SOURCE: Andrews, Michael Cameron. “Sincerity and Subterfuge in Three Shakespearean Sonnet Groups.” Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 3 (autumn 1982): 314-27.

[In the following essay, Andrews explores Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man. The critic contends that the speaker of these sonnets should be understood as a dramatic character separate from his creator, and demonstrates that through the course of the sequence the speaker journeys from insincerity and delusion to anguish.]

Early in Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling comments on the “implicit pathos” of Polonius' final adjuration to Laertes: “Who would not wish to be true to his own self? True, which is to say loyal, never wavering in constancy. True, which is to say honest: there are to be no subterfuges in dealing with him.” But as Trilling sadly observes, “We understand with Matthew Arnold how hard it is to discern one's own self in order to reach it and be true to it.”¹

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel—below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel—there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

In the Sonnets, as in our lives, words, thoughts, and feelings are often at variance. In the sonnets to the young man, the speaker passes from what may be called sincere delusion to efforts to rationalize or palliate what the eye cannot help perceiving. In the later poems in this group,² particularly those I shall consider, we often encounter lines conspicuously deficient in poetic conviction. Are we to say that Shakespeare, despite himself, could do no better? It seems to me, as to Philip Edwards,³ that Shakespeare's “bad” poetry in the Sonnets is intentional. And one of its uses is the dramatic one of calling attention to instances in which the speaker is not expressing what he actually feels. I do not, of course, mean that the Sonnets are dramatic in most of the usual senses of that term; indeed, as Heather Dubrow has recently emphasized, they are generically lyrical, not dramatic:

… we are not witnessing a confrontation that occurs at a specific place and time between a speaker and a particular listener, or even between two clearly distinguished personages within the speaker. Instead, it is the lyrical mode that predominates. Some of the poems resemble an internalized meditation, others a letter, others a monologue that the beloved hears but apparently does not respond to.⁴

Shorn of particularity, highly subjective, these poems give us only the voice and point of view of the speaker. Nonetheless, many of the Sonnets are dramatic in a special sense—their intensely kinetic rendering of “the passions of a mind”⁵ in conflict with itself. Poems which, regarded purely as poetry, would be flawed sonnets, may be superb “dramatic” addresses or “meditations,”⁶ combining unconscious or deliberate subterfuge with moments when the “central stream” of feeling pulses in the verse. In other sonnets, seeing and saying are for the most part neither disjunctive nor self-deceiving; in them the almost intolerable is confronted, not merely glimpsed. Yet there is perhaps no sonnet in which the speaker, having passed from ignorance to knowledge, can look at the friend without at some point flinching from the truth.⁷

But who is this speaker? To use terms like sincerity and subterfuge implies the existence of someone to whom they can apply. In Professor Muir's view, “the Sonnets, although not directly autobiographical, do at least reflect the poet's experience” (p. 190). We have, I believe, no grounds for discounting the possibility of a strong autobiographical element—though Shakespeare, on the evidence of his plays, experienced much that he had not lived. But “reflect” is surely the appropriate word. A poet does not write “autiobiographical sonnets,” however much they may reflect his life. The poetic presentation of the self is in some measure the freeing of the self, the translation of life to art. One becomes a character in a poem. And Shakespeare, dramatist as well as poet, is native and indued to this kind of imaginative activity. Whatever the autobiographical basis of the Sonnets (and the question may be as irrelevant as it has been unanswerable), the Shakespeare of the Sonnets is no longer Shakespeare, but a dramatic character at one remove from his creator. The sincerity of this character, the speaker, may be gauged by what he says, and how. He is the imagined presence behind the actual words.

There is no need to discuss the ideal value with which the speaker invests the young man. The friend “becomes … a symbol of living perfection”; “the friendship takes on a symbolic value … becoming the emblem of hope in a changing and discouraging world of unrealized desires.”⁸ No one could doubt the sincerity of most of the sonnets which appear to celebrate him. Yet the young man proves, of course, something less than the embodiment of Truth and Beauty (Sonnet 14); and Beauty, where Truth is not, has in the Sonnets a special horror.

I

Often the movement from insincerity to honest anguish is dramatic, either within a sonnet or within a linked group. In Sonnets 33-35, for example,⁹ there is at first an effort at exculpation:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly wrack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with his disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow;
But, out alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
          Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
          Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun
                    staineth.

