SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS: AN ICONOCLAST’S ANALYSIS


WITH LINKS TO THE TEXT OF THE 1609 QUARTO

TRANSCRIBED IN MODERN LETTERS



A Virgin Hand

by

Joe Hughes



            When the young graduate student wrote with his impertinent proposition, I had already achieved the height of what my worst critics would have called an outstanding career.  I had for several decades been a tenured professor at one of the oldest and most respected universities on the East Coast, one almost universally acknowledged as the most beautiful “academical village” in the world, designed by Thomas Jefferson; and I had written important works on my principal subject matter, the works of William Shakespeare.

            I grant that my work specifically on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the subject matter the presumptuous youth wished to discuss, was insubstantial, not in the same league as the lexicographically exhaustive volume by Stephen Booth or the inventive study of Helen Vendler.  But I had written An Appreciation of the Sonnets which might with honor sit on the same bookshelf as those.  And although I knew some of my detractors considered me a bit pompous, the greater number – not knowing me as well, I must acknowledge – considered that the opinion I held of myself was in keeping with that of the world at large.

            My personal situation was ennobled by the fact that I had stayed at the University where I had done both my undergraduate and my graduate work.  My longevity gave me the right, which I was presently exercising, to live for a decade in one of the Pavilions.  I had chosen Pavilion II, elegant and spacious, which had the advantage of distance from the sometimes noisy amphitheater.  I chose to live in the upstairs rooms and use the downstairs for a weekly entertainment, to which I invited many of the student residents of the Lawn.

           It was one of those residents of a few years ago who had given my name to the young man who had written.  That resident had been a student of several of my classes, and so I wanted to give his friend every help I could, though I doubted there was much reason for us to meet.

            It was April 18, the day we had agreed upon, and promptly at 2:00 I heard his knock on the door.  What a surprise it was for me to discover, on opening the door, that my visitor was doubtless considerably older than I.

            As we settled over a pot of tea I commented upon my expectation and surprise.  Will – for such was his name – told me that he had encountered my erstwhile student in the seat adjacent to his on an airplane.  On a cross-country flight their conversation fell to the Bard, and Will surprised the younger man by saying that he had memorized all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for public recitation, or declamation, if you will.  My student threw out the number 105, and was astonished that Will could easily recite it.

            Will went on to tell me that he believed the process of memorization had permitted him to unearth, over many years, all the secrets of the Sonnets: to whom they were written and generally when, the meaning and even the history of the dedication, and the manner in which Shakespeare had structured the 1609 publication.  He had told my student so and said, as well, that he was concerned that his age would prevent him from passing the story on.

            He told me that on several occasions he had spoken with Professor Booth, who was not sympathetic to some of the ideas.  It was natural, Will said, since they were in direct conflict with the professor’s published conclusions.  On the other hand, nothing I had written was directly counter to his conceits; and since Will was also a University graduate – College and Law – he decided to breast the entire matter to me.

            He added that, should he die with the story unpublished, he would be very happy for me to do so over my own name – a permission which a glance at the title will reveal I accepted.

            The story, he said, will not take long to tell.  And he began.


II


            “Out of law school I went immediately to San Francisco, which was in the 50’s the only city in the United States where a gay man could live comfortably.    I took a job with a large law firm, and practiced for almost two decades.  But I was also a practicing alcoholic, though I didn’t know it at the time. After my best friend and my mother died about 4 months apart in 1976, I began a long bottom run, adding several drugs to the mix.

            “In 1979 I decided it was time for San Francisco to have a gay mayor, and that I was the man for the job.  I received 617 votes; the winner, who went on to serve in the U.S. Senate, received 123,000 or so.  But I thought I had done so well that I should run for Supervisor the next year, and I received 4,252 votes.  The next year I ran for City Attorney, and received 23,900.  I was so emboldened that two years later I managed a campaign for another hapless candidate for mayor. 24,000 votes.

            “The day after that last election – it was November 9, 1983 – I sat in the den/library of the home of a friend who – knowing that I was impecunious - had put me up for years.  It was the first time in my life that I could recall having nothing to do.   No one expected anything of me.   I had no clients.  And I had nothing to occupy my time.  I looked around the room.  Among other books, there were two sets – leather- and cloth-bound – of the Herbert Farjeon Nonesuch editions of Shakespeare’s works.

            “I had recently had reason to question my memory, which had always been excellent.  I feared Alzheimer’s and AIDS, unaware of what was the more likely cause, my alcoholism.  Perhaps, I thought, I could try to memorize the Sonnets.  If I could do one a day, I would have them by heart by the 375th anniversary of their first entry in the Stationers Register, May 20, 1609.  Eventually the process developed into a plan to rent the Shakespeare Garden at Golden Gate Park and present a dramatized reading of the Sonnets, with assists from friends who sang madrigals and a gardener friend who helped decorate the stage with Cecile Bruner roses.

