SOURCE: Hart, Jonathan. “Conflicting Monuments: Time, Beyond Time, and the Poetics of Shakespeare's Dramatic and Nondramatic Sonnets.” In In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster, pp. 177-205. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Hart explores Shakespeare's treatment of the themes of time and death in the sonnets, observing that Shakespeare's rhetoric in the sonnets transcends the boundaries of language and poetic modes.]

In the Sonnets a conflict occurs between the ruins of time and the gilded monuments of Shakespeare's powerful rhyme set out in the desire between rhetoric and poetics, lust and love. How in the formal elegance and compression of the sonnet does Shakespeare represent a longing for eternity or a remembrance of things past or a wish for the extension of the evanescence of physical love into some timeless poetic moment? How much of the self-conscious rhetorical hyperbole of a poetics that would outlast other monuments in exploring love represents a conflict that recognizes the impossibility of such a vaunting verbal world? Paradoxically, this overreaching language, especially in conjunction and friction with the leveling rhetoric of lust and death, displays the only hope for love and poetics in the possible world of Shakespeare's poetry.

This attempt to reach beyond language and the forms of poetry also occurs in the sonnets in Shakespeare's plays. While this essay emphasizes primarily the great sonnet sequence, it also examines some of the dramatic contexts as a way to suggest how Shakespeare explores time and death in his sonnets generally and how that exploration calls attention to the limits and possibilities of poetry and the sonnet. The essay begins with a general discussion of the Sonnets, proceeds to a brief examination of Shakespeare's sonnet in various dramatic contexts, and then analyzes some key poems at the beginning, middle, and end of the Sonnets. It is impossible to be exhaustive with the Sonnets, and no attempt has been made to be so. While the argument takes into account the vexed question of the order of the Sonnets, it does not depend on that order.

The Sonnets are neither strictly love's argument nor a drama with fully embodied characters. They cannot be resolved into the key with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart, as Wordsworth thought, or a denial of their autobiographical nature, as Browning contended.¹ Criticism is full of partial insights, like those Wordsworth and Browning offered, but taken together these partialities help to address the complexity of literature itself and some of its most perplexing works, like Shakespeare's sonnets.² The part my essay plays in this critical drama is to seek out the limits of Shakespeare's language, his poetics and rhetoric, in these enigmatic lyrics and to do so most especially as he explores the outer boundary of life itself: death. Shakespeare's keeping time in the face of time the destroyer—whether he addresses the young man or the mistress, whether he proclaims the virtues of regeneration or laments the loss of youth and love, whether he contends with time through the boast of words or the heat of lust—constitutes the heart of this exploration of the Sonnets. Shakespeare uses dialectic, rhetoric, and poetics to face the ghost that haunts life, the dark gap of time and the skull beneath the skin. The confrontation of death, sometimes with despair or with the celebration of life, dwells behind the crumbling edifice of language and culture. In the tensions, inverted relations, and paradoxes of love and death lie that unexplored country Hamlet looked into and whose liminality made him shrink back and face those that cross the bourn to the afterlife, another world that could only be imagined. The narrator or speaker in the Sonnets must, in the drama of time and in the conflicted space between master and mistress, look into the abyss of his existence and express that gaze in a language that attempts to reach beyond its own boundaries, a gesturing that seeks to make the impossible possible.³ The strains of language at its end leave the speaker and those he addresses, the poet and the reader, seeking a comic ending, the happy circumstance of love, but in a tragic dilemma because humans are fools of love just as they are fools of time. Whether or not the expression of faith can resolve this sense of tragedy into something happy and comic is the deadly game, the play of the reclamation of wit, the serious but not always solemn procession or fragmentation called the Sonnets.

The hope against mortality and the erasure of human life and value in time begins in the first sonnet; and the structure of comedy, despite the wistfulness of loss and the anger over betrayal, persists to the end of the sequence, where Cupid is literally a deus ex machina, who saves humans from the blindness of their love, lust, and lives despite his paradoxical responsibility for their star-crossed love and comedy of errors. The great structure of comedy found in the Bible, The Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare's romantic comedy involves a move from order through chaos to a new order.⁴ Even in this hope for regeneration in the first sonnets and this paean to love in the last two sonnets a qualification of the drive toward comedy occurs, for the sequence includes poems that express the tragic aspects of love, time, and death. The Sonnets intersperse these darker elements with wit and humor, which so often constitute the substructure and content of comedy. Shakespeare's Sonnets, as they were printed, are not a conventional comedy—the narrator and the mistress do not overcome the complications of love and lust to marry—but they do have a general comic structure. Moreover, the ending of the sequence is reminiscent of the problem comedies or problem plays, whose conclusions seem theatrically achieved or forced.⁵ Part of the problem is notorious: we cannot be sure that the order of Shakespeare's sonnets, any more than Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, is the author's.⁶ Another strain occurs in the fragmentary nature of a series of lyrics, for they are discontinuous in a way that plays are not. The narrative is not straightforward: the telos vanishes and the story is not a simple series with named characters who develop in linear fashion. This tension plays out in the language of this great sonnet sequence as the words seek to move beyond the limits of love, lust, and death but reinscribe boundaries. The narrator and various players are the innovative creation of a great poet, so that they are part of an experiment in language that pushes back the bounds of expression but that, no matter how successful, cannot escape death and oblivion. If the poet and his creations have religious faith, it is God or the spirit that redeems the fall of language no matter how smooth and able the pen of the poet is. If Time, the great leveler, is the ultimate fact, then no amount of virtuosity can overreach the ruthlessness of Nature. The wax tablet becomes the wax wings. Shakespeare and his creations share the fate of Icarus.

I

This disjunctive strain occurs within the sonnet form, a virtuoso kind where the poet concentrates the vast themes of love and death into fourteen lines in one variation or another of a complex rhyme scheme. Before addressing the Sonnets themselves, I would like to discuss the sonnets in a few of Shakespeare's plays because they provide a gloss on the sequence itself, call attention to their difference in form from the wider dramatic contexts in which they appear, and also treat of some similar themes. The sonnet the Chorus speaks as the Epilogue to Henry V ends this play and the Second Tetralogy, yoking a vast, crucial stretch of English history into a compressed poetic form that was traditionally devoted to love. This war story pushes out the bounds of its form: the love lyric yields to the imperial theme just as the French princess had to succumb to Henry the Fifth for dynastic reasons and to please her father's will, even as the courtship had, in Shakespeare's version, contained tender and coy moments. Shakespeare's epilogic sonnet gestures toward modesty: “Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, / Our bending author hath pursu'd the story” (Epilogue, 1-2).⁷ This pursuit involves compression of the world into the confined space and time of a play, which has world and time enough compared to the sonnet that ends it: “In little room confining mighty men, / Mangling by starts the full course of their glory” (3-4). The topos of inexpressibility complements the modesty of the author even if he has had the ambition to write about the epic sweep of English history in a series of plays. Whereas Henry the Fifth had little time to achieve what he did in the world, Shakespeare has little space to represent that achievement: “Small time; but in that small most greatly lived / This star of England” (5-6). The end of the sonnet is more narrative, describing how Fortune had made him achieve France, “the world's best garden,” which he left to his son, Henry the Sixth, whose managers “lost France, and made his England bleed” (12). All this “oft our stage hath shown,” so that Shakespeare alludes to his own Henry VI plays, which had been popular and had represented the end of the historical sequence before Shakespeare had written the Second Tetralogy. Through allusion to more historical time and to other of Shakespeare's plays, the sonnet expands its content and strains its limits even more. This operation is left to the audience to complete, something in keeping with the Chorus's appeal to their imagination throughout Henry V. The audience, which in one form also includes the reader, is implicated in the exploration of boundaries in the world and the dramatic and literary forms that represent it. Like the poet and characters like Henry the Fifth, the audience is caught in time in the world and art and needs to meditate on it. Without an audience, history is no longer reenacted and embodied and withers away beyond memory. This topos is a courtesy from a begging epilogue but there is also some credence in the imagined space between author and audience, world and representation.⁸

A choric use of sonnets also occurs in Romeo and Juliet, where the Prologue narrates the argument, and sets the scene of the play. Once again, the conflict between love and public violence finds expression in the confines of a sonnet. The “new mutiny” and “civil blood” are the context for the children of the two households or foes, “A pair of star-cross'd lovers” (3-6). The love that should have a happy conclusion in marriage ends in death: these lovers “[w]hose misadventur'd piteous overthrows / Doth with their death bury their parents' strife” (7-8). The play, “the two hours' traffic of our stage,” is offered to the audience as something that will “mend” what the sonnet has not described and becomes an amplification of “[t]he fearful passage of their death-mark'd love” (12-14, 9). A narrative device, the sonnet calls attention to its own need for supplement that the audience “with patient ears attend,” so that the rough and limited art of the playwright needs more space to try to do the story justice (13). The poet emphasizes the bounds of his art as a poet and tries to justify the striving and mending “toils” of his playwrighting (14). The tragedy of what should be a festive comedy about lovers is something the sonnet amplifies through repetition, telling about “the continuance of their parents' rage, / Which, but their children's end, nought could remove” (10-11). The Prologue forewarns about the tragic turn of the play, for the body of Romeo and Juliet begins like a romantic comedy. Two lovers are smitten and fall in love at first sight, facing obstacles but moving toward overcoming them in order to be united. Something goes wrong in this play when Romeo steps between Tybalt and Mercutio and the former stabs and kills the latter under Romeo's arm, and the young lover then kills Mercutio's killer who is also Juliet's kinsman (III.i.85-137).