But even here the weight of felt experience subverts what is said—and perhaps thought—to be true.¹⁰ The sonnet expresses disillusionment and loss. To say that the friend “was but one hour mine” is, like Hamlet's telescopings of time, to use the natural language of one for whom time is the medium of betrayal. The idealized friend has proved a son of the world—as the pun bleakly intimates, more common than he seems. As he moves among the base companions who now surround him, there is no reason to expect him to “imitate the sun … By Breaking through the foul and ugly [clouds]” (1 Henry IV, I. ii. 185, 190). For the sun functions here as a symbol, not merely of vicissitude, but of the contamination of the beautiful. Today's cloud-choked sun may be tomorrow's glorious morning; but that is rarely true of the moral life of sons of the world. And if the friend should return in “all-triumphant splendor,” as if nothing had happened, the illusion of love's security would not. We are left with a sense of stain.¹¹

Sonnet 34 begins as if the speaker were impatient with the insincerity of pretending to accept the friend's conduct. He abandons the effort, implicit in the use of “he,” to stand somewhat apart from the emotions expressed. Address becomes direct, intimate:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy brav'ry in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace.
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet have I still the loss:
Th' offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offense's cross.(12)
          Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds,
          And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

The colloquial vigor and plain-speaking stance, like the shift from “he” to “thou,” make this seem an eruption of the emotions buried in the previous sonnet. The image of the sun is divested of its glory—the promise of a beauteous day hardly corresponds to the “sovereign eye” and “heavenly alchemy”—and is eclipsed by other figures after line six. The tone, moreover, is directly reproachful: Why did you make me trust you, then do this to me? To lack one's customary defenses is to suffer the more. For the emphasis here is on the speaker's sense of being wounded rather than on the sullying of an ideal. Though separation is less complete than in Sonnet 33 (sunny glances do pierce the clouds), the speaker has suffered a storm of grief. Far from working with “heavenly alchemy,” the friend's commiseration dries his tears but leaves “disgrace,” “grief,” a painful sense of “loss.”

After these tersely aphoristic lines, the couplet, which reverts to the language of conventional romantic hyperbole, must come as a shock. It is as if the speaker, fearing he has gone too far, attempts to give the friend's tears a value beyond what they actually possess. But the anguish expressed in the previous lines has too intense a reality to be asserted away by a couplet—certainly not by one which must impress us as more mechanical than felt. And if the speaker believes what he says, he is the more deceived; quite obviously, it is not what he feels.¹³

In Sonnet 35, also in the form of direct address, the same emotional territory is re-surveyed, and a different conclusion reached. Reversing Sonnet 34, the speaker begins as if in exculpation; but as in Sonnet 33, deep misgivings lurk beneath seeming acceptance:

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;(14)
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense
(Thy adverse party is thy advocate)
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence;
Such civil war is in my love and hate
          That I an accessary needs must be
          To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

What could sound more simple than the opening line? It is as if enough tears had fallen to wash away (or seem to wash away) the sins of the past. But we soon discover that this is not the reason tears are to be avoided. The friend is not to grieve because imperfection is an inescapable consequence of the natural condition. So stated, the idea is logically unexceptionable, if magnanimous. But in fact the first five-and-a-half lines give us something incomparably more complex. There could scarcely be a more untroubled way of accepting the friend's human imperfection than the proverbial “roses have thorns” analogy. It is extremely flattering to the friend; but it is also somewhat incongruous. The thorns of a rose serve as protection. They do not make the flower less beautiful, or less worthy to be admired; though an oblique reminder of the Fall,¹⁵ they are not a symbol of corruption. The second image, “and silver fountains mud,” is—and sounds—more unpleasant: beneath the beautiful is found something common and potentially sullying. In the next two lines the note of disgust becomes more pronounced. The moon and sun are stained—a return to the imagery of Sonnet 33—“And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.” How different from the cheerful “nobody's perfect” “Roses have thorns” of line two. As a defense for misconduct, it clearly will not serve.