            “I reached for the volume of the leather-bound set which included poetry and turned to the dedicatory epistle to Venus and Adonis.  It had been my practice for years, whenever I set out to read the Sonnets in their entirety, to begin with the dedications to the two narrative poems.  It amused me that some commentators opined that they saw little difference between the two.  It was one of the many ways that academics and others tried to make it seem less likely that the poet and his patron, the Earl of Southampton, had engaged in a physically intimate relationship.

            “I took the memorization of the Venus dedication as my first day’s work.  My project was underway.


III


            “On the third day, then, after a day on the dedication to The Rape of Lucrece, I turned to the dedication – apparently written by Thomas Thorpe – to the Sonnets themselves.  I’ll return to this topic later, because some important insights about these few words came to me only after study of the early sonnets.  I had always had a few questions, though.

            “While it seemed likely that “BEGETTER” meant “muse”, why was it qualified by “ONLIE”?  What significance could be attached to “INSUING”?  Both words seemed to be pleonasms. And why was the designation of the dedicatee jammed on the same line as “ALL.HAPPINESSE.”?  I would come up with what I thought probable answers to these, but I would also come up with additional questions.

            “As I began the very familiar early sonnets, I realized that I might finally learn where the first sequence was intended to end.  I had never discovered a spot before 33, where the poet for the first time turns a critical eye toward his patron, to suggest that the uniformly adulatory first sequence was over.

            “In order to be able to recite the Sonnets accurately, it was important for me to get the pronouns right, so I took special note that everything was second person singular up to 13; then the pronouns were sometimes plural, sometimes singular, almost evenly split.

            “I was about a month into the project when I turned to Sonnet 26.  Even as I read it, I knew for a certainty that it was not written to the same person to whom 25 had been addressed.  It was not just the sense, though that certainly was part of it.  The scorned ‘Great Princes’ of 25 seemed surely the very sort of person to whom 26 was addressed – who, it appeared to me, must be the Earl of Southampton.  It was many months, perhaps a year or more, before I turned to Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and realized that Wilde had preceded me to the discovery that Sonnet 25 could not have been written to an Earl.  As his alter ego puts it, that sonnet would be ‘meaningless’ if addressed to a person of noble rank.”

            “To whom do you think the first twenty-five sonnets are addressed?” I asked.

            “It seemed to me almost certain that it was the often-dismissed apprentice actor Will Hews,” Will said.  “The last name is italicized in Sonnet 20, and in the same line that the common noun is found in roman.  When I began to research the point, I discovered that Shakespeare did the same thing in the case of Pandar in the epilogue to Troilus and Cressida, using the word once in italics and capitalized, as the proper name, and once in roman and all lower case, as the common verb.  I must admit, however, that it is so in the Folio, but not the earlier quarto.

            “I returned to the first 25 sonnets to see what else I could discover,” Will continued.  Sonnet 1 made me face immediately one of the questions which had often perplexed me: why do most commentators decide to ignore the use of italic type?  Not only was it likely to have been indicated to the compositors by the author’s use of a separate and very different script from the secretary hand, the script commonly used for text that was to appear in roman type; but also words written in italics had very specific meanings.  The most common were proper names, whether names of characters in a play in the speech prefixes or the text, or proper names of real people, and words or expressions in a foreign language.  It is true that Shakespeare’s use of italics in the Sonnets occasionally seems irregular, but only 36 words out of some 18,000 total are set out by the compositors in italics.  The idea that that might be random error – especially considering that the italic letters were held at the compositors’ stations in a case separate from that which held the roman – seems extremely unlikely.  Even less might it be a compositor’s idea of intentional variety!

            “In any event, in the second line of Sonnet 1 the word “Rose” is set in italic.  Research showed that the word “rose”, italic or roman, singular or plural, whether or not capitalized, was used 80 times in the poet’s complete works, thirteen of those times in the Sonnets; but in only three instances is it printed in the singular, in italic type, with an initial capital:  here, and twice in Act One, Scene Two of As You Like It, where Celia ends her third speech with ‘. . . therefore my sweet Rose, my deare Rose, be merry.’

            “It was years before an answer to the puzzle of the italicized ‘Audit’ in Sonnet 4 suggested itself.  ‘Dit’ had been used in Norman French for years, in names and phrases such as Richard, dit Coeur de Lion; and only a few years later it would be used by, for example, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, dit Molière.  Could not Shakespeare here have intended “à le Dit”, contracted?

            “But I made another very important discovery about this group of sonnets, which I was beginning to think of as ‘Book One’:  there was an obviously purposeful ‘punctuation’ of the sequence by the periodic use of the imperative mood to both open and close a sonnet.  Sonnets 3, 6, 10 and 19 all opened with expressions in the imperative, increasing in number from two in sonnet 3, to three in 6, five in 10, and nine in 19Sonnet 13, which also ends with the imperative, opens with the subjunctive – for the optative – and stands precisely in the middle of the book.  Add to that the fact that, except for 3, the imperative sonnets are immediately preceded by interrogatory sonnets, and again, in increasing numbers, and I believe we find a structure that simply could not be accidental, but must be intentional from this extraordinarily intentional poet.