Before these deaths in this love tragedy, Shakespeare also uses a sonnet to introduce act 2, and this poem is a comic mock at the changeability of love. The sonnet emphasizes the obstacles to the match between Romeo and Juliet and how Romeo's love has shifted from Rosaline to Juliet (I.ii.83). Romeo has been spouting the oxymorons of a Petrarchan sonneteer early in the first act until his attentions turn to Juliet, so that by the time the audience hears this prologic sonnet to begin act 2, it is familiar with the shedding of his first love, to whom he had devoted the contradictory and apostrophic phrases “O loving hate! … O heavy lightness, serious vanity, …” that expressed the desire of love to yoke emotional extremities in order to exceed and resolve them in unity and the lovers' union (I.ii.175-82). The death of Romeo's love for Rosaline and the birth of his love for Juliet might invoke a shift from false love to true love and do so in the language of eternity and immutability, but the very shift itself questions a love that defeats time and change. This is precisely the monumental love that occurs at the end of the play, but even that union of lovers in death, as in Antony and Cleopatra, comes about because of ill fate and error, the star-crossed missings of tragedy. In this early satiric state of love, where Shakespeare has Romeo groaning and oxymoronic under the burden, Romeo will yield, not to the woman he thought his love, but to a woman whose family is his foe. In the metaphorical death of his old love, he has to find new life in love. He inhabits yet another oxymoronic paradox.

The Chorus emphasizes this rebirth and regeneration in Romeo's opening lines to act 2, and the progress of love finds its imagery in the “death-bed,” something that will become a literal stage image at the very end of the play:

Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie,
And young affection gaspes to be his heir;
That fair for which love groan'd for and would die,
With tender Juliet [match'd] is now not fair.

(1-4)

Although Rosaline is now not counted fair beside Juliet, Romeo and his new love will be heirs to “old desire” in more ironic ways, something the first sonnet spoken by the Prologue has marked out for the audience. Death sets a limit for the language of love even as that love proclaims itself as life itself or as something beyond death. Romeo must “complain” to “his foe suppos'd” and Juliet “steal love's sweet bait from fearful hooks” (7-8). Their situation curtails their love: he is a “foe” and thus cannot swear the vows to which lovers are accustomed; and in this enmity between their two families, she is not free “[t]o meet her new-beloved any where” (12). This danger is an obstacle that comes from parental blocks, as it is for the lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and other Shakespearean comedies. They will seem to defeat time and death, for the sonnet concludes: “But passion lends them power, time means, to meet, / Temp'ring extremities with extreme sweet” (13-14). They can meet owing to the extreme sweetness of their love, and it may be that their love triumphs over time, but in language on earth their tragedy, especially after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, seems inexorable, a waste of youth. Love might conquer all, as Ovid teaches, but, if so, this happens in a space that language can only reach for and whose putative existence draws attention to the very limits of verbal expression and perhaps any form of representation. The expense of spirit in a waste of words is love poetry in action. The very boasts of the language of love address the void of time, which seems like a means but has the power to take away and erase, a kind of heroic hope against the odds.

There are other places in the plays where Shakespeare might have used sonnets. In As You Like It the poems that Orlando has composed for Rosalind, which she, Touchstone, and Celia read aloud in sequence, are decidedly not sonnets, but poems of various lengths composed of rhyming couplets, subject to much satire and critical comment in the scene itself (III.ii.87-250). Perhaps the parody of love poetry, as in the plays-within-plays in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet, can be more stylized by using more obvious and rudimentary poetic forms. This comic revelry does not call for experiments that push at the bounds of the sonnet form. The Epilogue to Henry VIII is a fourteen-line verse in couplets that can be construed as a sonnet, although not formally a usual Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet. Shakespeare's epilogic verse incorporates themes found in other begging epilogues in his plays: the inability but desire to please the audience as well as the division between men and women but the hope that they will clap in unison. The Epilogue uses “we” instead of “I,” possibly suggesting the collaboration of John Fletcher and Shakespeare (4, 7-8, 11; see “ours” at 13). Such instances demonstrate that Shakespeare did not always use the sonnet for love poetry in the plays—in the minor epics Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece he also represented love, lust, and repulsion—and that his sonnets always explored in rigorous and innovative fashion the bounds of language, the sonnet, and life itself. That lovers, kings, and queens are fools of language and time—a thematic that is explored in the plays in forms other than the sonnet, except in a few rare instances—becomes a central concern in the Sonnets themselves. The sonnet, a compressed form of musical and semantic time, becomes, in a complex and disjunctive series, a place where the possibility of an enduring art and love—the art of love and the love of art—is called into question. If Shakespeare's art will fail to endure, then what does that mean for lesser mortals and those characters to whom his narrator promises immortality through the monument of verse?

II

The Sonnets themselves, whose order may or may not be the one Shakespeare gave to the poems, begins with reproduction as a means to stave off death: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty's rose might never die” (1:1-2).⁹ The speaker suggests that the youth avoid wasting himself by being too “niggarding” with his “content” and urges him to make an heir (1:11-12). In Sonnet 2 Shakespeare returns to the theme of the death of the beautiful: this time “forty winters shall besiege thy brow, / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field” (2:1-2). Once more, a child is held up as an answer to age and death, “Proving his beauty by succession thine” (2:12). More amplification of this concern of procreation occurs in Sonnet 3: the speaker grows ever blunter, “Or who is he so fond will be the tomb / Of his self-love to stop posterity?” (3:7-8). This warning against narcissism is a persistent theme of the procreation or regeneration sonnets that begin Shakespeare's sequence, and Shakespeare will set up this self-adulatory representation as death itself: “But if thou live rememb'red not to be, / Die single, and thine image dies with thee” (3:13-14). The speaker, who hectors the “beauteous niggard” for abusing “beauty's legacy,” the gift that Nature has given him, uses hyperbole to reach at the bounds of language in order to make his point that the young man will squander beauty and youth should he be content in himself and not produce an heir: “Profitless usurer, why dost thou use / So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?” (4:7-8). Shakespeare's numbers, the rhythm of his verse, call on images of numeration and remuneration, of natural and unnatural increase, to drive the point home: “Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee, / Which usèd lives th'executor to be” (4:13-14). The inexorability of wintry time finds amplification through an insistent repetition, so that the young man whom the speaker addresses cannot miss the message: “For never-resting time leads summer on / To hideous winter and confounds him there” (5:5-6). Beauty is “o'ersnowed” in one image and “summer's distillation,” like a perfume, is one way to “remembrance,” so that regeneration is a means to preserve substance even while the winter has wrought age and death (8-9, 12-14).

Sonnet 6 returns to winter defacing the young man's summer, to the theme of the previous sonnet, so well encapsulated in the phrase “Make sweet some vial” (6:3; cf. 5:9-14). Reiterating the imagery of self-killing and usury, the speaker urges his solution with familiar hyperbole: “That's for thyself to breed another thee, / Or ten times happier be it ten for one; / Ten times thyself were happier than thou art, / If ten of thine ten times refigured thee” (6:7-10). Shakespeare gives his speaker language to refigure the young man in a mimetic regeneration, but, for now, he does not introduce the notion that Shakespeare's verse will make him immortal. That would contradict the argument that regeneration must happen in the world, that an “heir” will make him perpetually “fair” as opposed to being “self-willed,” “To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir” (6:13-14). In Sonnet 7 the speaker likens the friend he is addressing to the personified sun, who rises with “gracious light” and “sacred majesty,” climbs up “heavenly hill, / Resembling strong youth in his middle age” while mortals still adore his “beauty” and attend “on his golden pilgrimage” and, past the apogee, “Like feeble age he reeleth from the day” and sinks low so that onlookers turn their eyes away (7:1-12). To clinch and telescope the comparison, the speaker concludes: “So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon, / Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son” (7:13-14). The addressee, who seemed a youth or a young man, is now almost past it and needs the repute and fame that he would gain from a son.

As if there had not been argument or amplification enough, the speaker now turns in Sonnet 8 to music as a means of persuasion. Harmony is not the “singleness” that the young man has chosen thus far but the way toward which the speaker, and perhaps the poet, is urging him, for if the addressee hears “music sadly,” it is because he cannot hear properly the “sweets” and “joy” and “the true concord of well-tunèd sounds” that “sweetly chide” him (8:1-8). The speaker urges the young man to “[m]ark how one string, sweet husband to another, / Strikes each in each by mutual ordering” and, by analogy, “Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother, / Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing” (8:9-12). This harmony in the family is like the music of the spheres, so the microcosm and macrocosm exist in mutual order. The family finds some of its music in paradox and oxymoron, its “speechless song being many, seeming one, / Sings this to thee, ‘Thou single wilt prove none’” (8:13-14). Thus far in the regeneration sonnets the young man has been told of his limits and—by means of hyperbole, paradox, and oxymoron, where the poet explores the limits of language through the speaker—how to defeat time through the fame, repute, harmony, and reproduced image of an heir. And Sonnet 9 amplifies this theme of “beauty's waste” through an analogy of the world mourning the young man as a widow would her husband, the tragic loss arising because he died childless (9:11). The gaze of others, as in the reception of the sun in Sonnet 7, is a recurrent theme: the widow here keeping her “husband's shape in mind” by looking into their “children's eyes” (9:8). Should the young man die “issueless,” then, the speaker concludes in the final couplet: “No love towards others in that bosom sits / That on himself such murd'rous shame commits” (9:13-14). Narcissus, or even Adonis in Shakespeare's narrative poem about his relation with Venus, is an implied comparison for the young man. Even at the limits of nature and language, Shakespeare gives his speaker a language of family and community—the close relation between speaker and addressee has not yet been established. Before the reader learns about the Platonic and close (perhaps sexual) relation between speaker and young man, he or she finds a social and familial context for love.¹⁰ The defeat of time through regeneration, with all the fame and reputation, or simply with the domestic moments of seeing oneself or others seeing oneself in one's son and heir, depends on a web of relations and an audience.¹¹ Remembrance depends on the son or heir, and sometimes the wife. This kind of memorial can be seen, although in a more violent state, when the Ghost of Hamlet senior asks specifically that his son “remember me,” and his heir, echoing his father, takes up the challenge literally with a vengeance and much chides Gertrude for her apparent neglect of mourning and remembrance (I.v.91-111). Here, the speaker of this sonnet sounds paternal and avuncular, a Polonius who happens to speak a more subtle poetry, which the poet has given him, but not too unlike the kind of advice the king's counsellor gives to his own son, Laertes, before he departs for France (I.iii.55-81). Age would school youth as if youth were wasted on the young.

