THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL EDUCATION
OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
SAMARKAND STATE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
ENGLISH FACULTY II
COURSE WORK
THEME: SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS
SCIENTIFIC SUPERVISOR: S.SH.SADRIDDINZODA
DONE BY: N.B.MUXTOROVA
GROUP: 2.06
SAMARKAND – 2022
Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 2
MAIN PART:
CHAPTER I
1.1 LIFE AND WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEAR…….……………….…….5
1.2 Early Years:…………………………………………………………………………6
1.3 Later Years: …………………………………………………………………………7
1.4 CONCLUSION I……..……………………………………………………………………………9
CHAPTER II
2.1 Summary and Analysis of Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare ……………….10
2.2 Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds…………………………..12
2.3 CONCLUSION II………..………………………………………………………....36
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..37
REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………….39
1
Introduction
In accordance with the Resolution of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan
No. PP-5117 of May 19, 2021 "On measures to bring the promotion of foreign
language learning in the Republic of Uzbekistan to a qualitatively new level" , as well
as foreign languages In order to effectively implement organizational measures to
promote the study, the Cabinet of Ministers decides:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are some of the most fascinating and influential poems written
in English. First published in 1609, in a small quarto edition (roughly the size of a
modern paperback), almost nothing is known about the poems’ composition. But the
Sonnets have been read, recited, reprinted and written about ever since their first
appearance. They have inspired many creative works, including music and dance
pieces as well as other poems. And they continue to intrigue those of us who watch,
read and study Shakespeare’s plays, for the insight they might offer into the mind of
the man who wrote our most beloved dramatic works. This piece will explore why the
Sonnets are so important to the history of English poetry and why they continue to be
enjoyed – and imitated – today Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, likely composed over
an extended period from 1592 to 1598, the year in which Francis Meres referred to
Shakespeare's "sugred sonnets":
The witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his
Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c.
(Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury)
In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's sonnets, no doubt without the author's
permission, in quarto format, along with Shakespeare's long poem, The Passionate
Pilgrim. The sonnets were dedicated to a W. H., whose identity remains a mystery,
although William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, is frequently suggested because
Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) was also dedicated to him.Until now, with the release
of The Folger Shakespeare (formerly Folger Digital Texts), readers in search of a free
online text of Shakespeare’s plays and poems had to be content primarily with using
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the Moby™ Text, which reproduces a late-nineteenth century version of the plays and
poems. What is the difference? Many ordinary readers assume that there is a single text
of all these works: what Shakespeare wrote. But Shakespeare’s plays were not
published the way modern novels or plays are published today: as a single, authoritative
text. In some cases, the plays have come down to us in multiple published versions,
represented by various Quartos (Qq) and by the great collection put together by his
colleagues in 1623, called the First Folio (F). There are, for example, three very
different versions of Hamlet, two of King Lear, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and others.
Editors choose which version to use as their base text, and then amend that text with
words, lines or speech prefixes from the other versions that, in their judgment, make
for a better or more accurate text. Other editorial decisions involve choices about
whether an unfamiliar word could be understood in light of other writings of the period
or whether it should be changed; decisions about words that made it into Shakespeare’s
text by accident through four hundred years of printings and misprinting; and even
decisions based on cultural preference and taste. When the Moby™ Text was created,
for example, it was deemed “improper” and “indecent” for Miranda to chastise Caliban
for having attempted to rape her. (See The Tempest, 1.2: “Abhorred slave,/Which any
print of goodness wilt not take,/Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee…”). All
Shakespeare editors at the time took the speech away from her and gave it to her father,
Prospero. The editors of the Moby™ Shakespeare produced their text long before
scholars fully understood the proper grounds on which to make the thousands of
decisions that Shakespeare editors face. The Folger Library Shakespeare Editions, on
which the Folger Shakespeare texts depend, make this editorial process as nearly
transparent as is possible, in contrast to older texts, like the Moby, which hide editorial
interventions. The reader of the Folger Shakespeare knows where the text has been
altered because editorial interventions are signaled by square brackets (for example,
from Othello: “ If she in chains of magic were not bound, ”), half-square brackets (for
example, from Henry V: “With blood and sword and fire to win your right,”), or angle
brackets (for example, from Hamlet: “O farewell, honest soldier. Who hath
relieved/you?”). At any point in the text, you can hover your cursor over a bracket for
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more information. Because the Folger Shakespeare texts are edited in accord with
twenty-first century knowledge about Shakespeare’s texts, the Folger here provides
them to readers, scholars, teachers, actors, directors, and students, free of charge,
confident of their quality as texts of the plays and pleased to be able to make this
contribution to the study and enjoyment of Shakespeare.
The principal aim of this research is to learn and analyse Shakespeare's sonnets
The objectives of the research follow as:
- Learning about the poems and William Shakespear’s Sonnets
-Analysing the poems “William Shakespear’s Sonnets”
The subject of this coursework is basically conducting the research on the
representative poems of the William Shakespear.
Research methodology:
During the writing of the course work, we used both qualitative and quantitative
complete with comparative methods, in the following purposes respectively. In order
to analyze “William Shakespear’s Sonnets”, we applied qualitative while approaching
the measurements and translation of words in the novel we were to use quantitative
method.
The structure of the research comprises introduction, main part, conclusion
and reference sections.
4
CHAPTER I
1.1 LIFE AND WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEAR
William Shakespeare, a British poet and playwright, is often considered the greatest
writer in world literature.
William Shakespeare was baptized April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire. He received at most a grammar-school education, and at age 18 he
married a local woman, Anne Hathaway. By 1594 he was apparently a rising
playwright in London and an actor in a leading theatre company, the "Lord
Chamberlain's Men" (later "King's Men"); the company performed at the Globe
Theatre from 1599 Shakespeare retired to Stratford before 1610 and lived as a country
gentleman until his death. His earliest plays seem to date from the late 1580s to the
mid-1590s and include history plays based on the lives of the English kings, comedies,
and the tragedy Romeo and Juliet. The plays apparently written between 1596 and 1600
are mostly comedies. Approximately between 1600 and 1607 he wrote the great
tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, which mark the
summit of his art. Among his later works are the fantastical romances The Winter's
Tale and The Tempest.
Shakespeare's plays, all of them written largely in iambic pentameter verse, are marked
by extraordinary poetry; vivid, subtle, and complex characterizations; and a highly
inventive use of English. His 154 sonnets, apparently written mostly in the 1590s, often
express strong feeling within an exquisitely controlled form. As with most writers of
the time, little is known about his life and work, and other writers, particularly the 17th
earl of Oxford, have frequently been proposed as the actual authors of his plays and
poems. The first collected edition of his plays, or
"First Folio", was published in 1623
5
1.2 Early Years:
1564 to 1585 .The Bard of Avon, as William Shakespeare is also known, was the child
of a leather merchant and glover, John Shakespeare. His mother was from a family of
landed gentry. In the absence of records detailing Shakespeare's early education,
historians guess he attended a nearby school where he learned to read and write English
as well as Latin. In 1582, when he was just 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway,
a woman eight years his senior. They would have three children, a daughter in 1583
and a set of twins in 1585. They lost their only son, Hamnet, when the boy was 11
years old. Daughters Susanna and Judith would live to be 66 and 77, respectively.
