Sonnet 94: They That Have Power to Hurt and Will Do None
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They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow, They rightly do inherit heaven's graces And husband nature's riches from expense, They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others but stewards of their excellence. The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die, But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity, For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds: Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. |
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They that have power to hurt and will do none,
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Those people who are in a position of power that would allow them to do harm to other people, for example because of their status, such as an absolute ruler, or on account of their physical strength, or, as here is barely implied, but as will become more obviously clear in the third line, on an emotional level, because they are so irresistibly beautiful and attractive...
The reference you will usually find cited in relation to this opening is from Sir Philip Sidney's prose work The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, generally referred to as Arcadia, which contains the line, "the more power he hath to hurt, the more admirable is his praise, that he will not hurt," which was published in 1593 and so may well have directly influenced Shakespeare, whereby a similar phrasing is also found in Ben Jonson's play The Case Is Altered, which compares the 'property' – as in characteristic – of a 'man' – as in a real or good man – with that of a 'wretch' or a 'wretched', miserable person and states: "The property of the wretch is he would hurt and cannot, of the man, he can hurt and will not." But this was published in 1609 – the same year as the Quarto Edition of The Sonnets – and so it is likely that either Jonson was in turn influenced by Shakespeare, or simply that for a person to be in a position of power and not to abuse that power was generally seen as a desirable quality then, as it still ought to be now. PRONUNCIATION: Note that while power here could be pronounced as either one or two syllables, in order for the line to scan properly and to match line 3 with which it rhymes, it really needs to be given one syllable only: pow'r. |
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That do not do the thing they most do show,
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Shakespeare continues his description of such qualities: those people who do not carry out the actions or show the kind of behaviour that going by their appearance one might most expect of them...
You may, like I, have personal experience of this: when you meet someone who looks to all intents and purposes as if they might be arrogant, aloof, sarcastic, or crude and uncouth, maybe unkind, and turn out to be absolutely lovely, and you realise that you've unwisely judged a book by its cover. The principal implication of the sentence certainly is one of admiration and approval: the kind of person here referred to is one who, also perhaps on account of their position in society, may have to put on a show of might, but whose integrity forbids them to overreach their power. That said, you will find editors also reading into the line a potential for duplicity as in: people who show themselves as one thing but then actually don't live up to those expectations, but in view of how the whole octave of this sonnet builds to a positive characterisation of a sound human being, I here, for once, feel quite strongly inclined to disagree with such an interpretation. Shakespeare, we know, often piles additional meanings on top of each other and he certainly wouldn't be incapable of doing so here, but it does not strike me as something he is pursuing here. The tone of this sonnet is not playful, and not in the least frivolous: it is building up to make an extremely strong and daring point, and so I think here we may in fact need to take Shakespeare quite directly at face value, even when, in the sestet that follows, he employs a striking and sensory metaphor. |
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Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow, |
These people who have all these – so far by implication only, but in a moment expressly – laudable qualities and who are so on top of their emotions that, although they move others to whatever the passion may be, they themselves remain cold 'as stone', unmoved, and slow to respond to any temptation that may offer itself to them.