            “Two more elements occurred to me.  ‘Beauties Rose’ is not an impossibe translation of ‘Rosa linda’, thus yielding the name of the most prominent character in As You Like It.  And in Sonnet 20, the phrase ‘with nature’s own hand painted’ is very like ‘Natures owne . . . hand laid on’ in a part of Viola/Cesario’s remarks to Olivia in Act One, Scene Five of Twelfth Night; while ‘Master Mistris’ is nearly identical to Orsino’s ‘your Masters Mistris’ in his last words to Viola/Cesario in Act Five.

            “Having the idea of a sequence of sonnets to Will Hews in mind, I returned to the dedication.  Now the word ‘INSUING’ made sense, because it limited ‘THESE. . . . SONNETS.’ to less than the entire volume.  ‘Mr. W.H.’ would, of course, be ‘Master W. Hews’, and, although we have no direct evidence that his first name was ‘Will’, that was by far the most common name beginning with ‘W’ at that time.

            “Much later I came to think it possible that Thorpe had removed and reinserted the name or initials of the dedicatee, and that the process resulted in both the jamming of the name on the same line as ‘ALL.HAPPINESSE.’ and the greater spacing of the lines from below ‘PROMISED.’ to below ‘WISHETH.’  If the name had originally been given its own line, then the dedication would have had 14 lines, as I felt Thorpe must have intended, rather than the 13 it ended up with.  I put together a little story about it.  Thorpe had originally written the dedication that way, perhaps even including the youth’s full name; but Shakespeare upon seeing it instructed him to remove the name.  Thorpe did so, but – not sharing the poet’s confidence that readers would pick up Hews’ name from the textx -  reversed himself just before the page went to the press, causing the compositor to put it where it presently stands in order to avoid resetting the entire page.”

“I take it,” I said, “that you believe Thorpe and Shakespeare worked closely on the publication, together?”

            “Yes, I do,” Will said.  “It was a certainty that the publication would create quite a stir.  I even think it possible that Shakespeare and Thorpe knew each other as members of a gay/bisexual underground, but I don’t want to emphasize that because it would be controversial, even inflammatory to some.  But, although the relationship between Shakespeare and Southampton must have been fairly well known, at least to an inner circle, this volume would put specifics on it.  I’m inclined to think that the poet did not have a physically intimate relationship with his apprentice.  In the first place, it was prohibited in the acting companies.  Although it’s highly likely that there were exceptions, I think Shakespeare’s knowledge of their propriety permitted him to think that if the volume opened with the sonnets addressed to Hews, the Southampton portion would be slightly obscured.  That that was not true is evidenced by the ‘disappearance’ of the Sonnets immediately after publication.

            “But more importantly, the order of the Sonnets reflects the fact that the close relationship between the poet and the Earl had ended, at the time when – as can be traced through the Sonnets – Southampton sold the ones he possessed in 1598 to William Jaggard.  And thus the importance of the emphatic ‘ONLIE.’ in the dedication.

            “Of course, the fact that Shakespeare was addressing his apprentice also explains why the early sonnets plead with the youth to marry.  Hews did not become a member of the company, but he could have done so if he married John Hemings’ oldest daughter, who was just coming to marriageable age.  In fact, two years later she married William Ostler, who did become a member of the company, only to die in 1614, leaving Tomasina and her father to quarrel in court over Ostler’s share.

            “One final point: in the entirety of the Sonnets, all of the words relating to the theater  – “stage,” (15, 23) “actor” and “part” (23) – appear in these first twenty-five.


IV


            “So, let’s return to Sonnet 26.  The first group of seven, ending with 32, now appeared to be a perfect septet, with a dedication, two sonnets setting the scene, two describing contrasting moods within that scene, a summary, and an envoi.  I had never recognized this before; only when I began with this sequence did I become aware of its existence.

            “I had come to believe that Shakespeare needed a powerful friend after the Greene/Chettle libel had been published.  Marlowe, who lived with and was perhaps the lover of Sir Thomas Walsingham, a cousin of the very powerful Sir Francis, may have been the instrument of an introduction to the Earl of Southampton in the period immediately following the publication.  Perhaps this brief sequence was written to memorialize their first meeting.  Since Chettle referred to ‘divers of worship’ in his apology – and I know there are those who do not believe the Earl, at least in his minority, would qualify for that epithet – I like to assume the meeting occurred shortly after the libel, and perhaps near Southampton’s 19th birthday, October 6, 1592.  In any event, at least two other groups of sonnets – 52-77 and 78-108 -  appear to have been written near one of the Earl’s birthdays.