Middle Years: 1586 to 1599. From 1586 until 1592, very little information is available
regarding the Shakespeare household or the bard himself. During this period that
historians refer to as the writer's lost years, only a scant legal document or two gives
evidence of Shakespeare's existence. Over the years, various biographers have
speculated that he may have been a poacher on the run from a disgruntled landowner,
a horse-minder at a London theater, or more probably, a local schoolmaster. Also
during his lost years, the bard was devoting a good portion of his time to playwriting.
By 1592, solid evidence shows that one if not more of his plays was underway on
London stages. The first of his plays in production was probably "Henry IV, Part One,"
an historical work which not only chronicles the active years of the monarch's reign
but also introduces his son Hal and Henry Percy, or Hotspur, a rival. The bard had
established himself in London prior to 1592, as evidenced by a mention in the London
Times by a fellow playwright. He completed "Henry IV, Part Two" and "Henry V"
early in the 1590s. By 1594, he and a group of colleagues had formed an acting troupe
they called The Lord Chamberlain's Men, in honor of their patron, which would soon
grow to prominence in the London theater scene. The 1590s were quite a prolific time
for Shakespeare. He wrote additional historic plays, including "Richard II," "Richard
III," and "Titus Andronicus." He also penned the comedies "Two Gentlemen of
Verona," "The Taming of the Shrew" and "A Comedy of Errors," probably early in the
decade. From around 1595 to the end of the century, Shakespeare turned his sights
6
toward more romantic comedies, including "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The
Merchant of Venice," Twelfth Night" and "Much Ado About Nothing." The bard wrote
the tragedies "Romeo and Juliet," and "Julius Caesar" during this period of his life as
well, By 1597, Shakespeare had written approximately 15 of his 38 surviving plays.
He had achieved enough financial success to purchase one of Stratford's nicest homes
for his family. He continued to live principally in London where he wrote and acted in
his plays. During periods such as Lent when theaters were closed and when outbreaks
of the plague shut down the city, he likely spent time with his family in Stratford..
Shakespeare was not only writing scripts for his company, often based on stories from
mythology, literature and historic accounts, but he was also acting in his own plays.
The Lord Chamberlain's Men put on performances at such London venues as The
Theatre and The Curtain. In 1599, the acting troupe built The Globe from the ruins of
The Theater, establishing their own playhouse, which opened in 1599.
1.3 Later Years:
1600-1613 Early in the new century, the bard continued to produce great literature,
penning such masterworks as "Troilus and Cressida," "Measure for Measure," "All's
Well That Ends Well," and some of his most renowned tragedies, including "Hamlet,"
"Othello" and "King Lear." In 1603, The Lord Chamberlain's Men delivered a
command performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Queen Elizabeth's
Hampton court. When the Queen died later that year, the acting troupe changed its
name to The King's Men in honor of the newly crowned King James I. Their first
The bard was growing artistically during this era, customizing his mastery of blank
verse with wit and intention to enrich his characters' dialogue and enliven the action.
He employed such techniques as run-on lines and inflected phrasing to breathe life into
a poetic form that tended to the monotone if used within strict parameters of ten
syllables per line and alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. The dialogue of his
play "Hamlet," for example, seems animated in comparison to the more strictly
patterned lines of earlier works such as "Henry V." Shakespeare also provided
moments of variation in his plays by inserting bits of rhymed verse in the dialogue, for
7
During the first decade of the 17th century, Shakespeare published his "Sonnets," a
collection of 154 14-line works that employed the same blank verse format as his plays
but with the specific rhyme scheme of three quatrains and a concluding couplet.
Released as a printed collection in 1609, Shakespeare's sonnets had likely been written
individually over time, and those within his circle of friends were probably already
familiar with some of them. The form the bard employed for his verses became known
as the Shakespearean sonnet, as opposed to the traditional Petrarchan sonnet, which
In his last plays, "Cymbeline," "A Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest," the bard testdrove a hybrid genre, the tragicomedy, also known as the romance. While they take a
more somber, serious tone than such comedies as "Twelfth Night," these tragicomedies
end on a positive note, unlike such tragedies as "King Lear." The bard also completed
two last works for theater, "Henry VIII" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen," with a
collaborator,
likely
John
Fletcher,
a
contemporary
playwright.
Just after the completion of "Henry VIII" in 1613, The King's Men lost the Globe
playhouse to a fire. By the time they reopened in 1614, Shakespeare had already retired
to his family home in Stratford where he died in 1616 at the age of 52. While no verified
version of the manner of his death exists today, one account, written by the vicar of
Stratford 50 years later, attributes his untimely demise to drinking too hard with his
friends John Drayton and Ben Johnson, and catching a fatal fever as a result. Due in
part to the great gaps in knowledge regarding Shakespeare's early education and the
lost years, the bard has always been shrouded in mystery. In addition, not a single
manuscript he wrote in his own hand survived the centuries. One scholarly explanation
for this lack of historical verification is that "William Shakespeare" was the pen name
of some more illustrious, well-educated figure of the Elizabethan era. The controversy
did not see the light of day until more than two centuries after the bard's death. Among
the first to question the authorship of such all-time great works as "Macbeth" was a
Pennsylvanian Lutheran named Samuel Schmucker, and he was merely drawing an
analogy. He likened the scholarly trend of his time in using historic data to raise doubts
about the existence of Christ was akin to speculating that Shakespeare never existed.
An offhand remark, but that is all it took to sow the seed of controversy.
8
1.4 CONCLUSION I
William Shakespeare was certainly a very famous writer. The man is credited with an
unbelievable thirty-eight plays, two narrative poems, several other poems and a whopping
one hundred fifty-four sonnets. So let us take a peek inside the life of this genius with this
essay on William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the world’s pre-eminent dramatist and
according to many experts is the greatest writer in the English language. Furthermore, he
is also called England’s National Poet and also has the nickname of the Bard of Avon.
Such a worthy reputation is due to his top-notch unmatchable writing skills.
William Shakespeare was born to a successful businessman in Stratford-upon-Avon on
23rd April in the year 1564. Shakespeare’s mother was the daughter of a landlord and
came from a well-to-do family. About the age of seven, William Shakespeare began
attending the Stratford Grammar School.
The teachers at Stratford were strict in nature and the school timings were long. One can
say that William Shakespeare’s use of nature in his writings was due to the influence of
the fields and woods surrounding the Stratford Grammar School on him.
Warwickshire was an interesting place to live, especially for those who were writers.
Furthermore, the river Avon ran down through the town and because of this Shakespeare
later got the title ‘Bard of Avon’. At the age of eighteen, William Shakespeare married
Anne Hathaway, a woman who in age was eight years older than him.
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CHAPTER II
Summary and Analysis of Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare and A Summary of Sonnet 116 Sonnet 116 is one of William
Shakespeare's most well known and features the opening line that is all too quotable Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments. It goes on to declare that
true love is no fool of time, it never alters. It has the traditional 14 lines, mostly full
rhyme, and iambic pentameter as a basic metre (meter in USA). There are some lines
that do not follow the strict iambic pentameter beat - you can read about them below.