The theme of self-shame, so evident in the final couplet in Sonnet 9, finds further expression in the next sonnet, whose first line speaks of “shame” and then proclaims, “For thou art so possessed with murd'rous hate” (10:1, 5). The wit of the speaker attempts to leaven the harsh judgment, “O change thy thought, that I may change my mind!,” the second clause linking the speaker with the young man through a chiming of the first clause, a play on a “change” that identifies and distinguishes the two characters (10:9). Through the metaphor of the house in the second quatrain, the speaker urges and cajoles and flatters the young man to put his house in order. In the concluding couplet the speaker—while doling out advice that by this point seems to be commonplace or conventional, for him at least—seems to intimate a love more personal: “Make thee another self for love of me, / That beauty still may live in thine or thee” (10:13-14). This line follows up on the recurrent concern of procreation to make beauty endure for the sake of nature, the world, and the young man, but might also suggest, as the appeal is now to procreate for the benefit of the speaker, a bond between the two men that involves an admiration of friendship through physical beauty or something more physical still. Sonnet 11 returns to Nature, who is bounteous with those who reproduce, “so fast thou grow'st / In one of thine,” but lets others not so wise “barrenly perish” (11:1-2, 9-10). Nature, like a monarch, places her seal on an important document: “She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby, / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die” (11:13-14). This is an aristocratic image, imprinting one's image in wax, but it also conjures the language of degree and law and, possibly, conjoins and confounds the imprinting of court documents and manuscript culture with the mechanical reproduction of print culture. The Sonnets themselves are said to have been passed about in manuscript only to be printed as a book with or without the poet's full or even partial participation. Even if the author did not intend this meaning, the ambiguity of the seal as imprint and the copies as printed versions would be available to Shakespeare's audience. To go forth and multiply, as if Shakespeare's Sonnets were beginning with Genesis in mind, means endurance, but the quality of the image and of the remembrance itself might not be as straightforward as the speaker says it is in his arguments to persuade the young man to regeneration.

Shakespeare regenerates the theme of regeneration: he repeats images in Sonnet 12—clock, sun, flower, person, Nature all move toward death. The sun sinks in “hideous night,” and the speaker identifies harvest and funeral. The theme of the “beauty” of the young man “among the wastes of time” is played out once more in the context of the death of beauty in Nature and the world, so that the reader can hardly be surprised in encountering the closing couplet: “And nothing ‘gainst Time's scythe can make defence / Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence” (12:9-10, 13-14). This personified or allegorized figure of Time or Death as harvesting humanity, found in emblem books, recurs in various sonnets in Shakespeare's sequence (60:12, 74:11, 100:13-14).¹² Breeding and providing an heir as a loss of “beauty” and a preparation against the “coming end,” which was the thesis of the last four lines of Sonnet 12 is a recurrent concern at the beginning of Sonnet 13 (1-6). The young man will find himself, his “sweet form,” through his “sweet issue,” so that, inadvertently or not, a kind of reproductive narcissism is being urged here as it was in earlier sonnets (8). The image of the house in decay, this time in a windy winter storm, “And the barren rage of death's eternal cold,” recurs, its only hope “husbandry in honour” (9-12). The speaker asks who would let this house fall and answers in a half-line of the final couplet, “O none but unthrifts,” the medial cæsura leading to “dear my love, you know,” which has ambivalent syntax, proclaiming how dear his love is to the young man or that this youth is his dear love (13). Whatever the reading here, the final line proclaims the familiar theme: “You had a father, let your son say so” (14). The line of male descent would then be preserved: but the speaker had also urged carrying on the maternal side by calling the youth his “mother's glass” (9). The urge to reproduction is dynastic and, while joining the parents in the son, may also blur gender boundaries because the son looks like the mother as well as the father and may not have achieved manhood. Sonnet 14 uses “astronomy” as the trope by which the speaker amplifies the now familiar theme. He will not use astronomical prediction to judge but will read the young man's eyes, “constant stars,” where “truth and beauty shall together thrive” if the addressee “from thyself to store thou wouldst convert” (9-12). This Grecian ideal, to which John Keats would later return, is a form of flattery and hyperbole, but Shakespeare relies on the volta of the sonnet to turn on and qualify this stretching of the limits, because, in the final couplet, the speaker's praise depends on this reproduction, this storing of the young man's seed, for if that does not occur, then the contrary prognostication will obtain: “Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date” (13-14). This volta, or turn, before the final couplet is far more abrupt and contradictory than in the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, where it usually occurs between the eighth and ninth lines and where the momentum for the argument is not quite so one-sided. Shakespeare's language is a vehicle against the ruins of time, but, at this stage, it is the reproduction itself in Nature that guarantees endurance.

Sonnets 15 and 16 mark the transition between the begetting of an heir and the lasting nature of the speaker's poetry as a means for the young man to find immortality in the face of Time, the destroyer. That rhyme is a means to stave off time goes back, as G. Blakemore Evans notes, to Horace and Ovid, and Shakespeare is not alone among Renaissance European sonneteers in elaborating on this theme.¹³ In Sonnet 15 a tension occurs between breeding and writing as a means of defeating time, something Shakespeare works out through a theatrical metaphor, which, in his plays, grows more specific, from metapoetics to metatheater. Shakespeare may be playing on the heavens in his theater, bringing astronomical and theatrical art together, as a means of amplifying earlier metaphors of the sun rising and falling and prediction by reading the stars. In this conjunction people grow and decay under the sky and fade from “memory” (1-8). The speaker returns to a situation he has outlined to the young man beforehand, one “[w]here wasteful Time debateth with Decay / To change your youth to sullied night” (11-12). In this “war with Time” the speaker has his “conceit,” and can thus state: “for love of you, / As he takes from you, I ingraft you new” (9, 13-14). The conceit might be that, like a gardener, the speaker as poet creates an image that creates an heir for the young man and, existentially, perhaps implies a kind of sexual union, in the text at least, that does not require the womb that he invokes in Sonnet 4 (5). The expression of endurance and immortality is becoming more intricate with each sonnet as the language is the form and the content striving in a bid to proclaim the young man's immortality. Sonnet 16 involves a retreat from pride in the power of poetry, and, in questioning the youth, suggests that procreation is “more blessèd than my barren rhyme” in the war with “this bloody tyrant Time” (1-4). Here, the speaker advocates the young man's “living flowers” to “you painted counterfeit,” so that Nature is urged above art and reiterated in the next quatrain (9-12). Shakespeare cannot resist a quibble on lines, which are bloodlines and the lines an artist draws, so that his puns may yield to the young man in his repetition of “yourself” and in the final phrase of the poem, “your own sweet skill”; but this admission and yielding occur in the language Shakespeare gives to the poet. There are two characters, speaker and addressee, and the implied lives of Shakespeare and the person who may or may not be a friend or lover of the poet. These linguistic domains involve a simultaneous distancing and intimating, for the language of speaker, character, poet, and friend (perhaps the dedicatee) plays on the reader, once apparently a member of an inner circle where the manuscript was circulated and now a changing him or her, himself or herself caught in the conflict between life and language on the one hand and time on the other. This is another dimension of loss that even monuments, brass and poetic, that proclaim their permanence face. We all face, inside and outside the poem, then and now, the dilemmas of time and the changes of language that proclaim the changeless, what Alexander Pope said would be Dryden's fate as much as Chaucer's, so the very conceit of endurance in the fallen world of time has a certain pathos to it.

Shakespeare plays with the limits of verse and language in Sonnet 17: “Who will believe my verse in time to come / If it were filled with your most high deserts?” (1-2). The hyperbole the poet had been using to praise the young man will, it turns out, dissuade posterity from believing the portrait. The anonymity of the addressee does not seem to occur to the poet who may have thought that his private circle of friends would know the identity of the young man or the construction of the character; but, in an age before biography was the rage, this identification was not passed on. The speaker qualifies this first question about exaggeration with an assertion that the verse is like the tomb from which it has been trying to rescue the young man, something “[w]hich hides your life, and shows not half your parts” (4). By this means, the speaker shows that his verse is unworthy and that its skill in descriptive hyperbole and hyperbolic description is not up to the task and if it were “[t]he age to come would say, ‘This poet lies; / Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces’” (7-8). His numbers cannot number and posterity will think the poet is given more to words than “truth,” given to “rage / And stretchèd metre of an àntique song” (10-12). The turn in this poem shows the wit and ambivalence of the poet: he displays his nimble gift for words while resolving that the young man can live in heir and poem: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme” (13-14). Perhaps, then, there is no true contradiction between Nature's regeneration and art's memorial reconstruction. Whether Shakespeare considered this a resolution that in the war with time people should choose both/and rather than either/or is something that the order of the Sonnets cannot answer because they do not have the unequivocal authority of the author. As the Sonnets stand, as they have from 1609, the poet turns from regeneration to the theme of the power of rhyme. Language here attempts to burst its own limits in the service of love and in the battle with death and time.