And such, indeed, the speaker realizes, feeling his way even as he attempts to formulate adequate excuses. Suddenly, in disgust, he turns on himself for “Authorizing thy trespass with compare.” As Patrick Cruttwell observes, there is a notable shift in style: in place of the pointed sententiousness of the opening quatrain one suddenly encounters poetry that is “terse, subtle, complex to the point of obscurity … finding its imagery not in the ‘poetical’ of roses and fountains, but in the world of law courts and politics.” In Professor Cruttwell's view, “this abandonment of the poetical diction corresponds to the complex fullness of what has to be said.”¹⁶ I would modify Cruttwell's statement by saying that the first quatrain has its own subtlety and complexity: its style is entirely successful for a self-deceived effort to defend the indefensible. Without the contrast between surface and depth it could not be what it is. The rest of the sonnet, which voices feelings previously no more than intimated, is equally well suited to expressing corrosive self-awareness. “[C]ivil war is in my love and hate,” and the speaker acknowledges that he has perverted reason on behalf of “that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.” We have reached, to alter Johnson's phrase, the instability of truth. Here is no shuffling.¹⁷

II

In Sonnets 40-42, all in the form of direct address, there is a good deal of shuffling.¹⁸ Sonnet 40 begins with a desperate attempt to justify the friend's infidelity; the nature of his theft, implicit in Sonnet 35, is now made explicit:¹⁹

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
          Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
          Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

The first line, as abject as it is dramatic, has the authority of authentic anguish. After such an outcry we do not need to be told why the friend can “Take all my loves.” But between it and the couplet we encounter desperate sophistries which obviously do not convince the speaker. The movement of lines 2-7, slowed by frequent repetition and feminine rhyme, testifies to the violence of the emotions the speaker strives to transmute to studied reasonableness. He cannot blame his friend for using “my love” as his own “if [it is done] for my love.” But “if,” of course, equivocates; and in what follows the speaker gives up the line of defense he has chosen. “But yet be blamed if …” (l. 7) initiates the imputation of guilt, but does so while attempting to preserve an idealized sense of the friend: he is to be blamed if, in being false to the speaker, he is also being false to himself. Paradoxically, what the speaker hopes for is insincerity in sin: for if the friend is really what his actions imply, what hope remains? It is this latter possibility, most evident in the couplet, which dominates the rest of the sonnet. The “gentle thief” is forgiven and not forgiven; the speaker will “bear love's wrong” because he must. In the couplet, the promise of line one is fulfilled in language utterly naked of defense:

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

The oxymoron quivers with peculiar horror. But along with this appalling insight into the friend's nature is an acknowledgment, stripped of all self-respect, that any suffering is preferable to losing him. In the immense sadness of the final phrase the worst is glimpsed.

Sonnets 41 and 42 draw back from this abyss, and continue the futile efforts at self-deception. Sonnet 41, the more intense and dramatic, is—like Sonnets 35 and 40—a self-correcting monologue:

Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won;
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman woos what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?
Ay me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth:
          Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
          Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.

Of the tone of the opening we may say, in Jarrell's phrase, that the “dishonesty is so transparent / It has about it a kind of honesty.”²⁰ The friend's betrayal is not susceptible to being so characterized: “pretty wrongs,” “liberty,” and “sometime absent” leave no doubt as to the speaker's real feelings. The friend's conduct is appropriate for one of his age and beauty, because (and here the tone turns ominous) “still temptation follows where thou art.” And what man can resist temptation? As the structure of lines five and six implies, this one yields before he is even assailed (“gentle” in this context may remind us of the chamber-visitors in Wyatt's “They flee from me”). Who can say no when a woman woos—and to say “woman's son” makes refusal sound like ingratitude to the sex. Then, abruptly, the speaker expresses what he thinks and feels: among the “pretty wrongs” is infidelity with the speaker's own mistress. What was termed liberty is really “riot.” And the beauty of the friend, tempting and provoking temptation, has effected a double breach of truth. By beauty the speaker is undone.

Sonnet 42 begins in comparable sincerity, but does not maintain it. Instead of the transparent dishonesty of the first lines of Sonnet 41, we encounter a totally unpersuasive exercise—a kind of pseudo-tour de force—in sophistic argument:

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her because thou know'st I love her,
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suff'ring my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And, losing her, my friend hath found that loss:
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross.
          But here's the joy! my friend and I are one;
          Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

All the abusing and approving, then, is for his sake. But even the joyless joy of this “sweet flattery” is preferable to confronting the truth. The couplet, however, surprises by what it does not say. The friend, whose loss touches the speaker more nearly, is not the subject of the final line. There is no pretense that the speaker and his mistress are one, and that the friend's infidelity may thus be regarded as testifying to the love it seems to violate.²¹

III

I come now to the last of the three groups I wish to consider, the “estrangement sonnets” (Sonnets 87-96). Here, as we might expect, the interplay of sincerity and subterfuge may be observed in its most intense and fascinating forms.