Note the turn in the final couplet (last two lines), where the poet sums up the previous
twelve lines. Shakespeare's 154 sonnets were first published as an entity in 1609 and
focus on the nature of love, in relationships and in relation to time.
The first one hundred and twenty six are addressed to a young man, the rest to a woman
known as the 'Dark Lady', but there is no documented historical evidence to suggest
that such people ever existed in Shakespeare's life.
The sonnets form a unique outpouring of poetic expression devoted to the machinations
of mind and heart. They encompass a vast range of emotion and use all manner of
device to explore what it means to love and be loved.
Sonnet 116 sets out to define true love by firstly telling the reader what love is not. It
then continues on to the end couplet, the speaker (the poet) declaring that if what he
has proposed is false, his writing is futile and no man has ever experienced love.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
10
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Sonnet 116 is an attempt by Shakespeare to persuade the reader (and the object of his
love) of the indestructible qualities of true love, which never changes, and is
immeasurable. But what sort of love are we talking about? Romantic love most
probably, although this sonnet could be applied to Eros, Philos or Agape - erotic love,
platonic love or universal love.
Lines 1 - 4
Shakespeare uses the imperative Let me not to begin his persuasive tactics and he
continues by using negation with that little word not appearing four times throughout.
It's as if he's uncertain about this concept of love and needs to state what it is NOT to
make valid his point. So love does not alter or change if circumstances around it
change. If physical, mental or spiritual change does come, love remains the same,
steadfast and true.
Lines 5 - 8
If life is a journey, if we're all at sea, if our boat gets rocked in a violent storm we can't
control, love is there to direct us, like a lighthouse with a fixed beam, guiding us safely
home. Or metaphorically speaking love is a fixed star that can direct us should we go
astray.
Lines 9 - 12
And, unlike beauty, love is not bound to time, it isn't a victim or subject to the effects
of time. Love transcends the hours, the weeks, any measurement, and will defy it right
to the end, until Judgement Day. Lines nine and ten are special for the arrangement of
hard and soft consonants, alliteration and enjambment:
11
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love is not harvested by time's sharp edge, it endures. Love conquers all, as Virgil
said in his Eclogue.
Lines 13 - 14
And if the reader has no faith in the writer's argument, then what use the words, and
what good is the human experience of being in love?
Sonnet 116 has fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg - three quatrains
and a couplet.
Most end rhymes are full except for lines 2 and 4: love/remove, 10 and 12:
come/doom and 13 and 14: proved/loved. But don't forget, in Shakespeare's time
some of these words may have had the same pronunciation.
The first twelve lines build to a climax, asserting what love is by stating what it is
not. The last two lines introduce us to the first person speaker, who suggests to the
reader that if all the aforementioned 'proofs' concerning love are invalid, then what's
the point of his writing and what man has ever fallen in love.
Metre
Iambic pentameter predominates - ten syllables, five beats per line - but there are
exceptions in lines six, eight and twelve, where an extra beat at the end softens the
emphasis in the first two and strengthens it in the latter. Metaphor - love is an everfixèd mark and also love is the star. in line five the words ever-fixèd mark - fixed is
pronounced fix-ed, two syllables. in line six the word tempest which means a violent
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storm. in line seven the word bark which means ship. in line ten the bending sickle's
compass refers to the sharp metal curved tool used for harvesting, that cuts off the head
of ripe cereal with a circular swipe or swing. Similar to the scythe used by the Grim
Reaper.
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not. In the first
quatrain, the speaker says that love—”the marriage of true minds”—is perfect and
unchanging; it does not “admit impediments,” and it does not change when it find
changes in the loved one. In the second quatrain, the speaker tells what love is through
a metaphor: a guiding star to lost ships (“wand’ring barks”) that is not susceptible to
storms (it “looks on tempests and is never shaken”). In the third quatrain, the speaker
again describes what love is not: it is not susceptible to time. Though beauty fades in
time as rosy lips and cheeks come within “his bending sickle’s compass,” love does
13
not change with hours and weeks: instead, it “bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.”
In the couplet, the speaker attests to his certainty that love is as he says: if his statements
can be proved to be error, he declares, he must never have written a word, and no man
can ever have been in love.
Along with Sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and 130 (“My
mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), Sonnet 116 is one of the most famous poems
in the entire sequence. The definition of love that it provides is among the most often
quoted and anthologized in the poetic
Essentially, this sonnet presents the extreme ideal of romantic love: it never changes,
it never fades, it outlasts death and admits no flaw. What is more, it insists that this
ideal is the only love that can be called “true”—if love is mortal, changing, or
impermanent, the speaker writes, then no man ever loved. The basic division of this
poem’s argument into the various parts of the sonnet form is extremely simple: the first
quatrain says what love is not (changeable), the second quatrain says what it is (a fixed
guiding star unshaken by tempests), the third quatrain says more specifically what it is
not (“time’s fool”—that is, subject to change in the passage of time), and the couplet
announces the speaker’s certainty. What gives this poem its rhetorical and emotional
power is not its complexity; rather, it is the force of its linguistic and emotional
conviction.
The language of Sonnet 116 is not remarkable for its imagery or metaphoric range. In
fact, its imagery, particularly in the third quatrain (time wielding a sickle that ravages
beauty’s rosy lips and cheeks), is rather standard within the sonnets, and its major
metaphor (love as a guiding star) is hardly startling in its originality. But the language
is extraordinary in that it frames its discussion of the passion of love within a very
restrained, very intensely disciplined rhetorical structure. With a masterful control of
rhythm and variation of tone—the heavy balance of “Love’s not time’s fool” to open
the third quatrain; the declamatory “O no” to begin the second—the speaker makes an
14
almost legalistic argument for the eternal passion of love, and the result is that the
passion seems stronger and more urgent for the restraint in the speaker’s tone.
Although in former times this sonnet was almost universally read as a paean to ideal
and eternal love, with which all readers could easily identify, adding their own dream
of perfection to what they found within it, modern criticism makes it possible to look
beneath the idealism and to see some hints of a world which is perhaps slightly more
disturbed than the poet pretends. In the first place it is important to see that the sonnet
belongs in this place, sandwiched between three which discuss the philosophical
question of how love deceives both eye and mind and judgement, and is then followed
by four others which attempt to excuse the poet's own unfaithfulness and betrayal of
the beloved. Set in such a context it does of course make it appear even more like a
battered sea-mark which nevetheless rises above the waves of destruction, for it
confronts all the vicissitudes that have afflicted the course of the love described in these
sonnets, and declares that, in the final analysis, they are of no account.
In addition, despite the idealism, there is an undercurrent of subversion which
permeates all. It is ironic that a poem as famous as this should be seized on by the
establishment as a declaration of their view of what love should be. Does the
establishment view take account of the fact that this is a love poem written by a man
to another man, and that the one impediment to their marriage is precisely that, for no
church of the time, or scarcely even today, permits a man to marry a man? It is useless
to object that Shakespeare is here talking of the marriage of true minds, for the language
inevitably draws us to the Christain marriage service and its accompanying ceremonies,
and that is a ceremony designed specifically to marry two people, not two abstract
Platonic ideals which have decided to be wed. It is almost as if the exclamation 'Oh
No!' in the second quatrain is a recognition of this one great impediment that overhangs
all others 'and all alone stands hugely politic'. (SB notes that the exclamation presents,
among other things, 'a logically incidental example of a suitable prefatory exclamation
introducing an impediment volunteered by a parishioner responding to the injunction
in the marriage service').
