession, allowing for the young man's status:
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.
This apparent 'tolerance' of the young man's escapades and general behaviour is here – and, as we shall see, in the next two sonnets –entirely absent. Which allows for a speculation – and this has to be a speculation at best – that while, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, he and his young man were always, in the classical lover's trope, one, this sense of being entitled to expect some sort of loyalty, this notion of being firmly committed to each other has since materialised. In other words, it would seem that at one point in the intervening period the relationship has acquired a more categorically 'assured' character, at least in Shakespeare's understanding of it.
What exactly it is that gives Shakespeare reason to view the relationship in this way and whether he even has good reason to do so, we cannot tell, but going by the words, and by the words only, since this has been and remains our approach, these words here really speak a new language. And if nothing else this points to and reminds us of one factor we are a bit apt to ignore: time.
We became aware, during the course of the last few sonnets, that quite naturally these sonnets must stretch over a certain period. We don't know what exactly that period is, but we do know that for many of these sonnets, although clearly not all, it must lie somewhere between approximately 1592 and 1594, with others then reaching up to 1598 and some quite possibly beyond. But this is worth bearing in mind: by now, William Shakespeare and his young man will have known and in one way or another related to each other for very likely two to three years. And this during a period when the young man very likely is turning from his late teens, early twenties into his early to mid twenties, in other words, when he is turning from a youth on the cusp of maturity into a fully-fledged, legally independent adult. And this is of great significance for our appreciation of this relationship as very naturally, very humanly dynamic and therefore evolving.
What we also do not know for certain, but have fairly strong reason to believe, is that the young man of the bulk of these sonnets is the same young man as the one who is being urged to marry in the Procreation Sequence that consists of Sonnets 1 to 17. I emphasise that there is no factual outward proof of this, and you will find scholars vociferously question it, but in our entire reading and analysis so far there has been not one good reason to assume otherwise, whilst quite to the contrary there have been many indications to suggest that this is in fact the case.
If it is the case, then there are any number of scenarios in which one can imagine an immensely privileged, somewhat petulant youth who is obstinate in his refusal to marry, and who is receiving all this attention and adoration from an obviously extremely gifted and also increasingly now recognised poet, to at one point in their relationship express to him – perhaps jokingly, perhaps seriously, perhaps somewhere in-between – that he will be his forever; that rather than marrying any of the society ladies throwing themselves at him or being foisted on him by people around him, he would 'assure' himself to his friend and lover 'for term of life'. But here we are finding ourselves once more in the realm of supposition and conjecture, and so before we drift altogether too far into these waters which are fraught with peril, let's steer our little ship of exploration back into the words themselves, which are not conjecture but which lie in front of us in literal or metaphorical black and white, and which do something else that is rather interesting.
They go from a generic possibility in Sonnet 91 "That thou mayst take all this [love] away," to a rather more specific "Thou mayst be false [and betray me] and yet I know it not" in Sonnet 92, to what comes close to observing an established fact in Sonnet 93. It is still coached in terms of a hypothesis: "If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show." But the way Shakespeare builds up to it suggests to us that this is in fact so, that the young man's 'sweet virtue' really does not correspond to his immaculate beauty, which hardly can surprise us by now.
And listen to this one more time:
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell
Whatever thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
Someone might be forgiven for replying to this: 'are you saying my heart is false'? And the answer would have to be: 'that is exactly what I'm saying.' Because that is exactly what I'm saying here, if I am Shakespeare.
And there is one final detail that is worth paying attention to, briefly. In this closing couplet
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.
the verb 'grow', as we saw above, means 'become': this is a small but significant nuance. Shakespeare presents the young man's beauty – of which we have heard a great deal by now, this being the 58th time within the sonnets that the word 'beauty', 'beautiful', 'beauties' or 'beauteous' appears – as, on the one hand, something organic, something that grows, and therefore on the other hand and by the same token as something changeable, something that can turn from one thing into something else. And what Shakespeare is making abundantly clear is that this young man's apparently legendary beauty is in acute danger of turning from the wholesome, surely at some point in his young life innocent, untarnished thing that it was into the embodiment of the ur-breach of trust: the ultimate symbol of betrayal and jeopardy.
And this sense of danger, this sense of the young man being capable of doing great harm to those around him, and of the young man himself through his conduct putting himself at extreme risk of being corrupted is exactly the subject of the sonnet that comes next and the one that then follows...
This project and its website are a work in progress.
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!
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!