We live in a world where emotions and putting them on display are valued highly, we have entire news bulletin segments devoted to the 'emotional aspect' of a breaking story, where we listen patiently to the tearful accounts of those who have suffered some dreadful, great calamity rather than being given any real facts, and we encourage each other on an almost daily basis to let it show, to cry, to laugh, to be free with our feelings, and to let them reign supreme: 'it's been very emotional' is a badge and expression of approval in our culture. This has not always been so. Never even mind the Victorian 'stiff upper lip' which was a particularly English form of emotional repression that stunted entire generations well into the twentieth century, here being 'cold' as 'stone' and 'unmoved' are qualities that are to be aspired to. Which is not altogether surprising when we consider how violent, quick to the sword and the dagger, and downright dangerous a time this is. In a world where as a man you are never more than an insult away from a brawl, a duel, a fight or some other challenge, someone who can moderate their actions and control their passions does, as Shakespeare is about to explain, possess a particular and particularly admirable form of strength. |
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They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense, |
Having used the first quatrain of his octave to characterise these people of whom he speaks, Shakespeare now goes on to spell out why this puts them quite above the rest:
These people – much as the meek shall inherit the earth in The Bible – in their apparent 'meek' conduct or ostensible 'weakness' rightly inherit heaven's graces, meaning that they by rights come into the possession God's gifts, or the divine rewards for a decent life well and properly lived. And they protect the rich gifts that nature bestows on them – such as their status, their wealth, their power, their beauty – from wasteful or wanton expenditure, in other words from being frittered away or from being given out indiscriminately to undeserving and unfruitful purposes and ends. 'Husband' here is used as a verb meaning "to use (resources) economically," (Oxford Languages) the resource in this case being the person's own precious qualities. |
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They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence. |
They, still of course these same people, are fully in charge and in control of their appearance, whereby for 'faces' here, beyond appearance, we may read their entire person: the 'face' then works – as John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition points out – as a synecdoche, meaning that the part stands for the whole, much as we might say 'my wheels' when we mean 'my car', for example.
While other people – those to whom all these qualities I have listed do not apply – are not fully in control and in possession of their faculties and therefore their own person, and are effectively serving whatever their particular qualities or skills may be. 'Their' here is problematic in so far as it allows for two rather distinct meanings. If it refers to the people who are 'but stewards of their excellence' themselves, then this is what we get: people who have some 'excellent' qualities, such as – to quote Shakespeare himself in Sonnet 37 – "beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit," but because they are not in control of their emotions, they are merely maintaining this 'household' of qualities in the way a steward would maintain and manage an estate, in contrast to the landlord who is the owner and therefore exercises full control over it. 'Their', however, can also refer to these first described people – the lords and owners – which means that then everybody else becomes essentially a steward to them: they serve the excellence of their betters. Either reading is possible and we don't know what Shakespeare intended, or whether he meant here as so often to suggest both. Worth noting though – as editors do – is that 'Your Excellence' is a form of address that would have been in use towards members of the upper classes, and seeing that our young man is in all conceivable likelihood a nobleman, this may well be an allusion to a difference in social status between the young man and our poet, even though neither, most notably, is mentioned in this sonnet. |
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The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die, |
The flower that blossoms in the summer delights that season with its beauty and its fragrance, and it does so in a sense selflessly and unselfconsciously: it may not have any great ambition or future but it is fundamentally pure: it lives, it delights, it dies.
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But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity. |
But if that same flower should become diseased, stained, or infested with what in several other sonnets Shakespeare refers to as 'canker' and 'canker vice' – all or any of which is like a vile debasement – then even the most lowly or basic weed surpasses it in dignity.
The suggestion is that it is better to be of low birth and possessed of few external qualities but to have integrity than to be an adored, gorgeous, privileged focus of attention whose character is putrified. PRONUNCIATION: Note that both in this and the line above, flower has one syllable: flow'r. |
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For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds:
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. |
Because the most precious, beautiful, exalted 'things' are, by their own actions, turned into the worst sort of liability and therefore disappointment: rotting lilies give off a far worse smell than weeds.
This is both proverbial and true: if you have ever left a bunch of lilies in their vase beyond their time you will come to sorely regret this, the stench becomes intolerable... It this is also, as it happens, a line that verbatim appears in Edward III, a play that was published anonymously in 1596 and until the 1990s was considered more or less unattributable. It has since been established – in no small measure by the computational methods we discussed with our special guest Professor Gabriel Egan a short while ago – that it was at least in parts written by Shakespeare, and there, in Act II, Scene 1 we find: That poison shows worst in a golden cup, Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 'Things', meanwhile here may clearly be read as people, since we are talking about things that change through their own agency, even if this is expressed through the metaphor of a flower. |
With Sonnet 94, William Shakespeare takes a step back from his discourse in poetry, addressed directly to his young lover, and reflects more broadly and apparently abstractly on a quality of mercy that ought not to be strained.