15
Of course it is partly due to the slow process of being drawn into the sonnets, with their
continuous change and varying cycles of elation and depression, that the view is
gradually inculcated into one's soul that this is a history of love which anyone might
have known, a mortal and immortal love such as any two lovers in the tide of times
might have experienced, or might even be experiencing now. We tend to forget that it
is also an unconventional love, even more unconventional in the Elizabethan world
than it is today. But it is precisely this unconventionality that gives to the sonnets their
subversive tone, and it is that tone which forces us, not so much to be on the defensive,
but to question more profoundly what we mean by the word love. What is that strange
attraction which draws two minds so irresistibly together? Must we classify or restrict
it? Does it depend on time, or place, on beliefs, on the sex of the lovers, on the Church,
or politics, life, death, change, removal, doom, eternity, the day of judgement? Or on
none of these? Is human love an allegory of divine love? Or should one prefer instead
the all too human conclusion of W. H. Auden:
I thought that love would last forever. I was wrong.
HV reads this sonnet as a direct refutal of the young man's cynically declared view of
love in which change and betrayal are expected and necessary and truth is of no
importance. HV 488-93.
SB gives a very detailed analysis of the many possible reactions to the nuances and
suggestiveness of the language and tries to show how our minds respond to the ideal
of love depicted, even though we gradually become aware of the hidden counter
suggestions. SB. 387-92
All but one of the extant copies of Q give the number of this sonnet, incorrectly, as
119. See SB. p.384.
LEt me not to the marriage of true mindes Admit impediments,loue is not loue Which
alters when it alteration findes, Or bends with the remouer to remoue. O no,it is an euer
fixed marke That lookes on tempeſts and is neuer ſhaken; It is the ſtar to euery wandring
barke, Whoſe worths vnknowne,although his higth be taken. Lou's not Times
foole,though roſie lips and cheeks Within his bending ſickles compaſſe come,
16
Loue alters not with his breefe houres and weekes, But beares it out euen to the edge
of doome: If this be error and vpon me proued, I neuer writ,nor no man euer
1. Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Let me not = Whatever else I agree to, I will not concede that etc.; I will not be forced
to admit that.
The negative wish, if that is how it might be best described, almost reads like the poet's
injunction against himself to prevent him from admitting something which he was on
the point of conceding. Perhaps he was being told frequently by others, and the beloved
himself, that love could not last for ever, that there were impediments, that there was
change and alteration, loss and physical decay, all of which militate against true love.
And finally, as an act of defiance, he insists that it is not as others see it, that love can
surmount all these obstacles, that although nothing can last forever, yet true love can
last and hold out until the final reckoning.
the marriage of true minds - this suggests a union that is non-physical, Platonic and
idealistic. See the introduction above.
true = constant, faithful, unchanging, truthful. Compare Polonius in Hamlet:
--to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then
be false to any man. Ham.I.3.78-80.
2. Admit impediments. Love is not love
Admit = accept, agree that there are; allow to enter or to intrude. By all commentators
this is taken to be a clear reference to the marriage ceremony, when the officiating
clergyman proclaims: 'I require and charge you, as you will answer at the dreadful day
of judgement, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you do
know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that
ye confess it.' However the only word which links this extract from the Marriage
Service in The Book of Common Prayer to the sonnet is impediment, which has become
the plural impediments here. But the use of marriage in line 1 and impediments
immediately following makes the connection almost inevitable. In Much Ado the word
is used three times in connection with preventing a marriage:
17
It is so; the Count Claudio shall marry the daughter of Leonato. BOR. Yea, my lord;
but I can cross it. DON J. Any bar, any cross, any impediment will be medicinable to
me MA.II.2.1-4.
Means your lordship to be married to-morrow? DON P. You know he does. DON J. I
know not that, when he knows what I know. CL. If there be any impediment, I pray you
discover it. MA.III.2.78-83.
FRIAR If either of you know any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined,
I charge you, on your souls, to utter it. MA.IV.1.11-13.
Love is not love = that sort of love is not true love which etc.
3. Which alters when it alteration finds,
Which changes (ceases, becomes unfaithful, becomes less) when it finds a change in
the beloved, or a change in circumstances.
4. Or bends with the remover to remove:
bends = yields, changes direction, is untrue and inconstant towards a loved one. the
remover = one who moves, one who shifts his ground, one who changes himself. to
remove = to make oneself different in accordance with the changes in the other person.
In this context, the word remove has a rather indefinite meaning, suggestive of moving
something or someone out of the way, possibly even suggestive of subterfuge.
Compare however: Then happy I, that love and am beloved Where I may not remove
nor be removed. 25 Not being moved or removed implies eternal constancy and
fidelity.
5. O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
an ever-fixed mark = a sea mark, a prominent navigational feature, a beacon, for
guidance of shipping. In the days before lighthouses, mariners used well known and
prominent features on the land as a guide to fix their position at sea. The spires of
coastal churches, towers, outcrops of rock of a particular shape or colour were obvious
sea marks. Beacons were no doubt also lit at the entrances to major ports, but there was
no widespread network of lighthouses as in modern times. Mostly sailors were highly
dependent on local knowledge. The point of the metaphor here is that the ever-fixed
18
mark is permanent and unshakeable, always there as a guide to the storm tossed
mariner.
fixed - pronounced fixèd.
6. That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
That looks on tempests - because of their height, the sea-marks would appear to be
looking down on the world below, and almost riding above the tempests. Because of
their solidity storms had no effect on them.
7. It is the star to every wandering bark,
It - i.e. love, as in line 5. Love is both the ever fixed mark and the Pole star to guide the
lover through the stormy waters of life. the star - the most obvious reference is to the
Pole or North star. In the Northern hemisphere it always appears to be unmoving in the
Northern sky, while all the other stars circle around it. Julius Caesar boasts of being
immovable, like the northern star: But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose
true-fix'd and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament. JC.III.1.60-2.
wandering bark = ship or boat that is wandering and possibly lost. It can identify its
position by reference to the Pole star.
8. Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Whose worth's unknown = the true nature and value of which is unknown. It was not
known at the time what the stars were made of, or how they shone, although various
theories existed. Modern astronomy cannot be said to begin before the eighteenth
century, even though Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had more or less overturned, by
Elizabethan times, the Ptolemaic system of an earth-centred universe.
although his height be taken = although its angle of elevation above the horizon could
be measured. The height of the Pole star above the horizon at its zenith was a guide to
the ship's latitude. The measurement would probably have been done with a quadrant.
The sextant was introduced slightly later. (See OED quadrant 5, sextant 3.) The
illustration of a quadrant opposite is of one which would be used on land. For sea
travelling no doubt much more compact versions were available.