Sonnets 87-92 may be dealt with briefly, as an induction to Sonnets 93-96. In Sonnet 87, for twelve lines a “farewell” to one “too dear for my possessing,” the speaker seeks to camouflage his real feelings with legal imagery and a coolly ironic tone. In the couplet, however,

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

we hear a different voice. The image, which attests to the enormous value the friend has had, also intimates that he never really gave himself. What the speaker possessed, he now realizes, never existed except in his own mind.

If Sonnet 87 is, but for the couplet, more self-protective than sincere,²² Sonnets 88 and 89 embody a different kind of falseness. The speaker in Sonnet 87 uses irony as a defense; its astringency attests to his self-awareness. There is no possibility of deception here: we realize at once that the speaker is assuming one of the most familiar of “deliberate disguises.”²³ But in Sonnets 88 and 89 we encounter something more subtle. Sounding the very base-string of abnegation, the speaker presents himself as love's martyr; under the guise of selflessness, he attempts emotional blackmail. The insidious attractiveness of this tactic has already been apparent, particularly in Sonnet 71:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe. …(24)

In Sonnet 88, the speaker is less sentimental and more aggressive. The first quatrain sets the tone:

When thou shalt be disposed to set me light
And place my merit in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side against myself I'll fight
And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.

The speaker, in short, makes the most of his role: he looks like the innocent flower, but is the serpent under it.²⁵ The sudden uncoiling of the self, so notable here, is repeated in the couplet:

Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
That for thy right myself will bear all wrong.

Sonnet 89, which is utterly abject throughout, serves as a foil for Sonnet 90. Its last line—“For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate”—is a fair indication of the speaker's lack of conviction.

In Sonnet 90 we are back in the real world of felt emotion:

Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
.....If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might;
          And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
          Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.

The speaker says nothing fraudulently self-effacing; he speaks of the pain of loss, not of justifying the friend's conduct. In the image of Sonnet 34, he ventures forth without his cloak.

Sonnet 91 ends in a confession of vulnerability: the speaker is “Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take / All this away and me most wretched make.” But in Sonnet 92 he expends much ingenuity on dispensing with this formidable truth. According to the argument, the friend is his “For term of life” because his own life will immediately cease if friendship is withdrawn. This idea is developed in such pallid language that one is never in danger of believing the speaker means what he says. “O, what a happy title do I find, / Happy to have thy love, happy to die!” sinks no roots into living experience. But in the couplet—and shockingly, after such a tissue of artifice—the speaker opens his mind with brutal directness:

But what's so blessed-fair that fears no blot?
Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.

It is with this recognition that Sonnet 93 begins:

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceivèd husband; so love's face
May still seem love to me though altered new,
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place.
For there can live no hatred in thine eye;
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change;
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange:
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
          How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow
          If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

The sonnet recapitulates much that has been both active and implicit in earlier sonnets. The friend's involvements, sometimes confronted in their intrinsic painfulness but often at least partially rationalized, are here likened to marital infidelity. A kind of sacrament has been profaned; but the speaker has his human claims too, his possessiveness. For, whether or not we are to imagine physical consummation, this is sexual jealousy, an emotion that, in Helen Gardner's phrase, “involves the whole personality at the profound point where body meets spirit.”²⁶ The young man's beauty, once seen as emblematic of his moral and spiritual qualities, is perceived as a mask behind which any vileness may lie concealed. Whatever his inner qualities, he will appear all “sweetness.” And this, with wonderfully mordant irony, is said to be the work of heaven. In the first line of the couplet, however, there is neither irony nor indirection. The friend's beauty is like that of “Eve's apple”—and then the speaker equivocates—“If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.” Though the sonnet began suppositiously, its language leaves no doubt as to what the speaker believes to be true. The saving “if” (rather than “since”) shows him attempting to extricate himself from the full implications of what he has said.²⁷ Yet, given the disturbing idea that what the young man shows is invariably beautiful, one cannot help imagining a vast disparity. The image of the fair fallacious fruit, primal temptation itself, is a natural one.