            After the septet there follow groups of two, three and four, with a few single sonnets that have no textual relationship with their neighbors; but at least one in each group shared a peculiarity, a compositor’s error of ‘their’ where the obvious intent was ‘thy’.  The error occurred in each group, except 40-42, up through 47.  Malone in 1790 thought this likely was caused by the compositors’ misreadings of an abbreviation the poet had used.  I think Shakespeare may have stopped using the confusing abbreviation after he saw proof pages of Venus and Adonis, when he noticed the error it caused compositors to make at Richard Field’s press.  That gave a time frame to the sonnets from 26 to 39 and 43 to 47, all of which were likely written before mid-May, 1593: Venus was entered in the Register on April 18, 1593; and it is known that a copy was purchased on June 12.

            “Whereas in memorizing Book One, at least after 13, I had had to take pains to remember whether the second person was singular or plural, that was not necessary from 26 until I came to 52.  ‘You’ appeared in Sonnet 52 for the first time in the Southampton sonnets, and the sonnet itself was clearly an introductory sonnet, a salutation, as it were.  I decided to treat it and the following sonnets as another ‘Book’.  Book One was 25 sonnets, Book Two, 26.  And when I came to the apparent conclusion of this Book, the self-referential 77, I found there were 26 in Book Three.  It was at this time that I realized the significance of 154 sonnets: 14 lines, times 11 maximum syllables per line, equals 154, QED.

            “The balance of my analysis of Book Three came later, but I had noticed the key to the solution when first memorizing it: there were only two sonnets that were critical of the Earl, and each contained the ‘their/thy’ compositor’s error.  If I was correct in my assumption about the time of using the abbreviation which led to the error, then 69 and 70 were not in the original book, which would thus have contained twenty-four sonnets.  The Book seemed celebratory; if it was written for the Earl’s 21st birthday, twenty-four months would have elapsed since their first meeting.  Considering 52 the introductory sonnet, and numbering 53-68 and 71-75 from one to twenty-one, then the ‘birthday’ sonnet, 75, would reflect in its opening ‘So are you to my thoughts’ the opening of 52, ‘So am I as the rich’.  No accident this, I thought.  And 77 clearly spoke of a book with empty pages, so the idea that Shakespeare presented a book as a birthday present made complete sense.

            “But the fact that there were 26 sonnets in each of the first two Books to Southampton had another significance: 26 sonnets of 14 lines each equals 364 lines, or nearly a line a day for a year.  Shakespeare may very well have had in mind Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 366 poems, a poem for each day of the year.

            “It may not have been accidental that two days after the Earl’s 21st, a date on which he would have been given access to some of the property he owned but could not make use of earlier, the Lord Chamberlains Company was formed.  The date, October 8, 1594, coincided with the reopening of London’s theaters after a closure of more than two years.  The man who announced the reopening was the Lord Chamberlain himself, first cousin – and some thought half-brother – to Queen Elizabeth.

            “The sequence beginning with 78 turned out to be longer than any of the others. And more than any of them the sonnets appear to be necessarily connected, whether by a shared word or a continuing thought.  There is a digression at 80-81, and there is a sharp turn of mood – required by the context – beginning at 87.  Then a problem occurs at 96, when an incorrect couplet – identical to that of 36, but bearing the opposite sense of what 96 requires – interrupts the continuity.

            “I studied the signatures on which the two couplets appeared.”

            At this point Will took two typed pages from a folder, pages which looked just as the original signatures might have.

            “Yes,” he forestalled my question, “I typed up texts which would appear as much like the original quarto as possible, so that I could make my own.  In any event, the couplet to 36 appeared on the verso of C4, that of 96 on the verso of G1.  And, oddly, the position of the printed text on the proof page of C4 would be just where the type the compositor was dealing with appeared in the forme.  My theory is that after a proof was taken of signature G verso, the type to the couplet of 96 was dropped.  The compositor turned to the proof sheets and picked up C, rather than G.  Perhaps the proof page of G was at that moment being proofread against the original text.  And I like to think the original 96 couplet began with the same words as that of 36, ‘But do not so’; they would fit a good sense.  In any event, he set the wrong couplet.

            “Now, all that there need be in the ‘correct’ couplet, to make the continuity flow, is the word ‘winter.’  Something like ‘But do not so, for summer’s wanton sport, Serves winter’s table naught but ill report.’  That would permit the poet to lapse into the reverie of 97’s ‘How like a Winter’.  Then, after the lovely 97-99 and the conversational 100-101, 102 can bring up the original topic of the rival poet, and another conversational sonnet can lead to the extended conclusion, 104-108.

            “Dating this sequence requires that we consider the difference between what the poet presented to the world as the history of their acquaintance and what is reflected in the Sonnets themselves.  The dedicatory epistle to Venus and Adonis suggests, almost requires, that the poet and the Earl be unacquainted at the time of its writing; but I think it certain that they met the preceding fall.  Sonnet 36 suggests, even demands, that Shakespeare was unwilling publicly to claim Southampton’s friendship until he had offered some poetic gift.  But the twenty-four sonnets of the ‘birthday’ book, Book Three, suggest the date of the Earl’s birthday, or thereabouts, in 1594.