19
his height = the height (angle) of the star. Q gives higth, which is probably intended to
be highth, a variant form of height.
To take the height of (something) = to measure its position relative to the horizon. The
phrase could also be used in a figurative sense meaning 'to assess the importance,
quality, type etc. of something'. As in this example from Ben Jonson's The Alchemist:
The doctor, I asssure you, shall inform you, To the least shadow of a hair, and show
you An instrument he has of his own making, Wherewith no sooner shall you make
report Of any quarrel, but he will take the height on't Most instantly, and tell in what
degree Of safety it lies in, or mortality. And how it may be borne, whether in a right
line, Or a half circle; or else may be cast Into an angle blunt, if not acute. Alc.III.2.35261.
In this, the alchemist and his assistant are attempting to trick a young jacakanapes to
give them money, and they try to impress him with scientific mumbo-jumbo,
pretending that they can, using an instrument, tell when it is safe to quarrel with
someone. The Alchemist was written circa1609-10.
9. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Time's fool - In Shakespeare's day readers would probably understand this in terms of
the fool employed in large establishments by the nobility, a favoured character whose
wit enlivened many a dull day. But their position was probably precarious, and they
were liable to physical punishment, or dismissal. See King Lear:
Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie: I would fain learn to
lie. Lear. An you lie, sirrah, we'll have you whipped. Fool. I marvel what kin thou and
thy daughters are: they'll have me whipped for speaking true, thou'lt have me whipped
for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind
o' thing than a fool: KL.I.4.177-183.
There is also the more general meaning of being the dupe or plaything of someone,
being led by the nose. The following is also from King Lear:
None of these rogues and cowards But Ajax is their fool. KL.II.2.118-9.
20
where Kent is implying that Cornwall is being easily duped by lying servants.
rosy lips and cheeks - symbolic of all mortal beauty, but especially between lovers.
They are cut down by Time's sickle.
10. Within his bending sickle's compass come;
bending sickle - the sickle had a curved blade, and several meanings of 'bending' are
appropriate, as 1.) curved; 2.) causing the grass that it cuts to bend and bow; 3.) cutting
a curved swathe in the grass.
compass = scope, the arc of the circle created by the sweep of the sickle. But with a
reference back to the nautical metaphors of the previous lines. Time, with his scythe,
or sickle, sweeps down the mortal lovers, the rosy lips and cheeks, as if they were
blades of grass.
11. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
his = Time's. All life is fleeting, and human life is measured by the brief hours and
weeks of experience. In comparison with the eternity of love, any unit of time is short.
But see SB pp.390-1.
12. But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
bears it out = endures, continues faithful. the edge of doom = the last day, the day of
judgement, the day of death. doom in Shakespeare can mean a person's death, as it still
does in the phrase, to meet one's doom. Or it can be applied to the day of the Last
Judgement, or the judgement itself. Macbeth exclaims in horror against the long
sequence of Banquo's descendants who are to reign in his place hereafter:
What, will the line stretch out till the crack of doom! Mac.IV.1.117.
13. If this be error and upon me proved,
If this be error = if my claim that love lasts for ever is erroneous. error also suggests
wandering (from the truth), as above in line 7. every wandering bark. From the Latin
verb errare - to wander.
upon me proved - a legalistic term, meaning, approximately, 'proved against me'. The
combination of this term with that of error possibly
21
implies religious heresy and action taken against it, as for example in the frequent
practice used by the Inquisition to compel victims under torture to confess to the error
of their ways. See JK p.334. Compare also the following from Volpone by Ben Jonson,
circa 1605: Volt. Would you have him tortured? Bon. I would have him proved. Volt.
Best try him with goads or burning irons; Put him to the strappado; Volp.IV.2.
14. I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
I never writ = I have never written anything. nor no man ever loved = and no man has
ever loved (even though he believed himself to be in love).
The fact that there is no logical connection between love's eternal status and whether
or not the poet has written anything, or men think themselves to be in love, is largely
irrelevant, because the poem has by now made its seemingly irrefutable claim. The
weakness of the concluding couplet does contribute to a slight sense of disappointment,
because the preceding lines are so vibrant with life and love. Perhaps this is intentional,
in order to underscore the transitory nature of all that we experience, and to show that,
despite our grandiose claims to immortality,
we all must depart beneath the eternal vault, and love itself paradoxically, though
eternal, is part of mortality:
For the sword wears out the sheath And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart
must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest.
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
The narrator of Sonnet 73 is approaching death and thinking about how different it is
from being young. It’s like the branch of a tree where birds once sang but the birds
have gone and the leaves have fallen, leaving only a few dry yellow leaves. It’s like the
twilight of a beautiful day, where there is only the black night ahead. It’s like the
glowing ashes of a fire that once roared. The things that one gave him life have
destroyed his life. From that experience he has learnt that one has to love life as strongly
as one can because it will end all too soon.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do
hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late
22
the sweet birds sang. In me thou see’st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth
in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that
seals up all in rest. In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his
youth doth lie, As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy
love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
The sonnet is the third in the group of four which reflect on the onset of age. It seems
that it is influenced partly by lines from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in the translation by
Arthur Golding. However the verbal parallels are somewhat sparse. Shakespeare's
presentation is much more individualistic and cannot easily be attributed to any one
mould or influence. It is worth noting that, if the sonnet were written in 1600,
Shakespeare would only have been 36, and it is quite probable that it was written before
that date. An age that we would not consider to be the threshold of old age. Of course
the group of four sonnets, of which this is the third, begins with a putative skirmish
with death and finality, so that it is in a sense merely thematic within that group to
discuss the autumn of one's years, which will shortly lead to parting and separation.
We can therefore allow that it uses some poetic licence in painting a gloomy portrayal
of the withered tree.
Nevertheless it is slightly surprising that the statements are so definite and
uncompromising. This is how he is now, it is not some prognostication of decay, or a
brief glimpse forwards to some imaginary time. The picture is more like that of age on
his death-bed, of the autumn tree, of the onset of night, of the actuality of dying. The
thought seems closer to the anonymous 16th. century poem
As ye came from the holy land Of Walsinghame Met you not with my true love By the
way as you came?
which becomes a lament for love's faithlessness as age comes on.
She hath left me here alone, All alone, as unknown, Who sometime did me lead with
herself, And me loved as her own.
O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
23
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odor which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumèd tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses;
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwooed and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made.
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.
24
What's the cause that she leaves you alone And a new way doth take, That sometime
did love you as her own, And her joy did you make?
I have What's the cause that she leaves you alone And a new way doth take, That
sometime did love you as her own, And her joy did you make?
I have loved her all my youth, But now old, as you see: Love likes not the falling fruit,
Nor the withered tree.
Some lines from The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599, which are often attributed to
Shakespeare, are also relevant. (See below). Perhaps Shakespeare was offering this
sonnet as a charm to ward off rejection. Perhaps the rejection was already evident and
this is just a historical analysis of what he already knows to be the truth, a deja vu of
love's forgetfulness. Or perhaps he genuinely felt that age had stolen a march on him.
From The Passionate Pilgrim.