III

While the order of the Sonnets may or may not be Shakespeare's, the procreation or regeneration sonnets do seem to cohere. From Sonnet 18 onward, the sequence has less apparent unity, and, owing to uncertainty over the structure, an analysis based on strands might provide a reminder of this textual instability as well as more focused discussion on each thematic concern in the friction between time and language. Poetry as immortality is a conceit Shakespeare takes up in Sonnet 18, but this time he does so without an apology for the claims of the poet to make the young man immortal. This well-known sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?,” reiterates the passing of summer and the turning of the seasons and the declining of the sun, yet sets those familiar tropes up for a turn, in the Petrarchan manner, after line 8: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade” (9). Death will not “brag” because “in eternal lines to time thou grow'st” (12). The speaker's verse, which has life in the fiction of Shakespeare's verse alone, is like Horace's and Ovid's but, in a Christian context, also resembles the power of God himself to make a man eternal: in the final couplet, the poem achieves this potency through the power of the readers over the generations: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (13-14). The power of poetry is beyond the grave in another time.

Sonnet 19 addresses “Devouring Time” (1), a proverbial expression in English and perhaps an echo of Ovid and Spenser, a figure that also appeared in Sonnet 5.¹⁴ Time is asked to have animals and seasons in its power—for instance, to blunt the “lion's paws,” and “burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood” (1, 4). The speaker will allow the immortal bird to be consumed again and to grant “swift-footed Time” to do with “the wide world and all her fading sweets” but not “one most heinous crime,” that is, to devour the young man: “O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow, / Nor draw no lines there with thine àntique pen” (6-10). In a vocative or apostrophic address the poet asks Time not to be a poet and write in hours in Nature in such a way as to create lines in the young man's forehead, so that his vaunted forbidding of Time is a pleading, a wish that is followed by another, that Time permit the youth to be “untainted,” “beauty's pattern to succeeding men” (11-12). Whether this physical beauty is a Platonic ideal or a physical icon of desire is left unsaid. In the turn to the couplet the poet dares “old Time” to “do thy worst,” because “despite thy wrong, / My love shall in my verse ever live young” (13-14). In the poet's hyperbole and hubris, Time has come to devour itself: this verse does something that the phoenix and Time cannot do—regenerate “My love,” the poet's feelings and the object of admiration or desire. That double love in one finds regeneration through the best that language can express when it defies its limits.

Sometimes the monument against time occurs in the speaker/poet's mind rather than in his writing. In Sonnet 30 in “the sessions of sweet silent thought,” he summons “remembrance of things past,” but this thought, expressed in the legal terms “sessions” and “summons,” finds itself disturbed by action and the sad loss that comes with “my dear Time's waste” (1-4).¹⁵ This waste is also of his friends hidden “in death's dateless night” and “many a vanished sight,” so that the speaker tells and pays his “sad account” (5-12). In a reversal, a kind of volta, or turn at the level of the structure of the Sonnets, the poet proclaims that the young man in the older speaker's thought will defeat time: “But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) / All losses are restored, and sorrows end” (13-14). As Ovid contended, but with perhaps more irony, amor vincit omnia—love conquers all—and this friend is male and not female. “Thy bosom” begins Sonnet 31, and indeed that breast subsumes the love of the dead friends that the speaker's heart has lacked, so the friend is later addressed as “the grave where buried love doth live / Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone / Who all their parts of me to thee did give” (1, 9-11). Regeneration comes through the young man and the love between the speaker and him, a love expressed as a debt, “That due of many now is thine alone” (12). This expression of love in fiscal terms, which credits the young man with defeating death through the speaker's love interest, could not, as much as the poet/speaker elides his writing of this account, exist without the writing in which this love union occurs: “Their images I loved I view in thee, / And thou (all they) hast all the all of me” (13-14). The poet needs his love for the young man as a topic to use writing as a weapon in the war against time and death, so his “images,” whether they represent other ones in life, are all that is left. If this love were Platonic it would be only these shadows on the wall of the cave that apparently would remain. This monument shifts as if the poet as speaker and Shakespeare as the poet have to devise new strategies in the action against time: his thoughts shift even as they are images in and against a changing world. Like Richard the Second making, before his death, comparisons between prison and the world, in which his brain proves “the female to his soul,” the father, “and these two beget / A generation of still-breeding thoughts” (Richard II, V.v.6-8). Whereas in the face of death Richard calls into question the efficacy of thought and the unlikelihood that it will make the thinker happy—“And these same thoughts people this little world, / In humors like the people of this world: For no thought is contented”—the speaker of Sonnet 31 (and of Sonnet 30), as he considers death, ends by putting his faith—he talks about “dear religious love stolen from mine eye”—in images and thought even as he expresses them through the idea of his love for the young man, because the friend's body or physical presence, whatever the claim, can be represented only in the very thoughts the poet seeks to make material (Richard II, V.v.9-11; Sonnet 31:6). Indeed, dear religious love is stolen from the eye—the poet's, the young man's, and the reader's.¹⁶ The heroic nature of that love, and its expression in poetry, are the hope against time and death even if that stand may not exceed, and the splendor of that endeavor is the mixture of standfastness and mobility, an ingenuity of expression in a desire for something that endures the wrack of death and the movement of time.

Nearing the center of the Sonnets, as they were printed, are Sonnets 54 and 55, which return to the theme of immortality through poetry. The reciprocal pair of beauty and truth, as well as the images of distilling perfume from flowers that Shakespeare employed in Sonnets 5 and 6, represent preoccupations in Sonnet 54. Shakespeare contrasts the rose, which regenerates, with the canker-rose, which dies unto itself, thereby returning to the thematics of Sonnets 4 through 6 (54:5-12).¹⁷ The final lines of Sonnet 54 proclaim: “And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, / When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth” (13-14). Whether “by” (Evans) or “my” (Capell) precedes “verse,” the poetry will distil the “truth” of the young man like perfume from flowers as his beauty fades.¹⁸ Shakespeare's best-known conceit of the power of verse in the Sonnets comes in 55: “Not marble nor the guilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme” (1-2). This conceit is bold but becomes more equivocal in the wider context of the Sonnets, where, whatever order, an oscillation, if not a vacillation, occurs in vaunting of the power of poetry against time and the potence of the temporal.

This boast about the power of rhyme finds qualification in Sonnets 63 through 65, where a disjunction exists between the sad progress of mortality and poetry's immortal qualities. After reiterating the work of “Time's injurious hand,” which includes once more “lines and wrinkles” on the beloved's brow, the speaker/poet of Sonnet 63 hopes that his “sweet love's beauty” can never be “cut from memory” by “age's cruel knife,” appealing again to the comparison of aging with the passing of the seasons (1-12). His answer, as it will be in Sonnet 65, is, “His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green” (13-14). The blackness of ink will restore the “greenness” of spring and youth to the beloved and stop “age's steepy night” from making the beloved's “beauties” vanish, “Stealing away the treasure of his spring” (5-8). The last couplet answers more generally the first twelve lines, which portray the anxiety of erasure, and more specifically, the death of youth and spring that age and death bring. The poet's hand tries to answer another writer, Time, whose “injurious hand” inscribes its lines in Nature and brands the beloved's brow with age and death. Sonnet 64 is another meditation on the ruins of Time, once more personified as devouring and decaying, a force that “will come and take my love away” (12). The speaker despairs in poetry that such a thought is death, when he possesses his love, both his feelings and beloved, that which the meditation “fears to lose” (14). In the final line, as in line 8, the poet stresses loss and the act of losing, the mourning of a putative death and the failure to win the battle with Time. Further, in Sonnet 65, the speaker asks: “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, / But sad mortality o'ersways their power, / How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” (1-4). Through amplification, the speaker queries further “how shall summer's honey breath hold out / Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days” when rocks and steel gates cannot and Time continues to decay (5-6). By analogy, the young man is now “Time's best jewel” and “beauty” and nothing and no one, no “strong hand” can, as the question seems to say, stop the “swift foot” of Time who will have “his spoil” (9-12). In the final couplet, the poet/speaker, who has already proclaimed “O fearful meditation!”—answers this question of who can resist Time with a short, direct, and despairing phrase, which he then modifies with a clause of hope: “O none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright” (13-14). The miracle is the claim that verse is immortal, that the poet's love for the beloved or the beloved himself may endure in the ink of this sonnet, perhaps a kind of apotheosis. The starkness of “O none,” a kind of sigh of despair, finds qualification not in a declarative statement of this “miracle” of “black ink” but in a conditional “unless.” Moreover, the conceit of the power of verse has its own limits and depends on the very abyss of Time that it labors against. As destructive of humanity as it is, this Time is humanized through personification, as it is throughout many of the Sonnets and certainly as it was in the preceding two sonnets (63 and 64).