            “If we adopt the ‘public’ dating to construe the dates of 104, then we are put in – I believe correctly – the late summer or early fall of 1596, and thus a time shortly after the death of Shakespeare’s son.  This, I believe, helps to account for the depth of the sorrow and despair reflected in some of the sonnets of Book 4, especially 88-92.

            “It was several years before I hit upon what I think is the truth behind sonnets 109-126.  Of course the Earl did not respond to the poet’s criticisms in Book Four; so Book Five is Shakespeare’s response for him, written by the poet, of course, but in Southampton’s style and with his diction.  It contains several words – ‘eisel’, ‘abysm’, ‘alchemy’, ‘lymbeck’ – that are used only one other time in the poet’s entire works.  It capitalizes and sets words in italics – ‘abysm’, ‘alchemy’, ‘heretic’, ‘informer’ – that would not be italicized by the standard rules: aristocrats are said to have used the italic hand more frequently than others.  It may even be that the compositor set ‘with’ as ‘wish’ in the first line of 111 because Shakespeare wrote out ‘with’ in full, copying the Earl’s usage, instead of using the customary abbreviation, ‘w’ with a backward swirl over it.  The compositor, unaccustomed to seeing ‘with’ written out in full, simply assumed it was ‘wish’, even though the long ‘s’ was missing.

            “From the outset I had doubts about the inclusion of Sonnet 122 in the Book.  That sonnet clearly suggests that Shakespeare knew of the Earl’s disposition of the sonnets he then possessed – doubtless by sale to Jaggard – and I could not believe that the poet would have written all the other sonnets of the sequence if he had.  But it seemed clear to me from the layout of The Passionate Pilgrime that Jaggard had about eighty sonnets to print, in a type size similar to that of the 1609 edition, and on both recto and verso.  I also thought 120, implying a meeting of poet and patron after Shakespeare’s discovery of Jaggard’s acquisition, and 125, which it seemed might have been written after the accession of James, had been added after the writing of the original Book.  If that were the case, the sequence would have originally consisted of fourteen sonnets, concluding with the ethereally beautiful 124.  It would have been a ‘significant’ number, paralleling the significant numbers of the two Books of 26 and the single 31-sonnet book – thirty-one being the number of days in the Earl’s birthday month, October, very probably, I thought, the month in which it was presented to Southampton.

            “My working theory was that Shakespeare wrote the original fourteen-sonnet sequence in ‘97 or early ‘98, and added the other sonnets after he in some manner got the earlier sonnets back from Jaggard.  The pages Jaggard was prepared to fill would have handily taken the 80 or so sonnets the Earl had had to sell him.  There is simply no publication of that era other than Pilgrime which has so little text for its pages, and blank versos, for heaven’s sake!  When Jaggard republished the volume in 1612, he maintained the same style, although he did add some additional verses from another poet to fill up some of the empty space.

            “But Shakespeare could not afford to let those sonnets be published in 1598, and perhaps Jaggard agreed.  The next to last sonnet would have contained the lines

                        ‘The mortal Moon hath her eclipse endured,

                          And the sad augurs mock their own presage.’

            The Queen would not have enjoyed reading those lines, and it might have been costly for both Jaggard and Shakespeare.  The poet gave the publisher a couple of nonce sonnets and use of some passages from Love’s Labours Lost, and the trouble was saved.

            “It seems, as  I have suggested, that Southampton and Shakespeare met, at some time after the poet had discovered the Earl’s dereliction; it may even be that 120 and 122 reflect the content of that meeting.  I have been unable to determine whether Southampton was one of those who carried a canopy over King James in 1603 – the Earl was one of the first of Elizabeth’s prisoners to be pardoned by the new King, and James’ formal entry into London was long postponed – thus giving a specific meaning to the beginning of 125.  The ‘Informer’ may well be Jaggard, or Meres, but who knows what that obscure phrase means.  It may be something only the principals could understand.

            “Sonnet 126 is of course once again in the voice of Shakespeare himself, and stands as an envoi to the entire Southampton sequence, 26-125.  I have an idea that a couplet originally existed, stricken out by Shakespeare, which would justify the compositor’s use of parentheses.  On the other hand, it is likely that each compositor was given a batch of sonnets to set equal to the space assigned.  Twelve sonnets filled five pages, so each forme held just over nineteen sonnets, and the compositor who came upon 126 may have wished simply to fill the space.

            “‘Book Six’ opens with the first of the sonnets which have given rise to the ‘Dark Lady’ concept.  In fact, there are only four additional sonnets which add their substance to it: 130, 131, 132 and 144; and 131 specifies that ‘In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds.’  Another sonnet, 145, is  almost certainly written to his wife-to-be.  But it is a certainty that Shakespeare was not as kind to his female intimates, with the exception of his wife, as he was to the males.  In passing, it is worth noting that ‘eyes’ is correct in both lines 9 and 10 of 127.  The sense is lost by changing one of them to another attribute, whether ‘brows’ or ‘hair’. The point is that the poet’s mistress had black eyes, the eyes being the only feature which could not be changed cosmetically.