Crabbed age and youth Cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasaunce, Age is full of
care; Youth like summer morn, Age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, Age
like winter bare.
The 1609 Quarto Version
THat time of yeeare thou maiſt in me behold, When yellow leaues,or none,or fewe doe
hange Vpon thoſe boughes which ſhake againſt the could, Bare rn'wd quiers,where late
the ſweet birds ſang. In me thou ſeeſt the twi-light of ſuch day, As after Sun-ſet fadeth
in the Weſt, Which by and by blacke night doth take away, Deaths ſecond ſelfe that
ſeals vp all in reſt. In me thou ſeeſt the glowing of ſuch fire, That on the aſhes of his
youth doth lye, As the death bed,whereon it muſt expire, Conſum'd with that which it
was nurriſht by. This thou perceu'ſt,which makes thy loue more ſtrong, To loue that
well,which thou muſt leaue ere long.
Commentary
1. That time of year thou mayst in me behold
You may observe in me that time of life which is like the time of year when etc. The
word behold, meaning 'to see or to observe', is mostly literary and not often used
nowadays.
25
2. When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
The line, by its pauses, almost re-creates the blowing away of the last resistant fading
leaves by the autumn wind. Only a few stalwart ones finally remain. Cf. Coleridge The
one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can. Christabel. 4950 There is a suggestion also of the faded, yellowing papers with the poet's lines written
on them, as in Sonnet 17: So should my papers, yellow'd with their age. The poet is
like a tree with his decaying, worn out verses being dispersed in the wind.
3. Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
shake against the cold = tremble in anticipation of cold days to come; shiver in the
actual cold; shake in the cold blast of the gale. against is used in the sense of 'in
anticipation of, in preparation for' in Sonnets 49 and 63.
4. Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
4. The emendation of Q's rn'wd quiers to ruined choirs is generally accepted. 'Choir'
was the spelling adopted from the close of the 17th century. In Shakespeare's day it
was quyre, quire, or quiere. The choir is the part of the church at the top, eastern end,
the chancel, where the choristers stood and sang. Shakespeare uses the word seven
times, only twice with this meaning. ......The rich stream Of lords and ladies, having
brought the queen To a prepared place in the choir, fell off A distance from her;
H8.IV.1.62-5. and Our valour is to chase what flies; our cage We make a quire, as
doth the prison'd bird, And sing our bondage freely. Cym.III.3.42-4 Elsewhere the
meaning is that of a group of singers, presumably choristers, as in this from 2H6: myself
have limed a bush for her, And placed a quire of such enticing birds, That she will light
to listen to the lays, 2H6.I.3.86-8 In Midsummer Night's Dream it is used to mean a
company of friends or gossips: The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale, Sometime for
three-foot stool mistaketh me; Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And 'tailor'
cries, and falls into a cough; And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh, And
waxen in their mirth and neeze and swear MND.II.1.51-6.
Since the publication of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930 (the extract is
given at the bottom of this page) commentators tend to agree that the imagery recalls
the many ruined abbeys and churches which were left to decay after Henry VIII's
26
dissolution of the monasteries. Churches were also vandalised or abandoned at various
times in Elizabeth's reign. In the early years of the reign there were few parish priests,
and later, after the religious settlement and with the spreading influence of European
reformist ideas, churches could be seen as symbols of popery and reaction and of the
old religion. Enclosures of common land, with the consequent abandonment of
villages, would also have caused some churches to fall to ruin. However it is not
possible to say with certainty that the image of a ruined chancel was primarily what
Shakespeare had in mind. He tends not to use the word ruin(s) or ruined other than in
a figurative or general sense, as in: Ruin hath led me thus to ruminate Sonnet 64 or in
..........The king has cured me, I humbly thank his grace; and from these shoulders,
These ruin'd pillars, out of pity, taken A load would sink a navy, too much honour.
H8.III.2.380-3. But the above is the only instance where the word specifically refers to
a building or a part of a building, and the lines were possibly written by Fletcher.
Generally Shakespeare is more interested in wreckages of human personalities .............She once being loof'd, The noble ruin of her magic, Antony, Claps on his seawing, AC.III.10.18-20. (loofed = with the head of the ship turned towards the wind).
Perhaps the most famous line featuring ruin is from Julius Caesar, when Antony speaks
over Caesar's corpse: Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide
of times. JC.III.1.257-8.
I remain unconvinced that the rich stream of suggestions listed by Empson in Seven
Types of Ambiguity, (see below), which has led to much debate on this line, is entirely
justified. It is a mattter of opinion whether branches of trees look very much like ruined
abbeys. Readers must judge the matter for themselves. Other fleeting references in the
line may be to quires of paper which contain songs and sonnets. Or to the composer
William Byrd, who moved away from London in the 1590's, probably owing to his
Catholicism.
5. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
of such day = of such a day of late autumn or winter as I have been describing. Or day
could be a synonym for 'light', allowing the meaning
27
to run on to the next line. 'In me you see such a time of life which is like twilight, when
the daylight, after sunset, fades away in the West'.
6. As after sunset fadeth in the west;
See note above.
7. Which by and by black night doth take away,
Which = the twilight. by and by = fairly rapidly; soon. Cf. Hamlet's response to Polonius
- I will come to my mother by and by. Ham.III.2.373. take away = As well as the
meaning of 'remove' there is also the implication of doing away with, killing,
destroying by underhand means. Thus Macbeth, contemplating the murder of Duncan,
fears that Duncan's virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet tongued, against The deep
damnation of his taking off. Mac.I.7.19-20. Night kills off the daylight, as a murderer
kills his victim.
8. Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
Sleep is often portrayed as a second self of Death, or Death's brother. Compare: Care
Charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born:
Samuel Daniel, Sonnets to Delia, liv. (c 1600). But in this sonnet Night takes the place
of sleep as the grand slayer. Three images are possibly condensed here. That of sealing
a coffin; sealing a letter, or a will, or a sentence of death, (i.e. folding it up and using
sealing wax to seal it: envelopes were a later invention); covering over the eyes
(seeling), as one did with tamed birds of prey. Similar imagery is used in Macbeth:
..........Come seeling Night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day. Mac.III.2.46-7. But
the thought in Mac. is somewhat different, being concerned with Macbeth's
determination to ally himself with evil forces in Nature.
9. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
such fire = such as is seen at twilight; such as is described in the next line.
10. That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
his youth = the fire's youth. The possessive 'its' was not yet in use in Elizabethan
England, so we should not assume that the word 'his' adds more to the sense of
personification than if it had been 'its youth'.
28
11. As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
As the death-bed - the ashes of his youth are as a death-bed; whereon it must expire =
on which it, the fire, or the youth, must at last die.
12. Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
Consumed with that = consumed, eaten away, at the same time as; eaten away by those
things (which also nourish it). Similar to the line from Sonnet I : Feeds thy light's flame
with self-substantial fuel. Life's progress from beginning to end is summed up in one
line.
13. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
Possibly a wish, rather than a statement of fact. 'When you perceive this, it will
strengthen your love'. this presumably refers to the poet's waning life, described in the
quatrains.