Whether thoughts, words, and deeds can be made into an association against Time, perhaps as Richard the Second tries to do in prison, is a question that becomes more problematic when the Sonnets are considered as a whole. The tension between the sequential and the overview is especially apparent in a collection of lyrics: the logic and counterlogic in the form of each poem contends with the gathering of them in a book, and the reader also traverses the breaks in the spaces between the poems. While I understand the reasons many editors have doubted that the order of the Sonnets was Shakespeare's, I also see no conclusive evidence against attributing this order to him. If he had been unhappy with the order he might have sought to publish an authorized version, although it has to be said that while he did publish Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece in good order, he did not do so with many of his plays, which would have come under another kind of ownership, that of his acting company. While it is impossible to be certain about the teleology or the generic construction of the Sonnets as a whole—for instance, whether Shakespeare himself conceived of them as a comic movement—these poems express enough qualifying and contradictory notions of writing and Time that they question the monument of poetry against sluttish Time.

IV

In writing against Time Shakespeare gives his speaker/poet a language that makes writing itself less monolithic and monumental, for authors are subject to style and rivals, so there is not one way to address the young man and to craft words against change and mortal corruption. Time is not the only rival poet to the speaker. Writing is in danger of warring against itself. The paradox for Shakespeare's speaker is that he must change and be constant, to move with the times in order to be immovable in time. To make his love ever young even as Time will age and kill him becomes a contradictory task. Nor are the two men—speaker and young man—alone. A new dramatic conflict—rivalry—seizes the center of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence.

The doubting and assertion of the power of his verse while contending with a rival (rivals) becomes the preoccupation of the speaker in Sonnets 76 to 84. The opposition between writing and time devolves into many more conflicts and complexities. Sonnet 76 begins with the questions, “Why is my verse so barren of new pride? / So far from variation or quick change?” (1-2). Instead, of fighting change with change the speaker writes in a verse that is “ever the same,” an ever-fixed mark where “you and love are still my argument” (5, 10). The oxymoronic old newness and new oldness of his verse gives a different spin to the revolution of the times: “For as the sun is daily new and old, / So is my love still telling what is told” (13-14). This love, like the beloved, is a variation on a theme told in a poem, which renews the conventions of previous love poetry. In Sonnet 77, Shakespeare invokes an old tradition, the memento mori, to renovate his love and beloved.¹⁹ Here, the speaker sends the young man the sonnet and a blank notebook to fill up with thoughts that will, like other measurers of time—like his “glass” and “dial,” which appear in the opening two lines and find further amplification beyond—remind him of “Time's thievish progress to eternity” (1-8). The book will contain what his memory cannot, so the addressee becomes a writer, the young man's thoughts “children nursed, delivered from thy brain, / To take a new acquaintance of thy mind” (11-12). Here is a new kind of procreation sonnet where the young man begets words for his children instead of children for his words. In all this, the poet/speaker is the metaphorical mid-wife. He and the young man can together produce children through words only—not in the world.

The rival poet or poets challenge the monopoly on writing and the speaker's friendship with the young man (see Sonnets 78-80, 82-86, 126).²⁰ They write against the grain of the speaker/poet's claim that his verse alone will immortalize the man he addresses in the Sonnets. In Sonnet 78 the young man is the poet's muse, but now “every alien pen hath got my use, / And under thee their poesy disperse” (3-4). The phrase “under thee” suggests a sexual image of the rival poets procreating with the young man as well as the notion that, under the young man's patronage, they disseminate their poetry through manuscript or print culture. Returning to hyperbole, the speaker makes the young man a muse that can teach the dumb to sing, make ignorance sing, and add feathers, grace, and style even to the most learned poet. This inspiration, which the poet invokes, raises him up: “But thou art all my art, and dost advance / As high as learning my rude ignorance” (13-14). The young man is a muse who becomes all his art, so that he is the only begetter of the Sonnets. Even if this is exaggeration for its own sake as a form of bonding flattery, it may speak as much to the young man as the author of himself and narcissistic reproducer of his own image that poetry is an act of love, where the object of desire transforms the subject to such an extent that their act and words of love are inseparable, a kind of progeny where the traits of the parents are indistinguishable. Sonnet 79 is a sly yielding to a rival poet with “a worthier pen” because the speaker's muse is sick, “his gracious numbers decayed,” but he takes away while giving ground to the rival, for that poet can invent virtue and beauty to praise in the young man by stealing it from his life, where it is greater yet (6, 3). The volta comes with the speaker's critique of the rival poet that empowers the young man, who, as the implication goes, is the source of beauty and virtue and therefore has the power to reinstate the speaker as his poet to make “thy lovely argument” (5): “Then thank him not for that which he doth say, / Since what he owes thee, thou thyself dost pay” (13-14). In Sonnet 80 the speaker praises the young man's “worth (wide as the ocean is)” (5) and, in an image of boats makes himself a “saucy bark” (7), a kind of bold but modest vessel, then “a worthless boat” (11), while the rival is “of tall building and of goodly pride” (12), so that, retrospectively, the line, “The humble as the proudest sail doth bear” (6) makes sense in terms of the rivalry between the humble speaker and the proud rival for the love of the worthy young man and for the chance to praise him in poetry. Although the speaker claims that the rival's “praise” of the young man's name makes “me tongue-tied speaking of your fame” (3-4), he is willing—in the final couplet—to accept his fate: “Then if he thrive and I be cast away, / The worst was this: my love was my decay” (13-14). This yielding is an appeal to the unable tongue of true love before someone who would praise the young man with “all his might” (3). This gesture toward sincerity, like that of Kent in King Lear, is an idealization or suppressed hyperbole of the speaker's virtue and steadfast love and loyalty. This is a far way from the boasts of Sonnets 15 to 19 and Sonnet 55 about the power of the speaker's poetry to make the young man immortal. The tension between these extremes provides dramatic conflict as well as expressing the oxymoronic claims of language to making the human world endure past a single generation and the inability of language to represent people and the world. Whether this modest boastfulness is witty, contradictory, or paradoxical, or all three is something with which the reader must grapple.

In Sonnet 81 the immortality of the young man in the speaker's poetry resurfaces and intensifies the oxymoronic claims of writing. Creation as procreation and praise as a monument come back in the middle of the segment on the rival poet(s) when the unworthy and tongue-tied speaker has his love alone. Nor do these claims slip in because the monumental nature of the verse, as opposed to the speaker's death, finds amplification: “Your name from hence immortal life shall have, / Though I (once gone) to all the world must die” (5-6). Even in death, the speaker will immortalize the young man, a point he reiterates as he envisions the death of his love: “The earth can yield me but a common grave, / When you intombèd in men's eyes shall lie” (7-8). Being buried in the eyes of the readers will be his rebirth: “Your monument shall be my gentle verse, / Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read” (9-10). To the eyes, the speaker adds tongues and breath to “rehearse” the words of praise for the dead beloved (11-14). This repetition of a meditation on death and how verse can defeat time and mortality qualifies the speaker/poet's yielding to the rival poets, although the fragmentation, agon, and agony of writing against time in the name of love can never be quite monumental or simply the dust that awaits each person. At worst, writing extends life when posterity re-creates the apparently lifeless signs of ink on page.

The next four sonnets explore the nature of praise in such a way as to modify the theme of poetry as monument as expressed in Sonnet 81, so that this sonnet finds itself in a context that contradicts it and one that creates dramatic tension. Sonnet 82 allows that other rival poets can praise the young man as there was no oath between the speaker and the youth, no marriage of true minds, and perhaps as the addressee passes all praise that the poet can muster, it is just as well that others try to come up to the mark and try to better time in these “time-bettering days” (1-8). But then comes the volta: the poet/speaker has spoken of plainly and truly—“Thou, truly fair, wert sympathised / In true plain words by thy true-telling friend”—as opposed to those deploying the “strainèd touches rhetoric can lend” (9-12). True plain speech—like Kent's in King Lear—characterizes the virtue of the poet, whose praise is short of, or at, the mark of the young man's beauty, truth, and virtue, so that this topos of inexpressibility attempts to escape the very rhetorical nature of its ploy. If there were any doubt in the turn, the final couplet defends the realistic and naturalistic virtue of the author of this sonnet: “And their gross painting might be better used / Where cheeks need blood; in thee it is abused” (13-14). The final plea is for the plain to triumph over the gross—quite a turn from the conciliatory and understanding position of the first eight and a half lines.

Sonnet 83 picks up on the theme, expressed in the last couplet of Sonnet 82, that the young man does not need “painting” (1-2). Here, the hyperbole is that the excellence of the young man shows that life can outpraise art: “I found (or thought I found) you did exceed / The barren tender of a poet's debt” (3-4). The parenthetical qualification raises doubt about the young man's status of being beyond the poet's obligation to his patron or the indebtedness of his love for the youth as well as the vacillation in the poet's mind concerning the power of his poetry and the power of the young man's truth and beauty in love. The speaker/poet has “slept in your report,” in writing about the young man and in the youth's chronicle of him (5). Still, the poet has doubts about the young man's “worth,” and the silence is a mutual dumbness, even if the poet protests about “being dumb,” about “being mute,” and that other rival poets, those of the “modern quill,” would “bring a tomb” (7-12). This epistrophic chiming of lines 10 through 12 contrasts the poet being mute and dumb before the worth of the young man with those who would silence their subject in a tomb, although Shakespeare has raised questions about whether the youth does exceed even the “barren tender of a poet's debt” and about his “worth” and “silence” (3-5, 8-9). As if to resolve the rivalry between poets and the ambivalence in the poet/speaker of Sonnet 83 about the young man and his power to love or to express in life more than any poetry, Shakespeare reverts, in the final couplet, to what may be called the antimonumental stance, which contravenes monumental sonnets like 55 and 81: “There lives more life in one of your fair eyes / Than both your poets can in praise devise” (13-14). This volta expresses the paradox that in this eulogy the eye of the young man has more life than the praise of two poets can enact even as Shakespeare's lines represent that commendation.