            “There is little in Book Six that requires comment.  Sonnets 133 and 134 appear to be part of a larger group that includes 40-42.  Sonnets 135 and 136, doubtless youthful exercises, do not require two persons named Will, as is sometimes suggested.  The 26-sonnet book ends with 152, leaving the last two, 153 and 154, as envoi to the entire collection.


V


            “It was quite late in my study of the Sonnets that I hit upon an idea which seemed to justify the inclusion of the clumsy, though formally perfect, 153 along with the striking and elegant 154 on almost the same subject.  Both derived from a few lines by Marianos in The Greek Anthology, though those lines carry the story only to the extinguishing of the torch, sometimes thought to be an advertising blurb, as it were, for the hot baths of a town – more than one has been suggested – in Asia Minor.  In each the poet takes the story farther.  In 153 he seems to say that the only palliative for dipping into the waters – i.e., having intercourse with his mistress – is to return for more.  On the other hand, in 154 it is at least possible, though far from certain , that the poet has contracted a sexually transmitted disease for which the hot bath is no cure.

            “In any event, whatever the specific intent of the endings of the two sonnets, the style is dramatically different.  Perhaps the only touch in 153 one might consider a mark of the mature Shakespeare is the refusal to make the rhyme of the couplet perfect by using the plural ‘eyes’, when he wants to use the singular as a metaphor for the female genitalia;  on the other hand, 154 is full of magnificent use of descriptive phrase rather than simple designation:  153 has ‘Cupid’ twice, which in 154 become ‘the little love-god’ and ‘the general of hot desire’.  And surely ‘was sleeping by a virgin hand disarmed’ is as lascivious a phrase as any in Shakespeare’s works, though subtle enough to pass muster of the most blue-nosed censor.

            “Eventually I came to believe that Shakespeare had given us, as his closing treasure, the first and last sonnets he had ever written.  Perhaps 153 was written as early as 1578, just as the young poet was leaving King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford.  Did circumstances force him to leave before he had completely finished his studies, as is commonly thought, based on the absence of any record of his attendance there?  Or might that not rather be simply the result of the fact that there are no records of the attendance of any students at all during that brief period?  Was it even possible that some early scholar had extracted the original records, just as an early scholar in reading the original Hall Register of the Stationers Guild had marked every work of Shakespeare, leading to the present practice – this is in the 1990’s – of permitting the volume to be seen, but only in the presence of the Guild’s Secretary.

            And, whereas Jonson’s ‘small Latin and less Greek’ has been brandished as evidence of the poet’s lack of classical studies, the modern reader is seldom acquainted with the fact that students could be fined for failing to use Latin for their every utterance in class in Grammar School.  Doubtless Shakespeare was the brightest student any of his masters had ever known, and one of them might easily have obtained for his study a copy – inscribed, not printed, of course – of the Anthology.

            “I was quite convinced that 154 was written almost as late as at George Eld’s shop in May 1609.  And curiously, since I also was convinced that Sonnets 1-25 had been the last written except for 154, it gave me an idea, which ended up giving me what I took to be a confirmation of my ideas about the temporal provenance of all the Sonnets.  It depends upon the failed rhyme in lines 9 and 11 of Sonnet 25.  Of course the failure was intentional.  It is the actualization, the ‘once foiled’ of the sense of line 10, ‘After a thousand victories once foiled’.  I find it wryly amusing that scholars bloviate on the proper rhyming solution to the problem!

            “But I have already bent your ear far beyond any reasonable expectation.  Perhaps I can come by on a later day.  I’m visiting Charlottesville for several days, staying at the Cavalier Inn.  What would be convenient for you?”

            “I have time tomorrow afternoon, if that would work for you,” I said.

            “Certainly,” Will said.  “Tonight I’m going to an AA meeting at the Episcopal Church across the way, and tomorrow night I thought I’d like to go to the meeting of the Jefferson Society.  I was active in it as a student.”

            “Excellent,” I said.  “I might join you at the Jefferson Society, though I imagine a couple of oldsters like us might surprise the kids.”

            “Too bad for them,” Will said.  And he took his leave.


VI


            The next morning was bright and clear, and I enjoyed sitting in a rocker on the Lawn for morning coffee and the newspaper.  I later reviewed my notes from Will’s visit and realized that I had understood his theory quite well.  It certainly made sense that he would want to find someone already very familiar with the Quarto with whom to share his thoughts.  There was a great deal that would make no sense to a beginner.

            I was surprised when Will failed to show up at tea-time, and decided that perhaps I had misunderstood and I would try to catch him up at the Jefferson Society that evening.  Food and drink were served there before the meeting now, though I doubted that had been the case in Will’s day.  So I arrived about 5:45, thinking to see him by the time the meeting started at 7:30 (actually, by tradition, 7:29).