14. To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
that = that person, spirit, dream of your imagination, me, the poet. Alternatively - your
youth and freshness which is doomed to the same fate. well - could include a pun on
Will, the poet's name. leave = depart from, abandon; give up. A sidelong glance also at
'to come into leaf'. SB points out that the couplet could have a bawdy interpretation.
Additional notes Empson's comment on line 4.
The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a
word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once. To take a famous
example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling in Bare ruined choirs,
where late the sweet birds sang, but the comparison holds for many reasons; because
ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a
row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they
used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a
forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because
they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter,
because the cold and narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with
Shakespeare's feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and
29
historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which
it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more
relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty,
and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in
mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the
machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.
W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Ch.I.
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare
published two narrative poems on sexual themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and
Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape
of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin.[178] Influenced
by Ovid's Metamorphoses,[179] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that
result from uncontrolled lust.[180] Both proved popular and were often reprinted
during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which
a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first
edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A
Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden
effects.[181][182][183] The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601
Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful
turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate
Pilgrim,
published
under
Shakespeare's
name
but
without
his
permission.[181][183][184]
Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to
be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but
evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private
readership.[185][186] Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The
Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's
30
"sugred Sonnets among his private friends".[187] Few analysts believe that the
published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.[188] He seems to have
planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of
dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man
(the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the
authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth
believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".[1
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are often breath-taking, sometimes disturbing and sometimes
puzzling and elusive in their meanings. As sonnets, their main concern is ‘love’, but
they also reflect upon time, change, aging, lust, absence, infidelity and the problematic
gap between ideal and reality when it comes to the person you love. Even after 400
years, ‘what are Shakespeare’s sonnets about?’ and ‘how are we to read them?’ are still
central and unresolved questions.
The ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets
Sonnets 1 to 126 seem to be addressed to a young man, socially superior to the speaker.
The first 17 sonnets encourage this youth to marry and father children, because
otherwise ‘[t]hy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date’ (Sonnet 14) – that is, his
beauty will die with him. After this, the sonnets diversify in their subjects. Some
erotically celebrate the ‘master mistress of my passion’ (Sonnet 20), while others
reflect upon the ‘lovely boy’ (Sonnet 126) as a cause of anguish, as the speaker
desperately wishes for his behaviour to be different to the cruelty that it sometimes is.
‘For if you were by my unkindness shaken, / As I by yours’, laments the speaker of
Sonnet 120, ‘you have passed a hell of time’.
The ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets
Sonnets 127 to 152 seem to be addressed to a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of
Shakespearean legend. This woman is elusive, often tyrannous, and causes the speaker
31
great pain and shame. Many of these sonnets reflect on the paradox of the ‘fair’ lady’s
‘dark’ complexion. As Sonnet 127 punningly puts it, ‘black was not counted fair’ in
Shakespeare’s era, which favoured fair hair and light complexions. This woman’s eyes
and hair are ‘raven black’ – and yet the speaker finds her most alluring. The two final
sonnets (Sonnets 153 and 154) focus on the classical god Cupid, and playfully detail
desire and longing. They do not seem to directly relate to the rest of the collection.
When were Shakespeare’s Sonnets composed and published?
The sonnets were probably written, and perhaps revised, between the early 1590s and
about 1605. Versions of Sonnets 128 and 144 were printed in the poetry collection The
Passionate Pilgrim in 1599. They were first printed as a sequence in 1609, with a
mysterious dedication to ‘Mr. W.H.’ The dedication has led to intense speculation: who
is ‘W.H.’? Is he the young man of the sonnets? As with the ‘Dark Lady’, various
candidates have been proposed, such as William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. No conclusive identification has been made,
and it may never be, because it is not clear that the sonnets are even about particular
historical individuals. Moreover, since this dedication is by the printer, not
Shakespeare, and we don’t know if Shakespeare was involved in the 1609 printing of
his Sonnets, it may have no relationship to the series of feelings, relationships and
anguishes that the poems map out.
Shakespearean sonnets
Shakespeare’s sonnets are composed of 14 lines, and most are divided into three
quatrains and a final, concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. This sonnet form
and rhyme scheme is known as the ‘English’ sonnet. It first appeared in the poetry of
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547), who translated Italian sonnets into
English as well as composing his own. Many later Renaissance English writers used
this sonnet form, and Shakespeare did so particularly inventively. His sonnets vary its
configurations and effects repeatedly. Shakespearean sonnets use the alternate rhymes
of each quatrain to create powerful oppositions between different lines and different
32
sections, or to develop a sense of progression across the poem. The final couplet can
either provide a decisive, epigrammatic conclusion to the narrative or argument of the
rest of the sonnet, or subvert it. Sonnet 130, for example, builds up a paradoxical picture
of the speaker’s mistress as defective in all the conventional standards of beauty, but
the final couplet remarks that, though all this is true,
Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems may often feel less familiar than his plays, but they
have also seeped into our cultural history. Within them, they reveal much about the
Bard himself and include a number of surprises. Here are a few lesser known facts
about Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems:
1. Frequency of publication: Of all Shakespeare’s great plays–Romeo and Juliet,
Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello–the most frequently published work in his
lifetime and for approximately a half century after his death in 1616 was not a drama
but his erotic poem, Venus and Adonis. First published in 1593, this fast-paced
narrative, based on an incident from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, went through no fewer
than ten editions by 1617 and another six by 1640. By comparison, the most frequently
published of the plays, Richard III, went through six editions by 1622, the year before
the great Folio edition of the plays appeared in print, thus ensuring the separation of
the drama from the poetry for several centuries to come.
What was the reason for the extraordinary popularity of Venus and Adonis? Sex, of
course, or rather, the tantalizing prospect of sex between the mythical goddess of love
and the most handsome of mortals, a violently erotic death of Adonis by the boar, and
some flashy writing by an author already known in some circles as an “upstart crow.”
The audience for this racy narrative was mostly educated young men, often on their
way up to or down from Oxford or Cambridge, a readership that initially constituted a
sizeable share of the emerging book-buying population in Shakespeare’s day. As the
century wore on, though, women too became frequent readers of the poem.
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2. The same is true of Shakespeare’s more serious poetic “sequel” with its noble
heroine, The Rape of Lucrece, initially published in 1594, and only slightly less popular
than Venus and Adonis. The Rape of Lucrece, or Lucrece, as stated more simply on
the original title page, is Shakespeare’s only work in which a woman’s name appears
alone in the title. With the drama, even Cleopatra has to share top billing with Antony.
The same is true for Juliet and her Romeo. The other named persons in the play titles
are all men. In naming his narrative poem after a woman, and a noble Roman woman
at that, Shakespeare was signaling his poem’s affiliation with the highly popular
tradition of female complaint poems that circulated widely under Queen Elizabeth.
3. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), often considered to contain the finest lyrics in the
English language, was barely noticed in his lifetime and for nearly two centuries
thereafter. Why so? Theories abound, usually to do with changing literary tastes in
Jacobean England, but this and other mysteries continue to envelope these wonderful
poems, including questions of the identity of the “young man” as well as the “dark
lady.”