The sonnet makes two at first glance almost separate observations, devoting the first eight lines – the octave – to an ethical question of how to handle privilege and power, and the following six lines – the sestet – to a metaphor of the tarnished ideal. The two are, of course, not only directly related to each other to form a compelling argument about personal conduct and integrity, but they are also firmly embedded in the group of sonnets which in the Quarto Edition follows the Rival Poet sequence: everything from Sonnet 87 to and including Sonnet 96 hangs together as a coherent string of thoughts, fears, hopes, and concerns over a relationship that is teetering on the brink of collapse, and although Sonnet 94 might in theory also be considered in isolation, it in reality only makes proper sense when read as part of this group, in which it provides something of a linchpin for the astonishing turnaround in tone and stance that is set up by Sonnet 93 and comes into full force in Sonnet 95.
This is the first time in the entire collection so far that William Shakespeare writes a sonnet that does not speak either directly to his young lover, or about him, or in any way puts him or himself in the poem, but keeps an apparently aloof distance above the fray of personal involvement, almost a bit like a person who possesses all these qualities that the sonnets itself praises. Sonnet 5 seems to do the same, but Sonnet 5 really comes in a close pairing with Sonnet 6 which directly continues its argument and so "The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell" mentioned in Sonnet 5 very clearly and unmistakably belongs to the young man who then in Sonnet 6 is duly spoken to directly.
Here, this is not the case. Sonnet 94 stands out for its formal purity and near-didactic tone: we are, we sense, listening to an important point being made about probity, but of course in its context we realise that for all its outward detachment, the sonnet most evidently pertains to the young man we have got to know really rather well by now.
So any suggestion that this could be about anything or anyone quickly goes out of the window: our young man very obviously is someone who has power to hurt, but he is not, we have got the firm impression, someone who 'will do none'. We know from several sonnets – we mentioned some of these in our last episode – that far from being slow to temptation, he surrenders to those whom he keeps 'all too near' him, all too readily.
We also have heard Shakespeare liken this young man to a flower before: Sonnet 5 – the one just mentioned a moment ago – sets up the idea of a flower whose essence can be distilled for posterity and invites, nay urges, the young man to be like a flower and to distil himself by passing his essence on in a child. We next get a couple of instances where flowers are simply symbols of beauty, and then with Sonnet 69 Shakespeare tells him that owing to his behaviour, people who watch and comment on him, "To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds," meaning that his beautiful appearance is acquiring a foul reputational stench through his conduct. Here, he pointedly goes one step further. Weeds may well have a rank smell compared to the sweet fragrance of a rose, for example – although in fact they do so mostly proverbially, rather than in the real world – but there are also those beautiful flowers that "smell far worse than weeds," the lily that festers being the real world specimen cited for evidence.
All of which does pose the question, naturally, why is Shakespeare doing this? Why is he here talking to his young lover not by addressing him directly, but by making generalised statements about the nature of things and the ways of the world and the lot of the lily that gradually decomposes?
If you cast your net wide enough, you will soon be able to bring in a whole haul of theories and interpretations that attempt to deal with this apparent conundrum, and it would be churlish and indeed out of place for me to dismiss these or let alone the desire to formulate them, but apart from Shakespeare in doing so setting himself above the world of wild raging emotions that the sonnet itself criticises, the most tangible, most readily accessible, and therefore most obvious explanation that offers itself is also most human: that's what you do when you have something to say that is hard to get off your chest.
