July-August 2017
Seventeen is a lot of sonnets.
There is a photo I saw on the intertubes and squirreled away at the time – saw it somewhere in The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, I think, in 2002, according to the file-date my computer gives it – of a painting of an unknown man who might be Shakespeare.
Slightly scruffy; retreating hairline; sweet smile; deep-sharp observant eyes, I’ve-got-your-number eyes 11 … So why is someone who looks approximately like this 11 writing these sonnets, and sending them to the young man if the traditional story isn’t true?
Scarry thinks they were all known to each other, a circle of young people, young artists, actors, musicians.
There are some people so beautiful their arrival sends everyone into a tizz. If there were a circle of people which included Shake, if all these people knew each other, there might have been a consensus about this recently arrived young man, this beautiful and kind and intellectual and irresistible young man – and a sort of good-natured and semi-subliminal desire to be part of his extraordinary sweetness and beauty, to be included in the sunlight of his goodwill by giving him gifts. Recognition of your gift could make you a minor sun, for a moment.
A pretty penniless young man like Shakespeare, already in the theatre, in the speaking and writing biz, could send a sonnet. On some general theme, or the theme the communal joking with the young man took. “The world’s fresh ornament” (sonnet 1) does suggest someone new to the scene, and strikingly beautiful.
The picture in my mind is strange. It’s from the first story... an image of a man in a field, cartoonish castle in the background. The man has a quill pen and a modern writing-pad. This is Shakespeare, persuading the young man in the castle to marry.
With the old story wrong the field and castle vanish. But the sonnets still continue in a vacuum. My mind supplies a drawing-room of sorts, a small group of teasing bohemians and young aristocrats or the aristocratically-connected, a mixture perhaps of men and women. Pleasantries, wit, non-specific. It seems slightly feasible that jokes and gifts and gossip and poems might all be created or uttered here.
Shake’s first nine sonnets are full of almost abstract argument. Some parts are so compressed the syntax gives out –
Then were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was – [sonnet 5]
Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for the world enjoys it – [sonnet 9]
– but mostly it does not. The arguments are beautifully made, but the first sonnets of the sequence aren’t engaged.
(Even so, there are nine of them so far... Was Shake writing them that fast? Was that another part of the joke, if at this stage the whole thing were still a joke, a game, a pastime in and for the group?)
But there is a gradual change throughout this whole (what I think of as preliminary) sequence. In sonnet 10, Shake says:
Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
... for love of me. ?! This is a bit personal for a trope or joke even in a small and habitually meeting group. I’m not sure a group setting for these is plausible.
Sonnet 13, line 1, addresses the young man as “love”: Oh that you were yourself, but love you are and line 13 says “dear my love.” Something is happening; the distance between the speaker and the subject has lessened drastically.
This is really beginning to sound like a private conversation, not a public one. It begins to cast doubt on whether any part of the sequence had ever been read or extemporized or conducted in the company of the group.
In Sonnet 15 Shake declares:
And, all in war with Time for love of you
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
There’s scarcely any distance between speaker and subject now. It is much more feasible to understand this as a private matter of Shake sending poems to the young man privately.
But still – this is a lot of poems. It’s the vacuum around them from my first understanding of the old story that always... Made me afraid of them, because they were incomprehensible, difficult in themselves but also suspended in a contextual void.
Michael Wood said that after the opening sonnets Shakespeare then fell in love with the young man, possibly in his grief over the death of his son, Hamnet. The quill pen scribbling on the modern notepad a good furlong from the castle returned to my mind. I think the absurdity of the image meant that, unconsciously, I thought the explanation unlikely, but that I didn’t want to disrespect anyone’s grief. And so, for me, the sonnets continued to swirl along in their difficulty and conceptual mistiness, another bit of Shakespeare I didn’t dare even think about, notice, be contemporaneous with.
Sonnet 16 draws back a bit (a better war against Time, you having a son), but 17 says a son would prove Shake’s descriptions no exaggeration, and that the young man would live twice, in his son and in Shake’s verse.
… If I could write the beauty of your eyes
and in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, “this poet lies –
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”
… But were some child of yours alive that time
You should live twice – in it and in my rhyme.
This is the first time he says this.
It’s almost like ownership, this new boldness, boast, decision, policy, procedure. The premise/promise affects two people, not one. This formulation of the position of the speaker with regard to the person spoken to, this new claiming of one by the other – What are you doing with my life in your poems? Even thinking of somehow putting my life in your poems? – would be presumptuous, suffocating, intolerable.
Unless the young man were amenable. Especially unless the young, aristocratically-connected, darling-of-the-elite young man were amenable.
Unless the young man had also been speaking.
As Scarry has discovered, writing. Back. 12
Seen as one man writing in privacy and isolation, even with the clear movement of the writer towards the subject, there’s no situational sense in this many sonnets except as some kind of ... bizarre exercise? Fantasy? Delusion? Astonishing and pointless creation of air and glass? A young man, this extraordinary young man replying explains the seventeen, the eighteen, most of the many.
This may be one of his replies. If the English ever existed, it is lost. This is a literal translation of the Latin, published in the Netherlands in 1591:
I send, Light, this narcissus to you by gift of a warm spring, and I send out poems joined to the narcissus. I do this so that in return for the book you may give back to me moistened lips, and in return for my flower you may give your flower to me. 12
Light, this early bloom I send thee
Our songs bound in its open bell and tips.
For this book give me thy moistened lips,
My flower make thine; give thine to me.
11. See also https://news.canadianshakespeares.ca – the Sanders portrait.
12. Scarry, pp. 243-244. The original of this poem may be the Latin quoted on p. 243; at St. John’s College Constable would have written in Latin as often as English. (The collection of fifteen of Constable’s poems in which this poem, Carmen xx, appears, was printed in the Netherlands in 1591; five poems were translated into Dutch, then into Latin.)
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