IV

Sonnet 94, though closely linked to the sonnets in this group, is set apart by its seeming detachment.²⁸ There is no reference to the speaker or his friend; the abstract “they” replaces “you” or “thou”:

They that have pow'r to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flow'r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
          For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
          Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Few of the Sonnets seem less dramatic than this extraordinary poem.²⁹ Yet it is nonetheless, I think, to be understood as a dramatic meditation, analogous within its context to the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet. In each instance, apparent detachment masks intense involvement: to generalize is to escape, however briefly, from the tyranny of the personal.³⁰ Neither Hamlet nor the speaker confronts the painful particulars. But what has struck at the mind and heart to occasion such reflections?

The sonnet describes, in the octave, people almost wholly different from the friend. Power to hurt he has in abundance; and the speaker has suffered.³¹ In Sonnet 96, moreover, the speaker talks of what the friend might do:

How many lambs might the stern wolf betray
If like a lamb he could his looks translate!
How many gazers mightst thou lead astray
If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!

(ll. 9-12)

Here “pow'r to hurt” appears both in the wolf-as-lamb image and in the vaguer—but still sinister—assertion that the friend might lead many gazers astray if he wished to “use the strength of all [his] state.” Not doing what one most shows sounds far more disquieting. And what the friend has “shown” is, I think, the critical question. If the friend's virtue answers his show—that is, his physical appearance—the line cannot apply to him: he would exemplify proper concordance, not a praiseworthy discrepancy between appearance and reality. But there is another way of showing. As Stephen Spender has remarked, the friend creates a “double impression”:

What we see are two things, characteristics which the poet doubtless found present in the real young man, but which are so idealized that it is difficult to form a realistic picture from them: and opposite to this, references to the friend's lascivious faults, coldness, falsity, and his ill reputation, a kind of counter-image held up before his eyes as a terrible example.³²

Setting aside biographical speculation, we may agree that the friend, like a Renaissance perspective drawing,³³ produces a double impression: his looks imply one thing, his conduct another. And if, despite all evidence to the contrary, his conduct has been misinterpreted (or he can be shamed into amending it), the speaker would have reason to rejoice. There is of course falseness, both in the general proposition regarding the virtue of those who “do not do the thing they most do show,” and in the speaker's belief that the friend may be one of them. But how much better for the friend to be virtuous after all than for him to be, as Sonnet 96 implies, masterly in predation.

The speaker continues the argument in similarly strained terms, for his desire to reconcile what he has perceived of the friend with at least the possibility of virtue commits him to what would otherwise seem a kind of mock-encomium. Readers are right, I believe, to detect irony along with apparent commendation: to be “as stone,” “cold,” hardly sounds like the way to “merit heaven's graces.” But as Sonnet 95 emphasizes, the friend is guilty of precisely opposite defects:

That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;
Naming thy name blesses an ill report.
O, what a mansion hath those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where beauty's veil doth cover every blot
And all things turns to fair that eyes can see!
          Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege;
          The hardest knife ill used doth lose his edge.

(ll. 5-14)

The changeless beauty of the friend, so prominent in Sonnet 93, is here shown for what it is: there is no question of “if.” And what the veil covers is rampant sexuality. In view of the “deceived husband” image (also Sonnet 93), we may suspect that the speaker is thinking of the friend's profligacy when he praises those who “do not do the thing they most do show” (both do and thing have sexual senses too well established to require documentation). Since the friend's “sport” is what Sonnet 129 calls “Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” there is something to be said for “husband[ing] nature's riches from expense.” And if the peculiarly non-active beings praised in the octave are (surely with some irony) the “owners of their faces,” the corresponding image in Sonnet 95 makes vices possess the bodily “mansion” of the young man: given the alternative, the former must seem preferable. But of course the image is, in its immediate context, repellent: it suggests deceptiveness, the ability to hide whatever one does not wish the world to see. This quality, unlike the others that the “they” of the octave possess, has characterized the friend from the start. In conjunction with his beauty, it is his most striking attribute; do what he will, his face will never give him away. But the real “lords and owners of their faces,” the speaker insists, are men of another sort, these almost passionless unmoved movers.