Sonnet 84, a poem of “rich praise,” argues that the young man need be represented only—“that you alone are you” (2) and “[t]hat you are you” (8), so that embellishment in poetry is not necessary. No matter what the “store” of praise the poet has or the store of seed the young man has, the youth is himself (3). Perhaps, as in the procreation sonnets, begetting a son is the only way to produce a like, but not identical, beauty, worth, and truth as the young man possesses. Once again, any poet who wishes to praise the addressee should count on a representational “copy” of “what in you is writ” and not a “fame” begotten by “wit” and “style” (9-12). The subject and object are indistinguishable as writers. In the final couplet a turn occurs that, as in Sonnet 83, calls into doubt the perfection and self-praising and self-sufficient representation that is the youth: “You to your beauteous blessings add a curse, / Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse” (13-14). The young man's blessings are praise and elicit praise, which, being foolish, makes this adulation even worse, so that the young man and the poets appear less than perfect. It is possible to say that the criticism might be a double negative or a backhanded compliment that, being so perfect, the youth causes others to praise him in ways that, by comparison, fall short, and so this perfection attracts imperfection and thus is imperfect (perhaps through no fault of its own.)²¹ In this version, there is less of a turn because there might be a pun on “fond on” as “fawned on,” so the youth's beauty has the curse of being fond of a praise that is fawning, which makes his “beauteous blessings” worse through a praise that is foolish and falls short. Either way the praise is less than perfect because the young man and what the poets say about him are entwined in this couplet and elsewhere. If the young man is himself, a trope repeated in the poem, he is also the poetry that represents him: even in the separation of life and art a problem arises, as set out in the procreation and monumental sonnets—how can this beautiful young man outlast the ravages of time and death?

More than one rival poet appears in Sonnet 85, which elaborates on the theme of praise, something that reaches beyond neutrality, potentially in the direction of flattery and hyperbole. The poem begins with the speaker/poet's “tongue-tied Muse,” a conflation of tropes in Sonnets 80 and 82, in the face of the work of others, whose “praise” for the young man is “richly compiled,” and who use a “golden quill / And precious phrase” (1-4). Once more, the speaker/poet is silenced and thinks “good thoughts, whilst other write good words” (5). This plainness and silence in the face of aureate rhetoric, this trueness before polish and refinement, is the poet's virtue as opposed to his rivals' verbosity: they may be true in praising the youth, but the poet/speaker adds “something more”—the love in his thought (9-12). The “Amen” of the prayer is, by translation, true, and gives a religious cast to these words that the silent thought supplements with an even greater truth.²² Nevertheless, the speaker/poet as character and the poet Shakespeare as creator cannot express truth and silence in this lyric poem in any way but with words, so that the thoughts, even if one accepts the Platonic split between words and writing, go before words but can only find an outlet in language. The larger framework of praise and patronage—which might well inform the context of the writing and production of the Sonnets, although we do not have a direct and easily identifiable dedication as we do in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—might further suggest that the use of “rank” is also a metonymic suggestion of the relation between poet and patron socially as well as a bond of love through the poet's thought, which ranks above the words that must express it. Just as Richard the Second chases his thoughts through elaborate metaphors and words in prison, the poet/speaker uses an extended metaphor to couch his thoughts as opposed to words in an elaborate chain of verbal association: “Then others for the breath of words respect, / Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect” (13-14). These “dumb thoughts” are not as silent as the verbal conceit of silence would make them.

This civil strife amongst poets in the middle of the Sonnets questions their monumentality. The conflict develops a certain vocabulary: for instance, Sonnet 86 returns to the imagery of the rivalry with another poet—spirits and ships—that occurs in Sonnet 80. Writing fractures in the contest over who gets to represent the young man and how. According to the poet/speaker of Sonnet 86, the rival goes from “the proud full sail of his great verse” in line 1 to being “[b]ound for the prize of all-too precious you” in line 2.²³ As in Sonnet 85, the speaker examines his own thoughts as worthy reflections of the youth, but, as in an anti-procreational image contra the tropes he used in the first fifteen sonnets, he asks whether the rival's verse makes the “tomb” of speaker's thoughts “the womb wherein they grew” (1-4). The poet wonders whether spirits taught his rivals' spirits to write supernaturally, so as to silence or kill the speaker figuratively; but answers no, these nightly spirits and ghosts, perhaps emissaries of the devil, could not “astonish” or dumbfound his verse (5-12). Here, beyond death as a trope qualifies the death that seemed so final in the procreational and monumental sonnets, so that the power of poetry, even if it cannot be silenced, is phenomenal in a world that might be, even if only figuratively, noumenal. The final couplet stresses that the young man's “countenance”—face and patronage—“filled up his line,” so that the speaker/poet lacked “matter—means or a subject—so his line became “enfeebled” (13-14). This is the very feebleness of a great sonnet sequence. Sonnet 86 displays the fissures in writing itself through the rivalry and the desire to represent life beyond death, here in a spirit world, however negatively portrayed, and, in the monumental poems like Sonnet 81, in the wish or assertion that the speaker's poet will outlast silence and death.

In the middle of the Sonnets as we have them a dramatic tension occurs between poetry as the hedge against death and time, but, whatever the order, an ambivalence takes place between life and art and a conflict arises between poets that questions the very nature of writing. The art of writing splits between plain speech and rhetorical ornament, although rhetoric is not enough for poetry even if poems are partly rhetorical. Representing plainness requires rhetorical strategies. Nor in the war against time and death is victory readily achieved through beauty, truth, thought, or words: the fiction of the young man or the speaker's poetry as outlasting their time till doom is a hope caught in the web of the very language in which it is expressed. Sonnet 81 proclaims the monumental and enduring nature of the speaker's poetry but in a context that modifies any such claim, and in other sonnets throughout and toward the end of the sequence, the disjunctions and fragilities of language and life find further exposure.

V

Sonnet 126, a coda to the poems that are thought to be addressed to the young man and a transition to the sonnets about the mistress (127-52), represents the ravages that time will have on the young man.²⁴ Despite procreation, the monument of the sonnets, and his own beauty, worth, and truth, he will grow old and die. The reaction to this plight is mixed, as in the previous 125 sonnets none of these means has triumphed as a way to defeat Time and death. In individual sonnets one of these options might gain the upper hand, but even in single poems there is often a tension between two, or among three, of these alternative ways to defiance against temporality and mortality. This poem mixes praise and warning, for the “lovely boy” who holds in his power “Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour,” has “by waning grown” while his lovers withered and benefited from a Nature whose skill “[m]ay Time disgrace” by plucking the boy back from its ruin (1-8), but in the volta at line 9 the eulogistic mode shifts to the minatory. Of Nature the speaker proclaims to the youth: “Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure, / She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure!” (9-10). The aristocratic youth, a “minion,” must beware of a more powerful patron, being now in a position that the speaker/poet has found himself in regarding the young man, so that he is warned that her pleasure might be to “detain … her treasure,” which reinforces the earlier “pluck thee back,” but she cannot “keep” him. This imagery of commerce, sex, and patronage stresses the power of Nature and the impotence of the young man to be above Nature and to defeat Time because if he grew as he waned, as the first eight lines promised, he ultimately will suffer what his lovers, perhaps like the older speaker/poet, will: age and death. The last couplet in this twelve-line sonnet proclaims that the young man is the “quietus,” or final settlement, that Nature, a personified she, must make with the youth, which, given the earlier discussion of Time, implies that that is how she pays the debt to Time. Although the order of the Sonnets is not entirely certain, as the sequence stands, the poems begin with procreation and move through a vacillation between the assertion that the speaker's poetry will be a monument to the young man that will outlast time and the doubt over the power of poetry generally and his poetry specifically to the inevitable movement of Nature and Time, despite the favored condition of the young man, to death: “Her audit (though delayed) answered must be, / And her quietus is to render thee” (11-12). The poet surrenders his love to debt/death.

This last poem is also a transition to the sonnets about the mistress or dark lady. Sonnet 127 meditates on Nature and art in regard to beauty, a concern that ran through the sonnets addressed to the young man. In this poem the ideal of beauty is anti-Petrarchan, for this mistress is “black” and Laura is blonde: “ma poi ch'Amor di me vi fece accorta, / fuor i biondi capelli allor velati / et l'amoroso sguardo in sé raccolto” [but since Love has made you aware of me, your blond hair has been veiled and your lovely gaze kept to itself].²⁵ In Sonnet 7 of Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591) the speaker praises Stella's blackness, so that Shakespeare's poet is part of a larger literary movement in which love and the lady are transformed.²⁶ Shakespeare sets up a contrast between the dark lady and the fair youth of the preceding sonnets, so that the speaker has shifted his aesthetic of love within the sequence not only in terms of gender but also in regard to color. Fairness and beauty are also matters of fashion. The mistress's eyes are “raven black” and so seem like “mourners”: “Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe, / That every tongue says beauty should look so” (13-14).²⁷ This paradoxical praise, a technique the speaker had used to flatter the young man, bolsters the beauty of the dark lady, transforming nature through the hyperbolic reaches of poetry.