            I was again surprised and quite disappointed when he was a no-show.  When I returned home – a short walk from West Range to East Lawn – I called his hotel.  I was shocked when the desk told me that He had passed away over the preceding night.  Apparently he was discovered by housekeeping around 11:00 AM and had suffered a heart attack during the night.

            I was completely stunned and sat for a while, wondering what to do.  At least I knew now that he had been wise to pass his theory on, and I promised myself that I would be a worthy steward.

            The proper place to begin, I decided, was the “confirmation” he believed he had found in Sonnet 25.  He had not told me what the confirmation consisted of, so I would have to try to recreate his analysis.

            The quatrain which would have to include his confirmation was

                        ‘The painful warrior famoused for worth,

                         After a thousand victories once foiled,

                         Is from the book of honor razed quite,

                         And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”

            What could it be?  Was it, perhaps, that there were precisely 1,000 “victories”, which I assumed must be successful rhymes, in all the Sonnets?  Will had said it confirmed his theory, which was, among other things, that the last sonnet written was 154, making 25 the next to last.  I began making the calculations:  154 sonnets with 7 rhymes each equals 1,078 rhymes; but 126 lacks one, so 1,077.  Will had been of the opinion that the rhyme in 66, “enabled” and “strumpeted”, was incorrect, so 1,076.  Then subtract the seven rhymes of 154 not yet written, 1,069.  And the rhyme for 9 & 11 wasn’t going to happen, 1,068.  The rhyme for foiled hadn’t happened yet, so 1,067.  And the couplet rhyme for 25 hadn’t happened, either.  So, 1,066.

            That’s a number which must have been as well recognized in 1609 as it is now.  I had to agree with Will’s estimate that it served as some confirmation of his theory.  Shakespeare could have made his “mistake” in a range of locations.  That he selected precisely here must surely mean something.

            Content that I had solved this mystery, I considered how I should work with Will’s material.  He had presented it in almost a stream of conscienceness manner, exactly as it had occurred to him, for the most part.  That, I thought, would not work well for me.  I would need to organize the material in some other manner.  And the sole manner that made sense to me was in the order 1 to 154, or Books One to Six, plus envoi.

            I would consider the dedication first, and at the same time would discuss Oscar Wilde’s observation on Sonnet 25.  After that I would simply take the Sonnets in the order Shakespeare set out, which was obviously what he considered his best chance to put them in a way that readers – perhaps, though he may not have envisioned it, not aware of the specific, relevant circumstances of the theater and publication of his day – would be able to understand what lay behind the texts of the poems.


VII


            Bearing in mind Wilde’s dictum, it seemed certain that the words of the dedication were to be applied to only the twenty-five sonnets written to “Mr. W.H.”, that is, “Master Will Hews.”  So the “ONLIE.BEGETTER” was so stated in order to make clear that the Earl of Southampton – to whom some of the Sonnets, beginning, at least, with 26, were assuredly written – was not in any sense the muse who had inspired the Hews sonnets.  (It would seem likely, when one considered the purport of 25, that the poet intended to indicate that his relationship with the Earl was no longer close when he wrote some or all of 1-25.)  “THESE.INSVING” sonnets was designed to limit the scope of the dedication; not “THESE.SONNETS”, which to the less inquisitive mind might seem sufficient, if all that followed were intended.

            I thought the suggestion likely that Thorpe had first created a separate line for “Mr. W.H.”, or perhaps the name in full, thus creating a dedication of fourteen lines; that he had taken the line out – which led the compositor to add vertical space to the remaining lines between “PROMISED” and “THE.WELL-WISHING”; and that upon re-addition of the name, time did not permit more than a hasty insertion of it at the beginning of the “ALL.HAPPINESSE” line.  The most the compositor could do was to leave a space after “Mr. W.H.” that was greater than the customary spacing in the dedication.

            I have sometimes wondered if “EVER-LIVING” was to some extent an allusion to the concluding line of Sonnet 20: “My love shall in my verse ever live young.”  Shakespeare’s insistence on precise meaning would not permit him to change that line to one which might seem rhythmically preferable: “My love shall in my verse live ever young.” The difference in the meaning of the two lines is obvious, and the poet would not sacrifice meaning for rhythm.

            The general design of the dedication, its shape, and the use of periods to separate words, are monumental in nature and, I assume, intent.  And if one excludes “Mr. W.H.” and “T.T.” from the count, there are twenty-five words in it, corresponding to the number of sonnets in Book One.   Perhaps Thorpe was emulating the poet’s precision.

            Book One consists of Sonnets 1-25.  All one needs to understand that these sonnets were written about or to someone other than the Earl of Southampton is Oscar Wilde’s observation in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. that Sonnet 25 would be “meaningless” if addressed to a nobleman.  I would find it perplexing that Wilde did not see that the sonnets beginning with 26 were most certainly written to the Earl, but for the fact that he, like every other writer commenting on the Sonnets – at least until this moment – assumed that all the “lovely boy” sonnets were written to the same youth.