It is not how your personal growth or management consultant will teach you to have your difficult conversation with a partner or a colleague, but Will is a poet not an aspiring CEO and he's talking to someone who's clearly driving him crazy with what he's up to, and what do you do when you get to the point where you really want to tell someone off but you don't know how to say it? You go generic. 'Some people would really appreciate it if their boyfriend gave them a call now and then.' 'Ah, that's interesting. It never occurred to me: who are these people...' It's not a question we need to ask. 'Someone it seems has left the milk out of the fridge. Again. Overnight.' ' Well there are two people living in this flat and the cat doe not help himself...' If your livein partner says to you 'it would be nice to receive a thank you now and then', you don't need to ask them 'for whom would this be nice? The cleaner? Too true. I need to be much more appreciative of all the work they do. Thank you for pointing this out to me.' Your partner is obviously talking about themselves. If they say to you 'there hasn't been much affection lately', they're not referring to the Deliveroo driver, are they...
And it is no coincidence – nor is it any wonder – that what happens next happens next, because what happens next? Will snaps. He lets rip. Everything he keeps holding in up to this point, he is about to splurge out. And so, without wishing to anticipate Sonnet 95, or without wanting to deny Sonnet 94 its own intricacies: this is not a difficult sonnet to get. And if we look at what builds up to it and what follows, it becomes even more perfectly straightforward: Shakespeare is telling his young lover, in quite categorically uncertain terms – though they be dressed as an essay on the nature of the virtuous man – not to abuse his power, not to give in to temptation left right and centre, not to allow his exquisite status to be tarnished by 'base infection'. And this 'base infection' may well have all too literal a connotation, because if there is one threat – apart from violence, death, the long arm of the state, and the plague – that is ever present to the sexually active person living in Shakespeare's England it is venereal disease. And although we can't say whether such an allusion is here intended, we can say that elsewhere in these sonnets, specifically in several of those yet to come, Shakespeare makes it clear that that is what he's talking about, and so rule this out here is something we can not do.
And should you feel that I'm coming on a bit strong here with my postulation on what Shakespeare is telling his young lover, then hold out for just a couple of sonnets longer, because Sonnet 96, in a fascinating twist that may or may not in its phrasing be fully intended, not only gives the young man some space after the assault Sonnet 95 is about to unleash, but it will also spell out and tell the young lover precisely this: don't use your state of privilege unwisely, because doing so will harm us both.
The sonnet makes two at first glance almost separate observations, devoting the first eight lines – the octave – to an ethical question of how to handle privilege and power, and the following six lines – the sestet – to a metaphor of the tarnished ideal. The two are, of course, not only directly related to each other to form a compelling argument about personal conduct and integrity, but they are also firmly embedded in the group of sonnets which in the Quarto Edition follows the Rival Poet sequence: everything from Sonnet 87 to and including Sonnet 96 hangs together as a coherent string of thoughts, fears, hopes, and concerns over a relationship that is teetering on the brink of collapse, and although Sonnet 94 might in theory also be considered in isolation, it in reality only makes proper sense when read as part of this group, in which it provides something of a linchpin for the astonishing turnaround in tone and stance that is set up by Sonnet 93 and comes into full force in Sonnet 95.
This is the first time in the entire collection so far that William Shakespeare writes a sonnet that does not speak either directly to his young lover, or about him, or in any way puts him or himself in the poem, but keeps an apparently aloof distance above the fray of personal involvement, almost a bit like a person who possesses all these qualities that the sonnets itself praises. Sonnet 5 seems to do the same, but Sonnet 5 really comes in a close pairing with Sonnet 6 which directly continues its argument and so "The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell" mentioned in Sonnet 5 very clearly and unmistakably belongs to the young man who then in Sonnet 6 is duly spoken to directly.
Here, this is not the case. Sonnet 94 stands out for its formal purity and near-didactic tone: we are, we sense, listening to an important point being made about probity, but of course in its context we realise that for all its outward detachment, the sonnet most evidently pertains to the young man we have got to know really rather well by now.
So any suggestion that this could be about anything or anyone quickly goes out of the window: our young man very obviously is someone who has power to hurt, but he is not, we have got the firm impression, someone who 'will do none'. We know from several sonnets – we mentioned some of these in our last episode – that far from being slow to temptation, he surrenders to those whom he keeps 'all too near' him, all too readily.