Some of the other poems to the mistress qualify the idea that love conquers all. Time and death, while not as ubiquitous and explicitly present as in the sonnets to the young man, still haunt the poems to the dark lady. In Sonnets 135 and 136, which tease the reader with more autobiographical dimensions, the speaker identifies himself with the author by punning on his name, “Will,” but “Will” may also refer to other Wills (including, perhaps, the W in the W. H. of the dedication) and the will of sexual appetite, of determination, and of inheritance. The defeat of Death in Sonnet 146 is part of a general address that may or may not be to the mistress. Sonnet 147 represents reason as “the physician to my love” whose prescriptions the speaker will not keep, so that “Desire is death” (5-8). The speaker admits that in love and desire his discourse is as random as a madman's, so that he strays from reason and truth (9-12). In this Sonnet the volta turns on the power of blackness that began with the praise of his mistress' dark beauty in Sonnet 127, and on the fever of his longing expressed in the body of 147 itself: “For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night” (13-14). Poetry does not redeem the world but is a subjective madness that desire has induced while the speaker seeks recognition that he has been mistaken in his longing for his mistress—her darkness once seemed beautiful but now is hell itself. The soul of the speaker/poet of Sonnet 151 “doth tell my body that he may / Triumph in love,” but by the last line of the poem the poet puts love in quotation marks and in the context of rising and falling as in intercourse and, perhaps, as in a tragic rise and fall on the wheel of fortune (7-8, 14).

In Sonnet 152, the last of the poems that address the dark lady, the speaker shows his disgust for his love/lust for which he has lied, adulterated, and perjured his faith, so that while he has accused her, his breech is ten times worse. His “honest faith” in her is lost—in both the sense that he is lost in her in sex and the sense that his belief in her is gone (8). Although the poet has looked into his heart and taken a responsibility tenfold hers, he now, from line 9, comes to blame her, that he did praise her too much in his oaths, making her kind when cruel, in love when not, true when false, constant when fickle, enlightened when not, that he gave eyes to his blindness and made them take oaths against what they actually saw (9-12). This self-delusion in praise is another aspect of the problem of the limitations of language, which the speaker also explored in his addresses to the young man, so that the nature of praise and hyperbole in poetry does not necessarily lead to truth and faithful love or a defeat of time and death. Sonnet 152 ends with the wistful and witty paradox: “For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie” (13-14). The self-accusation moves to self-righteousness in the blame of the mistress: he has perjured his eyes and himself (through the eye/I pun) and his lies about her fairness have fouled the truth. After this reversal and all these shifts can the reader, in this last great volta, come to see that the poet has reached a kind a tragic recognition of his error? Or does he or she wonder about the ability of the speaker to bring all things in love around to his own way or to his advantage?

This betrayal in love, as represented in the Sonnets, perhaps even presaged in the young man's tolerance for rivals, is a betrayal of fairness, not the ideal love that Petrarch had found in his golden Laura (not to mention in Dante's relation to Beatrice) but an infernal and consuming love of the body, a tale of lust and lies. Whether this confession or retraction at the end of things redeems the failures of the language of praise and the possibilities of poetry to defeat time and death remains an open question. That desire and flattery make illusions of love is what the speaker asserts, but whether the speaker's blind claims make it difficult for poetic language to triumph is left in the reader's eye, which has its own sins, faults, and perjuries with which to contend. Certainly, the young man and the dark lady are each left—in the last sonnets in this sequence as it was ordered in 1609—to a defeat in time, Nature, death, and language: their beauty in the speaker's love and words of love were to be such eternal truth. Even if in Nature these addressees were of such great beauty, they are represented as fallible in the words and eyes of this poet; and the eyes and ears of posterity will judge them, whoever they might have been in history and fiction, not without prejudice—that which the speaker makes for them and that which the readers bring with them.

Nor are these two “lovers” without mutual relation as a triangle exists among the speaker, mistress, and fair youth, something represented in Sonnets 41, 42, 133, 134, and 144. Three is not company here: the speaker states his case forcefully, his revulsion, despair, and disgust depending on his point of view. The readers do not have the other sides of the story, but can see that the speaker shifts within poems—the nature of the sonnet—and between them. This split unsettles the very unity of faith and truth in love and, like the rival poets, questions the nature of praise and endurance in the speaker's poetry. The accusations and conflicting multiplicities unsettle the single integrity of truth and faith that the poet seems to yearn for in the whole sequence.

VI

Writing in the Sonnets can and cannot defeat Time and Death, the very forces of oblivion that they personify. Love and writing are, nonetheless, ambivalent and sometimes self-contradictory, self-effacing, and self-defeating. A few scattered sonnets other than those discussed in this essay should suggest this intricacy in the larger sequence of sonnets, suggesting too that this ambivalence, contradiction, and effacing happens no matter what the order. The poet writes against the temporal and mortal forces as he addresses his Muse and vacillates between the power of the young man in life and Nature and that of poetry (Sonnets 100-103). Looking typologically into “the chronicle of wasted time”—as if all history led by prophecy to the youth whom he addresses—the speaker of Sonnet 106 sees that poets, old and new, do not have the power to praise this young man adequately (1). Love, “an ever-fixèd mark,” is “not Time's fool,” so that the speaker concludes, if this view is erroneous, “I never writ, nor no man ever loved” (116: 5, 9, 14). In Sonnet 41, however, the poet claimed that his mistress and the youth had been inconstant to him: “Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee, / Thine, by thy beauty being false to me” (13-14). Beauty and truth in love are not always true ways to stave off the vicissitudes of time and death. Wit and flattery are playful parts of writing and qualify the stern constants of ideal love, for Sonnet 137 begins, “Thou blind fool, Love,” and Sonnet 138 starts with the proclamation, “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies,” and ends with the sexually and linguistically playful, “Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be” (1-2). This world of lovers can be full of error, illusion, and flattery and is self-reflexive enough to know that a constant and sincere love is improbable in such a setting, so that, at least in some of the sonnets, the realization and even the celebration of inconstancy and “lying” is a convention. In Sonnet 148, after declaring, “Desire is death” in the previous sonnet (147:8), the speaker asks “O how can love's eye be true, / That is so vexed with watching and with tears?” (148:9-10).

The last two sonnets, 153 and 154, end the sequence as we have it with the witty “love is blind,” which qualifies that of “love conquers all.” Cupid, the key figure in these last two poems, gives the Sonnets a conventional and comic ending even to the sometimes tragic aspects of the whole sequence. This pair of sonnets resembles some written in Latin, Italian, and French that treat of Cupid.²⁸ In Sonnet 153 the “holy fire of Love” possesses “[a] dateless lively heat,” but no bath could cool the poet's passion because there “Cupid got new fire—my mistress' eyes” (5-6, 14). Sonnet 154, a kind of diptych with 153, tells how a virgin nymph stole Cupid's “heart-inflaming brand” and tried to quench its “heat perpetual” in a well to provide a remedy for love-sick men, but, the speaker, coming there for a cure, learned that “Love's fire heats water, water cools not love” (2, 10, 14). The eternal rule of love is that love is too hot to be cooled and that there is no cure for it. As much as the speaker wants a remedy from the vicissitudes of love, the only constant is that there is no cure. Love is too strong for cold water, but has it the strength to defeat time and death?

Love is ever-changing, a disease to be borne, and the language of love is ever-shifting. The speaker of the Sonnets seeks out different ways to make the young man live on past the heat of the moment but that heat is all that love can offer. As the Greeks knew with their many words for “love,” even if English puts such strain on the one poor word we have, there are different kinds of love, and Shakespeare's Sonnets do explore aspects of agape, caritas, and Eros. The speaker/poet suggests procreation and the power of words to represent the young man until doom while showing the betrayals, opportunism, and limitations of physical attraction. The sequence of poems asserts and subverts the power of the poet and of poetry to make love endure, and while the Sonnets, as we have had them from 1609, begin with advice to a young man to marry and produce an heir, it ends with an irrational paean to Eros itself and to the desire the poet finds in his mistress's eyes.

Shakespeare's dramatic and nondramatic sonnets stretch the bounds of the verse form itself, the desire for peace and the discovery of conflict working within the confines of fourteen lines and a tight formal rhyme and rhythm. His sonnet sequence represents a private love made public in fame, whether their generation in print was authorized or not, an exploration in the oscillation between permanence and oblivion, true and false love that is not always that different from the more seemingly public space of the theater, where the sonnets in Romeo and Juliet and Henry V were performed. In Romeo and Juliet other tragic elements of love are explored in the sonnets within the play, but whereas the prologic sonnet sets out the tale of woe of the terrible consequences of the meeting of private love and public hatred, of the oxymoronic enemies as lovers, an oxymoron that has a basis in the two lovers but is ignored in the blindness of the feuding families, it is but one type of poetry that Shakespeare uses in that play to explore the errors of love, hatred, time, and death in the play, and one in a minor key. In Henry V Shakespeare compresses history into dramatic time, the vast world into a stage, and uses the compression of the sonnet to underscore that great clash. War has a prominent role in the play until a dynastic match, at least as much owing to Mars as to Venus and Cupid, unites Henry and Katherine, France and England. The sonnet goes more public here and gestures toward the more public sonnets of Milton and Shelley. All the while with virtuosity Shakespeare asserts, sometimes modestly and sometimes not, the power of language to speak about love, time, and death. This unsure sureness rests as much in readers' eyes as in a mistress's eyes, not to mention in ears, hearts, and minds, the images and music extending in many directions at once.