It has escaped few readers that this has been a singularly wintry recommendation. The speaker, who obviously has little relish for these paragons of attenuated humanity, cannot praise but in a kind of dispraise. His mind, however, is on the friend, so profusely endowed in all seeming, who squanders nature's riches. Sterile self-mastery is set against the friend's misuse of the excellence entrusted to him by nature or heaven.

The uncorrupted flower of the sestet requires little comment. Unlike Eve's apple, it is what it seems. And as in the octave, the contrast is between what appears to be incomplete participation in life (living and dying to itself) and actions that are reprehensible. The subverted flower, like the friend, meets “with base infection.” So expressed, the flower's plight differs in one essential from that of the friend: for how is one to blame a flower for letting itself suffer blight? But the speaker is willing to sacrifice logic in order to make his point. Thus, in the couplet, the festering of lilies symbolizes the way “sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds.” It is through what one does that corruption comes. The “sweet thief” of Sonnet 35 has turned sour.³⁴

In Sonnet 95, as we have seen, the speaker abandons obliquity and addresses the friend directly. The first quatrain, which I have not quoted, employs the image of the corrupted flower:

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!

But neither here nor in Sonnet 96 can the speaker refrain from ending on a note of insincerity. The couplet of Sonnet 95, “Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege; / The hardest knife ill used doth lose his edge,” is a palpably fraudulent effort to treat what obviously arouses moral horror (not to speak of jealousy) in a spirit of levity.³⁵ In Sonnet 96, the speaker strives to seem far more disinterested than he actually is. And his language shows it. The friend might, if he wished, mislead many: “But do not so; I love thee in such sort / As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report”—as if the friend's reputation, rather than his deeds, were at the heart of the matter.³⁶ What the speaker sees and feels, in short, renders him incapable of total sincerity.³⁷

V

Arnold's image of the three-leveled stream, with which we began, is of course too simple and too orderly to suggest the full complexity of experience—the speaker's or our own. “After all,” Kafka asks in a letter written in 1913, “who knows within himself how things really are with him? This tempestuous or floundering or morasslike inner self is what we really are. …”³⁸ Knowing what we do of suppression and repression, not to speak of the conscious role-playing that is a consequence of intense self-awareness,³⁹ we recognize how hard it is to be veridical, “simply true.” And as Robert M. Adams trenchantly observes, “Even to protest the difficulty of truth is to betray it; for one's protest implies special exalted standards, and there's no one of us who doesn't live snugly enough in the enseamed, sweaty security of a thousand prudent, approximate lies.”⁴⁰ With respect to the young man, the speaker's deepest feelings are fundamentally ambivalent—an ambivalence corresponding to the double impression the young man creates. There is no “noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,” but a turbulent confluence of conflicting emotions. Never in these sonnets do we encounter anything like the edged self-awareness, combined with awareness of the other, that we find in some of those sonnets to or about the mistress—nothing comparable, for instance, to Sonnet 138: “When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies.”⁴¹ In the sonnets we have been considering, the price for such an insight comes too dear. The speaker—our double, our brother—cannot bear very much sincerity; when we think we have found where truth resides, we probably have found only where it lies.

Notes

1. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 4-5. The passage is quoted, Trilling indicates (p. 173), from The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 483.

2. I refer to the 1609 order. For evidence that this may be “Shakespeare's own,” see Kenneth Muir, “The Order of Shakespeare's Sonnets,” College Literature, 4 (1977), 190-96.

3. See Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 27.

4. “Shakespeare's Undramatic Monologues,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (1981), 62. Since, as Dubrow notes (p. 55), “We are regularly informed … that [the Sonnets] are ‘dramas’ or ‘stories,’” her essay is particularly salutary.

5. I take the phrase from Stephen Booth, “Shakespeare in California, 1974-75,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 27 (1976), 107. Booth is commenting on the effect of Robert Boerum's reading of seventy Sonnets: “Shakespeare's sonnets are highly dramatic but totally cerebral. In Boerum's performance, one comes as close as I have to actually, physically, seeing the passions of a mind.”

6. Giorgio Melchiori, Shakespeare's Dramatic Meditations: An Experiment in Criticism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 30, uses “dramatic meditations” to describe “some of the sonnets without a you or when the you is the poet's own ‘soul.’ … They represent a conflict not between characters, their actions and feelings, but within one character.” Melchiori, however, finds these sonnets exceptional, “dramatic in a different way” from the you sonnets; the latter he appears to consider dramatic in the senses convincingly refuted by Dubrow.