We also have heard Shakespeare liken this young man to a flower before: Sonnet 5 – the one just mentioned a moment ago – sets up the idea of a flower whose essence can be distilled for posterity and invites, nay urges, the young man to be like a flower and to distil himself by passing his essence on in a child. We next get a couple of instances where flowers are simply symbols of beauty, and then with Sonnet 69 Shakespeare tells him that owing to his behaviour, people who watch and comment on him, "To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds," meaning that his beautiful appearance is acquiring a foul reputational stench through his conduct. Here, he pointedly goes one step further. Weeds may well have a rank smell compared to the sweet fragrance of a rose, for example – although in fact they do so mostly proverbially, rather than in the real world – but there are also those beautiful flowers that "smell far worse than weeds," the lily that festers being the real world specimen cited for evidence.
All of which does pose the question, naturally, why is Shakespeare doing this? Why is he here talking to his young lover not by addressing him directly, but by making generalised statements about the nature of things and the ways of the world and the lot of the lily that gradually decomposes?
If you cast your net wide enough, you will soon be able to bring in a whole haul of theories and interpretations that attempt to deal with this apparent conundrum, and it would be churlish and indeed out of place for me to dismiss these or let alone the desire to formulate them, but apart from Shakespeare in doing so setting himself above the world of wild raging emotions that the sonnet itself criticises, the most tangible, most readily accessible, and therefore most obvious explanation that offers itself is also most human: that's what you do when you have something to say that is hard to get off your chest.
It is not how your personal growth or management consultant will teach you to have your difficult conversation with a partner or a colleague, but Will is a poet not an aspiring CEO and he's talking to someone who's clearly driving him crazy with what he's up to, and what do you do when you get to the point where you really want to tell someone off but you don't know how to say it? You go generic. 'Some people would really appreciate it if their boyfriend gave them a call now and then.' 'Ah, that's interesting. It never occurred to me: who are these people...' It's not a question we need to ask. 'Someone it seems has left the milk out of the fridge. Again. Overnight.' ' Well there are two people living in this flat and the cat doe not help himself...' If your livein partner says to you 'it would be nice to receive a thank you now and then', you don't need to ask them 'for whom would this be nice? The cleaner? Too true. I need to be much more appreciative of all the work they do. Thank you for pointing this out to me.' Your partner is obviously talking about themselves. If they say to you 'there hasn't been much affection lately', they're not referring to the Deliveroo driver, are they...
And it is no coincidence – nor is it any wonder – that what happens next happens next, because what happens next? Will snaps. He lets rip. Everything he keeps holding in up to this point, he is about to splurge out. And so, without wishing to anticipate Sonnet 95, or without wanting to deny Sonnet 94 its own intricacies: this is not a difficult sonnet to get. And if we look at what builds up to it and what follows, it becomes even more perfectly straightforward: Shakespeare is telling his young lover, in quite categorically uncertain terms – though they be dressed as an essay on the nature of the virtuous man – not to abuse his power, not to give in to temptation left right and centre, not to allow his exquisite status to be tarnished by 'base infection'. And this 'base infection' may well have all too literal a connotation, because if there is one threat – apart from violence, death, the long arm of the state, and the plague – that is ever present to the sexually active person living in Shakespeare's England it is venereal disease. And although we can't say whether such an allusion is here intended, we can say that elsewhere in these sonnets, specifically in several of those yet to come, Shakespeare makes it clear that that is what he's talking about, and so rule this out here is something we can not do.
And should you feel that I'm coming on a bit strong here with my postulation on what Shakespeare is telling his young lover, then hold out for just a couple of sonnets longer, because Sonnet 96, in a fascinating twist that may or may not in its phrasing be fully intended, not only gives the young man some space after the assault Sonnet 95 is about to unleash, but it will also spell out and tell the young lover precisely this: don't use your state of privilege unwisely, because doing so will harm us both.
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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!