            The most vexing question about these twenty-five sonnets is answered with the knowledge that the intended was an apprentice actor.  The insistence upon marriage and progeny relates to the fact that Hews could have become a member of the Kings Men by marrying John Heming’s eldest daughter, Tomasina.  In fact, two years later she married William Ostler, who did become a member of the Company, only to die three years later and leave his widow and father-in-law to argue in court about his share.

            Book Two consists of Sonnets 26 through 51.  The first seven, 26-32, are a perfect sequence – dedication (26), description of circumstances (27-28), effect on thoughts (29-30), conclusion (31) and envoi (32).  Hews theory that these were a present to the Earl after their first meeting is as good a suggestion as any.  The fact that the sequence was of seven sonnets permitted the thought that the gift might have been made exactly a week after their first encounter, and the tenor of the poems certainly suggested that their initial engagement was exceptionally pleasant, even intimate (“bare” and “naked” in the first sonnet!)  The familial similarity in the three dedications can be seen in the words “duty” and “love”.

            There is little order to be perceived in the balance of the Book until the end, when two seeming “farewells”, 48-49 and 52-53, suggest a possible relation to the fact that acting companies left London – which still suffered from high plague levels in 1593 – for provincial tours, returning for a brief holiday season in December and January.  With that exception, the balance might relate to any time during 1592-93.  However, a common compositor’s error, “their” for an obviously intended “thy”, occurs at least once in every related group except for 40-42 – which couple with 133-134, apparently addressed to the woman of the triangle, and the likely farewells. (The same error occurs in 69, 70 and 128.)

            Malone suggested that this might have been caused by a compositor’s misreading of an abbreviation by the poet. I propose, though it is not necessary to the analysis, that the abbreviation was a “Y” (for “th”) on the line, with a “y” superscript (for “y”).  It is easy to see how this could lead to confusion.  In a Folger analysis of part of a printed text of Psalm 119, the writer makes the same confusion, reading “thou” as “you”, a word which never appears in that psalm.

            In any event, I suggest that Shakespeare realized his error when he proofread the text for Venus and Adonis, which would have occurred sometime in mid-May, 1593.  If that is correct, sonnets containing the “their/thy” error would have been written before then, the balance after that time.

            It does seem that the poet gave an intentional structure to Book Two.  The opening septet is the longest group.  Immediately following is a group of three, then a quartet, and another three – of course, part of a group of five, including 133-134.  There follow a single (43), two pairs (44-45 and 46-47), and the two conclusions.

            Book Three is the group written to celebrate Southampton’s 21st birthday, October 6, 1594.  Sonnet 52 opens it with what may come as a shock to the reader, who has noted that everything written to the Earl before this is in the second person singular.  Suddenly 52 introduces the second person plural; it is also clearly a salutation.  Assuming that 69 and 70, which contain the “their/thy” error and which are the only unflattering sonnets in the Book, were not originally a part of the sequence, that is, when the Book was presented to the Earl, then there are 24 sonnets, one for each month of the acquaintance of poet and patron.  The similar introductions to 52 (“So am I as the rich”) and the sonnet which would be number 21 after the introduction (“So are you to my thoughts”) is a sweet reminder of the poet’s attention to detail.  There is no overall certainty that the order of Book Three is original, however; Shakespeare may easily have altered it to make 60 come where it does, for example.

            Book Four consists of 78 through 108.  The only significant textual problem is to span the divide between 96 and 97; once that is accomplished, the continuity is uninterrupted.  Sonnet 97 begins a reverie on winter; to make that sensible, the word “winter” should appear in the preceding sonnet.  Since the concepts of youth and sport open 96, to end on a seasonal note – summer/winter – is no great stretch.  And to justify the compositor’s misreading, the couplet might begin with the phrase used.  One Will suggested that could be appropriate reads

                        But do not so, for Summers wanton sport,

                        Serves Winters table naught but ill report.

            Book Five consists of 109 through 125.  It is the only sequence which begins without dedication or salutation, but plunges directly into its main thesis: I may have run around a bit, but I never truly left you, and most of what you think I’ve done is simply scandalous comment expected to be leveled at a prominent person like me.  All the problems of these sonnets are solved by realizing that although Shakespeare indeed wrote them, they are in the voice and manner of the Earl.  The poet is responding for his patron to the charges the poet made in Book Four.

            Sonnet 126 is the envoi to the Southampton sonnets, 26-125.  And Book Six, Sonnets 127-152, are all of the poet’s sonnets to one woman or another (145 is certainly to his wife-to-be; the rest are to one or more mistresses ).  Finally, Sonnets 153-154 are the envoi to the entire collection.

            I hoped I would be able to get Will’s ideas to the public.  He wanted that to happen so badly!