7. Though Dubrow's main concern is generic, one section of her essay (pp. 62-65) includes perceptive comments on the deception of the self and the other. As she remarks (p. 65), “the most disturbing of the deceptions … are the speaker's self-deceptions. … Sometimes a whole poem represents his effort to impose a more comforting but fallacious interpretation on a reality that, as the reader uneasily recognizes, demands a different response. At other times the couplet undercuts the neat but false interpretation of the quatrains. Most often, however, it is the couplet itself that contains the lie.” See also Margreta de Grazia's brief discussion of language in the “Dark Lady” sonnets: “Shakespeare's View of Language: An Historical Perspective,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 386-88.

8. Douglas Bush, “Introduction” to the Sonnets in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 1451 (the text used throughout this essay); Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York: Hill and Wang, 1952), p. 7.

9. On Sonnets 33 and 34, see M. M. Mahood, “Love's Confin'd Doom,” Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), 50-53; on Sonnets 33-35, see Hilton Landry, Interpretation in Shakespeare's Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1963), pp. 57-63; Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 155-59; Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 3-8; Philip Martin, Shakespeare's Sonnets: Self, Love and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 66-69; and C. O. Gardner, “Some Reflections on Shakespeare's Sonnets Nos. 33, 34 and 35,” Theoria, 42 (1974), 43-55.

10. See Dubrow, pp. 62-63.

11. As Martin Seymour-Smith observes, “Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-42: A Psychological Reading,” this sonnet expresses the realization that “the friend is capable of corruption, is in fact to some extent corrupt” (New Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Hilton Landry [New York: AMS Press, 1976], p. 35).

12. Q: “losse.”

13. Cf. J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 223: “The Friend weeps in genuine remorse; and his tears pay the price of his fault.” See also Gardner, “Some Reflections,” p. 48.

14. Q: “Excusing their sins more then their sins are.”

15. See Paradise Lost, IV.256; ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1935), p. 119. Hughes compares Herrick's “The Rose”: “Before man's fall the Rose was born, / St. Ambrose says, without the thorn.”

16. The Shakespearean Moment (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 61.

17. See Cyrus Hoy, “Shakespeare and the Revenge of Art,” Rice University Studies, 60 (1974), 78: “The poet is painfully aware of just what a dubious endeavor he is engaged in as he casts about for excuses for the friend; the ‘civil war’ … has the effect finally of making him untrue to himself.” Cf. Richard P. Wheeler, “Poetry and Fantasy in Shakespeare's Sonnets 88-96,” Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), 159: “Shakespeare retreats from fixing guilt in the young man out of fear of collapsing a relationship which must be sustained even through self-denial.” Wheeler notes, however, that “an undercurrent of accusation remains, as if Shakespeare were saying—look at the extremes to which I must go in order to make you look good.” See also Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited with analytic commentary (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 191-92.

18. See Landry, Interpretations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 63-72.

19. Seymour-Smith considers this inference “tempting, but unlikely” (“Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-42,” p. 33); he does not, however, explain why.

20. Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 295.

21. Cf. Sonnets 133-34.

22. Cf. Martin, Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 69-70, Krieger, A Window to Criticism, pp. 133-37.

23. Usually, of course, the speaker is taken at his word; see, e.g., C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 505; Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, p. 185; and C. L. Barber, “An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets,” Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 314.

24. Cf. Sonnets 57-58. In Sonnet 71, as Wheeler has noted (“Poetry and Fantasy,” p. 159), “The aim of the poem … is clearly the opposite of its stated theme. Shakespeare is using his own death … to pry pity from the young man.”

25. Cf. Mahood, “Love's Confin'd Doom,” p. 57: “[Antonio's] words at the trial … are as movingly unconvincing as is sonnet LXXXVIII.”

26. “The Noble Moor,” Shakespeare Criticism 1935-60, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 361. My concern is with what the speaker says, not Shakespeare's sexual orientation—though I agree with Booth (Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 548) that “Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual.” See, however, G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame (London: Methuen, 1955), pp. 24-25; Seymour-Smith, “Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-42,” p. 38; Purvis E. Boyette, “Shakespeare's Sonnets: Homosexuality and the Critics,” Tulane Studies in English, 21 (1974), 35-46; Katharine M. Wilson, Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), pp. 355-72. A survey of psychoanalytic criticism is provided by Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 83-88.