Notes

1. Hallet Smith, “Sonnets,” in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1842.

2. H. E. Rollins and T. W. Baldwin give extensive genealogies of critical commentary in this and other instances of reading the sonnets. See William Shakespeare, Sonnets, 2 vols., ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, New Variorum edition (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1944); and T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950).

3. In discussing Shakespeare's Sonnets (Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986]) Joel Fineman provides a useful reminder about praise: “the poetry of praise is regularly taken to be, from Plato and Aristotle through the Renaissance, the master model of poetry per se: furthermore, … this is a central fact for the renaissance sonnet, which, from Dante onward, characteristically presents itself as something panegyric” (1). Fineman argues that the poetry of praise relates to poetic subjectivity in the techniques, conceits, and literary personality of the poet (1). Heather Dubrow, in Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), also discusses the character of the speaker of Shakespeare's Sonnets in terms of rhetorical paradox. She suggests that closure and flattery are problems that occur in sonnet cycles (213-14, 226, 252, 257). Whereas for Fineman Shakespeare rewrites praise through paradox to invent a new persisting subjectivity (2), for Dubrow, the speaker of Shakespeare's Sonnets at once desires “to express and deny his aggressions, to be victor and captive” (253).

4. On the structure of comedy, see Francis Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914; rpt., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934); Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy” (1948), in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, rev. ed., ed. Leonard F. Dean (1957; London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 79-89; Z. J. Jagendorf, The Happy End of Comedy: Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984); Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Jonathan Hart, “The Ends of Renaissance Comedy,” in Reading the Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama, ed. Jonathan Hart (New York: Garland, 1996), 91-127, 232-33. For a suggestive and apt discussion of comedy more generally, see Michael Corder, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan's, introduction to their English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1-11.

5. See Jonathan Hart, Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare's History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), esp. 21-28, 166-99.

6. For a good summary of whether the order of the 1600 Quarto of the Sonnets (1609) is chronological or Shakespeare's arrangement, including a brief outline of the key views of John Benson (1640), Charles Knight (1841), H. E. Rollins (1944), and Katherine Duncan-Jones (1983), see G. Blakemore Evans's, “Commentary” on The Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113-14. W. H. Auden makes some of the most sensible observations on the writing, order, and publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which he calls a “jumble” (W. H. Auden's introduction to The Sonnets, ed. William Burto, The Signet Classic Shakespeare [New York: New American Library, 1964, rev. 1988], xxiii; see also xxi-xxii, xxiv, and xxxv-xxxvi). John Kerrigan refers to John Benson's reprint of the Sonnets in 1640 as inflicting on the poems “a series of unforgivable injuries.” Benson made longer poems and “began the long-running tiresome game of re-ordering” (see Kerrigan's introduction to William Shakespeare: The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan, New Penguin edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, 46).

7. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); all subsequent citations to the places are to the edition. References to the Sonnets are to The Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

8. For a reading of this Epilogue in the context of the other choruses in Henry V, see Hart, Theater and World, 149-57; and Henry VIII's fourteen-line Chorus that ends the play.

9. To follow up on the discussion of the order in note 6, it is debatable whether or not Shakespeare authorized Thorpe's Quarto of his Sonnets in 1609, and so critics have questioned the ordering of the poems. Whereas Duncan-Jones (1983) thinks Thorpe was so authorized, Evans (1996) does not (see Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Was the 1609 Shakespeare's Sonnets Really Unauthorized?” Review of English Studies 34 [1983]: 151-71). Brents Stirling explores the ordering and reordering of the Sonnets in Shakespeare's Sonnet Order: Poems and Groups (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Heather Dubrow (1987) questions the narrative of the Sonnets and later expresses the view, which must have crossed the mind of many readers, that sonnets that do not specify the gender of the addressee cannot neatly fit into the conventional split of Sonnets 1-126 (young man) and Sonnets 127-152 (dark lady) and so cannot be identified with certainty with either the young man or the dark lady (see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchanism and Its Counterdiscourses [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995], 121-23; and her “‘Uncertainties now crown themselves assur'd’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare's Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 [1996]: 291-305). As Auden reminds us, Michelangelo's nephew altered the sex of the addressee of his uncle's sonnets to Tomasso de Cavaleri, just as Benson was to do with Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1640 (introduction to The Sonnets, xxxvi). Shakespeare may be shifting the gender of the addressee, but the motif of age and death is a carpe diem convention of the sonnet. See, for instance, Ronsard's Sonnets pour Hélène, 2:42. Whereas Auden does not think Shakespeare wanted the Sonnets published let alone created in the order in which they appear, Stephen Booth discusses the principle of structure in the individual sonnet and the collection of sonnets, analyzing the dilemma over order that faces the critics of these poems (Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), esp. 1-28).

10. For a discussion of homosexuality in these poems and in the Elizabethan context, see, for example, Auden's introduction to The Sonnets, xxviii-xxix, xxxi; Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982); Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 7.

11. The role of the eyes (I's) has not gone without notice. On the Petrarchan distinction between eye and heart, see Auden's introduction to The Sonnets, xxxii-xxxiii; on the lying figure of eyes/I's, see Fineman's Shakespeare's Perjured Eye.

12. See Evans's “Commentary” on The Sonnets, 125, Sonnet 12:13 n.

13. Ibid., 127, Sonnet 28:15 headnote; see Horace, Odes, 3:30; Ovid, Metamorphoses, xv, 871-79, 234-36.

14. See Edmund Spenser, Amoretti, 58:7.

15. See Evans's “Commentary” on The Sonnets, 142, Sonnet 30:1-2 n.

16. Helen Vendler (“Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Uses of Synecdoche,” in The Sonnets, ed. William Burto, The Signet Classic Shakespeare [New York: New American Library, 1964, rev. 1988], 233-40) discusses the use of metonymy in Sonnet 128, including associations and displacements of “eye/I”; whereas Fineman gives a more deconstructive turn to the general use of “eye/I”.

17. See Evans's “Commentary” on The Sonnets, 162, Sonnet 54:11-12 n.

18. Ibid., 163, Sonnet 14 n.

19. Stephen Booth reminds us of Falstaff's allusion to Bardolph's face as “a death's head or a memento mori” in 1 Henry IV, III.iii.29-31 (“Commentary” on Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 266).

20. John Kerrigan aptly argues that Shakespeare begins the Sonnets with a “breeding group” and that the reason poems concerned with metaphor, such as 21 and 78-96, follow a group of sonnets on marriage is because “[i]n reproduction, Shakespeare found the most moral means to similitude.” Kerrigan suggests that the Elizabethans had an ideal of copiousness with which we have lost touch (introduction to Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint, 27).

21. See The Sonnets, (The Signet Classic Shakespeare), Sonnet 84: 14n.

22. Evans's “Commentary” on The Sonnets, 192, Sonnet 83: 6n.

23. Perhaps this prize, as Evans suggests, is like a booty from the New World such as Francis Drake seized, except that this pirate was a national hero as well as a mercenary whom the court sanctioned (see Evans's “Commentary” on The Sonnets, 193, Sonnet 86: 3n). The Spanish gold in this analogy would be the young man—an ambivalent praise at best as Ralegh, Hakluyt the younger, Bacon, and others wanted England to seek such riches yet warned that this American or Spanish gold was a source of Spain's power and the corruption of European courts. I have written extensively on God and gold in the colonization of the New World and on what I call the example of Spain. A full treatment occurs in my book, “Representing the New World” (in manuscript).

24. In his edition of the Sonnets Kerrigan notes how this envoy, 126, sums up the themes from the preceding 125 sonnets addressed to the young man, such as love, beauty, Time, destruction, and death (introduction to Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint).

25. Petrarch, “Rime sparse,” 11:8-10 (Petrarch's Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling, bilingual edition [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], 46-47). As Durling notes, Petrarch, who did not have the apostrophe as an aspect of his punctuation, identifies Laura with laurel (lauro), breeze (l'aura), and gold (l'auro) (see Durling's introduction to Petrarch's Lyric Poems, 27). For our purposes of contrast between black and blonde, the association with gold is important.

26. See also Evans's “Commentary,” on The Sonnets, 243-44, Sonnet 127, headnote and n. 10. In Sonnet 15, Sidney's speaker proclaims, “You that poore Petrarch's long deceased woes, / With new-borne sighes and denisend wit do sing (7-8) The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], 466). Mary Wroth's importance in this discussion of Petrarchanism and anti-Petrarchanism should not be underestimated. Heather Dubrow speaks of “Mary Wroth's juxtaposition of the most conventional Petrarchanism with its most rebellious counterdiscourses” (see Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 135). On Wroth and the context of women writers in the Renaissance, see Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press), chap. 8; Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), chap. 4; Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Katy Emck, “‘A Wanton Woman and a Wise’: Women Writing about Desire in Renaissance Europe, 1540-1620,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Alberta (fall 1996), chap. 2.

27. Shakespeare should also be viewed in the context of European poetry. For instance, the unsunlike eyes of the mistress of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 are like the dark eyes of the mistress in Ronsard's Amours de Cassandre 152.

28. For example, in a sonnet, Mary Wroth describes Cupid as the “great King of Love” (see Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 89:11, in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983]).