4. Should the Sonnets be read as telling a true story of Shakespeare’s loves? Many
scholars say no, but this hasn’t stopped the impulse to do so—so real and immediate
their passions seem, and so up-to-date in their sexual preferences and transgressions.
5. On the general question of authorship, did the person we call Shakespeare write the
poems generally attributed to him? There seems little doubt that he was the author of
the two narrative poems. His name appears on the dedicatory page to each. With the
Sonnets, his name is likewise conspicuous, crawling boldly and possessively along the
top of the page. As for that most mysterious of poems, “The Phoenix and Turtle,”
Shakespeare’s name appears at the end of the poem in the original 1601 publication.
So not much doubt here.
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But what about the narrative poem placed at the end of the 1609 edition of the Sonnets
called A Lovers Complaint, in which a seduced maid plaintively—and not quite
repentantly–recounts her seduction at the hands of a young man? So close to the
situation in the Sonnets and yet, stylistically, to some readers not quite close enough to
banish doubts about the poem’s authorship. But, if it’s not Shakespeare, then who?
Suppose we accept , as many do, that Shakespeare occasionally collaborated with
others in writing some of his plays, might not the same be the case here, and that what
we have is something of a workshop poem? Shakespeare in the company of another,
the master teaching the apprentice. And just who might that other person be? Maybe,
just maybe, the “dark lady” herself, sometimes identified with the poet, Aemelia
Lanyer, the first female, in fact, to publish a volume of verse in England just two years
after the sonnets appeared? A guess, of course, with no evidence to back it up, but
anyone who travels very long in Shakespeare-land is entitled to a fantasy or two. But,
nevertheless, it’s an ongoing question that will continue to be debated and examined
by scholars. Featured image credit: Royal Park of the Palace of Caserta – Venus and
Adonis Fountain by Livioandronico2013. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
35
2.3 CONCLUSION II
Shakespeare sonnets were actually developed by the Earl of Surrey but because
of Shakespeare’s extensive use of the style, it became known as Shakespeare sonnets.
There are about 154 Shakespeare sonnets attributed to the bard who many says were
addressed to a young lord living in Shakespeare’s time and presumably his dear
friend. The cover page of Shakespeare’s “The Sonnets” published in 1609 by Thomas
Thorpe has given rise to much debate as to who the sonnets are actually dedicated
to. ... Let us take a step forward and look at all the sonnets written
by William Shakespeare. If at all, W H is Shakespeare’s reference to the subject of
his verses, then scholars believe it could be William Herbert, The Earl of Pembroke
and Shakespeare’s friend or Henry Wriothesley, The Earl of Southampton, known for
his looks and argued to be the actual fair youth of the Sonnets. A Shakespeare sonnet
also consisted of 14 lines further divided into four parts. The first three parts
consisted of four lines each and called a quatrain. The last part consisted of two lines
and was called a couplet. The rhyme scheme of a quatrain was divided according to
the individual quatrains You will find detailed analysis for each sonnet by clicking
the link attached. Shakespeare Sonnet 1, From fairest creatures we desire increase
William Shakespeare's love sonnets have delighted and puzzled readers for centuries
but there are unanswered questions. Who did he write them for? Who is the so called
Dark Lady? Are the sonnets all written in iambic pentameter? This in-depth guide
will help you. ... Andrew has a keen interest in all aspects of poetry and writes
extensively on the subject. His poems are published online and in print. Title Sheet of
the Sonnets, first published in 1609. Public Domain via Wikimedia
Commons. William Shakespeare and The Love Sonnets. William Shakespeare wrote
154 sonnets in total. The first 126 are addressed to a 'fair youth', the remaining 28 to a
mistress known as the Dark Lady
36
Conclusion
When Shakespeare turned to writing poetry, he did not have the luxury that we
assume modern poets have of writing to please himself. He wrote for a living and so
he wrote for a patron, a man who shared and in some ways directed the values and
tastes of the Elizabethan courtly elite. When he dedicated his two narrative poems
to Southampton, Shakespeare had to hope that what pleased his patron would please
other powerful courtiers, and beyond them the growing merchant/middle-class
audience whose curiosity about high fashion would lead them to buy volumes of his
poems. One might assume that whatever Shakespeare’s own views might have
been, he could not have afforded to jeopardize his livelihood by going against the
establishment grain. Nevertheless, an underlying assumption of this book has been
that Shakespeare was in many ways sceptical of elite values. However great his
artistic and commercial success might have been, Shakespeare was kept by both his
class and his profession on the margins of the circles of power in Elizabethan society.
Common sense would seem to suggest that a degree of resentment must have
been a component of his attitude to those he had to serve through his poetry. When
the Poet in Timon of Athens complains: ‘When we for recompense have praised the
vile, / It stains the glory in that happy verse / Which aptly sings the good’ (1.1.15–
17), he surely articulates feelings akin to those that Shakespeare must have had
15 years before when his living depended on pleasing a patron. We do not have to
believe that Shakespeare was as embittered as the Poet or that he thought that his
patron was ‘vile’, to appreciate that he might have fretted at the constraints imposed
upon him by the need to gratify his privileged readers. Something, at any rate,
persuaded him to withdraw from this literary servitude in spite of his conspicuous
success at it. It might well have been this same concern that inhibited him from
publishing his anti-romantic Sonnets at a time when sonnets were still in vogue.
The needs of the Elizabethan poet and the needs of his readers were, then, sometimes
in conflict, and the disruptions caused by that conflict must be reflected in the poems,
though it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to locate all of them. For the modern
37
reader seeking to identify the poet’s intentions there is a further complication. This is
the fact that Renaissance poets, however ‘experimental’ they might appear, were
writing within the conven- tions of genres. That is, what sounds like the poet’s voice
is often actually the genre’s voice or the voice of a broader convention. We
see this in sonnet 55, in which the poem’s speaker claims that ‘these contents’, that
is, this specific poem, will ensure that the young man’s memory will not die.
However, the sonnet itself echoes passages from Ovid (Metamorphoses XV, 871–9)
and Horace (Odes III, xxx). Not only that, but those passages were so frequently
echoed by Renaissance poets that they were, in effect, commonplace. What
does that say about the ‘sincerity’ of ‘this powerful rhyme’? The poem’s claim to be
able to bestow immortality depends upon the claims of other poems to do the same
thing. It is, in the strictest sense, simply a variation on a theme. In the same way, the
anti-Petrarchism of the sonnets depends upon the speaker taking a Petrarchan stance
in many of them. Even the narrative poems work within a set of conventional
assumptions, and while the poet works to impose his own mark upon them, he is in
many ways controlled by them. What all of this suggests is that what we seek to
identify in the poems as Shakespeare’s voice is unstable, because what we are hearing is only in part the voice of the poet; it is also in part the voice of his time, in that
it incorporates the perspective that he constructed for his contemporary readers, and
it is in part the voice of the tradition in which he was writing. Perhaps we should
think of it as the voice of the poems rather than the voice of the poet. This is why
there are no final answers to the question of what Shakespeare ‘means’, and
why the poems remain rich for modern readers. It also suggests that looking for
Shakespeare’s biography in the poems does not help much in our understanding of
them, any more than does applying to them the biography we know about.
38
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