27. Stephen Spender, “The Alike and the Other,” The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Edward Hubler (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 116, finds the couplet “more exhortatory than condemnatory.” But cf. Wheeler: “The poet asserts that he recognizes no falsehood in the young man, even if it is present. But to say that such a falsehood may be present, and to suggest that the poet fails to notice it is, in fact, a way of recognizing it and drawing attention to it” (“Poetry and Fantasy,” p. 158).

28. See Carol Thomas Neely, “Detachment and Engagement in Shakespeare's Sonnets: 94, 116, and 129,” PMLA, 92 (1977), 83-95.

29. For a listing of critical studies, see Melchiori, Shakespeare's Dramatic Meditations, pp. 35-36. Recent studies include Lorena Stookey and Robert Merrill, “Shakespeare's Fearful Meditation: Sonnet 94,” Modern Language Quarterly, 39 (1978), 27-37. See also Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 305-9.

30. Martin, Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 42, compare Wyatt's “They flee from me”: “In each case the plural is, partly at least, a resort from an all-too-particular instance, too close and painful to be expressed in the singular.” Melchiori, p. 63, holds that a “meditation” “implies a transcendence of the particular case, the private persons, and the specific circumstances, in order to reach out towards first principles, to the roots of human motivations. …”

31. See Alexander Dunlop, “The Concept of Structure in Three Renaissance Sonnet Sequences” (unpublished diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976), p. 196: “The beloved has had the power to hurt the poet and has indeed done so by robbing his mistress, by preferring other poets, and by general indifference.”

32. “The Alike and the Other,” p. 112.

33. See Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978). Gilman does not discuss the Sonnets, though he refers to Sonnet 24.

34. Cf. Sonnet 69, lines 13-14: “But why thy odor matches not thy show, / The soil is this, that thou dost common grow.” See, however, Melchiori, Shakespeare's Dramatic Meditations, p. 63: “to assume, as nearly all critics do, by analogy with other sonnets … that the single flower of the sestet … is tout court the boy—and to interpret the Sonnet merely in that key—is preposterous.” The confidence of this declaration does not alter the fact that it too is based on an assumption. Stookey and Merrill, “Shakespeare's Fearful Meditation,” pp. 36-37, “do not think that Sonnet 94 should be read as part of a continuing dramatic ‘action,’” yet suggest that the sonnet, so interpreted, would reveal the poet's discovery that “his love will never be returned, for the friend is incapable of love.”

35. Cf. Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art, p. 30: “What is perhaps not improperly called the fear of desire is partly submerged in Shakespeare's earlier plays but it reappears at the turn of the century and in almost every play from Measure for Measure onwards there is an acknowledgement of the supposed disjunction between the marriage of minds and the union of bodies.”

36. The same couplet is used in Sonnet 36. Jean Fuzier, “‘Mine is thy good report’: A Note on Shakespeare's Sonnets 36 and 96,” Cahiers Elisabéthain, 9 (1976), 55-58, argues that the second instance is ironic.

    My understanding of this group of sonnets is very different from that of Wheeler, who finds Shakespeare coming full circle in his feelings toward the young man: “The couplet completes the cycle formed by the series of Sonnets (88-96) … fully re-immersing the poet in a tender and helpless love through identification that blurs the boundaries of self and denies the necessity and the very grounds of realistic appraisal” (“Poetry and Fantasy,” p. 161). Nor can I agree with John D. Bernard, “‘To Constancie Confin'de’: The Poetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets,” PMLA, 94 (1979), who says of the first quatrain of Sonnet 95: “Though tainted by contact with the world, the friend's beauty is able to transmute even sin to beatitude” (p. 83).

37. See Jane Roessner, “Double Exposure: Shakespeare's Sonnets 100-114,” English Literary History, 46 (1979), 357-78. Roessner explores the ways the speaker of these sonnets “turns from using poetry to hide or deny or dissuade his friend's untruthfulness to the complex trick of appearing to praise him while in fact exposing just how and why those praises are written” (p. 358).

38. Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), p. 198.

39. See Robert Ellrodt, “Self-Consciousness in Shakespeare and Montaigne,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 37-50.

40. Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977), p. 14.

41. See M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 102-3, and p. 108.