From Fairest Creatures

(i)

Elaine Scarry says we now know the name of the young man Shakespeare wrote the first 123 sonnets for and about. (1)

The traditional explanation for the sequence is that Shakespeare was hired by the Earl of Southampton to persuade his son to marry. The sequence begins with witty and formal arguments to that effect.

From fairest creatures we desire increase
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die – [Sonnet 1]

Look in the glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another – [Sonnet 3]

Though the arguments are propositions, formal and abstract, so abstract they feel the way Elizabethan scrollwork looks, lines wound around themselves in air, continuing, unanchored and centreless, there are phrases so sound they are still striking. "The world’s fresh ornament" – structured like a cliché but still singular; "thy youth's proud livery" – so simultaneously abstract & concrete it could never become the pedestrian clothed in youth; perfume, "a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" – so exact you can see the glint on the edge of the bottle. Wit and argument condense to single lines: "Oh change thy thought that I may change my mind." "You had a father – let your son say so."

The first 17 sonnets can be difficult or abstruse. It's the syntax, it's the language changing: 400 years of empire and social and scientific revolution. But even as Euclydian as they are, as apparently supportive of the old tale as they seem, the first 17 of these poems also document, 1 step forward, & a step back, the social and personal distance between the poet and the young man diminishing. Shakespeare is coming closer.

Any overview of the sonnets will always group the first 17 together. This is because 18 breaks style and subject completely: neither distanced nor impersonal nor general nor abstract; not designed to be harmless if overheard or presented in public, it's intimate, unguarded, direct, electric.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer's lease hath all too short a date
But thy eternal summer shall not fade...
Nor shall Death brag thou wandr'st in his shade.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

After number 17, there's no more talk of sons.

(ii)

Part I
December, 2016

Tuesday, Dec. 13, '16
Today I picked Naming Thy Name: Crosstalk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets off the truck I was "cataloging" – i.e., copy-cataloging, in the new, streamlined, do-nothing way: pick record, Dewey/category, initials, no duplicate call numbers please.

("You can correct it if it’s just plain wrong.")
(How wrong are we allowed to know it is?)
("Your job is to choose a record and assign a call number – Dewey/category, initials, no duplicates.")

Scarry says she knows who Shakespeare's sonnets were written to & about: the name of the guy. (The name of the guy!? The name of the guy. I'm avid.)

I have to read the sonnets before I read the book. I've been meaning to read them for yonks. Now I'll read them for the goss.

First impressions: They start all strained and ho hum, and I'm finding that I don't like the editor’s glosses, they're too literal and nailed down (which is what you have to do as an editor, I see that). I like the word to float over all its applicable semantic areas; you lose the sense of richness otherwise. So I only look at the glosses when I really am puzzled & have no hope of etymologizing my way out – as in misprision for fault. But anyway:

By sonnet 13 Shake's hooked, the sonnets start to get substantial, the language gets less... twisted around almost nothing like wire on air or the loops in an Elizabethan signature (1 & 3, e.g.) and they go on and on about the guy’s beauty and grace and how he'll live forever in these lines (18) and how he's the best thing ever (sonnet 33) and Shake's not old, only as old as the guy because they're one spirit (sonnet 22) and his heart lives in the guy's (and the guy will live forever in these poems). This goes on for quite a while and it gets a bit tedious, but there's a tidbit about not being able to acknowledge each other publicly (sonnet 36), which makes me wonder how Marlowe managed. (By being flamboyant, like Guy Burgess? There's a long tail of hiring the Queen’s eisenspies atte Cambrigge.)

And then Shake's wittily talking himself out of jealousy because the guy's boffing a woman Shake's also ditto, (sonnet 42). Then Shake gets miserable because the guy's gone away, or he's gone away (sonnets 50, 51), and the guy's out doing godknowswhat (sonnets 57-58), & Shake spends his nights trying to sleep & imagining the guy under the ceiling & under his eyelids (sonnet 61) and then the guy is writing a book (sonnet 77), and then other poets are writing to and about the guy (sonnets 78, 80) and Shake is all jealous again, and I keep reading because I have to know what happens next.

The love/affair's been going on for three years (sonnet 104). (This isn't Michael Wood’s safe-for-fambly-viewing Saint Shake. (2) And Shake starts condemning himself & asking for forgiveness because he's been off bonking other people (sonnet 110) – now I really know you're the best, but the others gave me a new lease on life.

My mouth was still gaping after the word outrageous passed through it, but managed to close when the word shameless arrived. This jaunty Act of Cocktrition! But the flattery combined with the unbreakable bond, the mixture of condescension and erotic connoisseurship and helpless helplessness

Mine appetite I will never more grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend
A god in love, to whom I am confined.

save the poem as well as Shake. He gets forgiven & taken back (sonnets 119-120).

Then there's the farewell (sonnet 126), which is really interesting. The original editor put 2 blank lines in square brackets where lines 13 & 14 "should" be, on the assumption that this was also a sonnet. But I don't think it's a sonnet at all, & was never meant to be. The affair is over for some reason, the union is broken, and so the form is broken: the 14 sonnet lines (3 quatrains abab, etc., and the last rhyming couplet) have become 6 rhyming couplets ending in mid-air. And these couplets are like the couplets that end all the sonnets, little knots tying up the thought, or reiterating it, or making a moral point, or all 3; they speak of Nature being the one to render (the guy) down as it has & will have rendered everyone else.

The next sonnets are the "Dark Lady" sequence, and these are immediately less interesting, initially more mere wit as there was in the first twelve, satirizing the tired panoply of tropes of woman as Other… Although Shake does move almost immediately to the psychology of the relationship – fear that she’ll mock his age in front of her other suitors, or openly prefer them in front of him.

In among all of them, the entire 174, are the old warhorses, the technically perfect, the taken-out-of-context-bland, safe-for-teen-anthology-pieces (e.g., 18, 29, 30, 33, 65, & 73), so general in subject as to scarcely register, guaranteed to make the rest sound uninteresting another hundred and sixty-odd times. Sonnet 20 is mos def NSFW.

Among the first hundred and twelve some of the others are nearly as perfect, and they're electric – the sense of – I can't quite put my finger on it. It is obsession, but it seems benign, there's no sense of threat or domination or wheedling – it's a mutual bond/obsession – it's ongoing, it's praise of virtue, it's identification and merging, it's about being equally bound by the bond (to whom I am confined).

Well, perhaps that's the atmosphere, feeling... Almost. Perhaps it's more subtle than I can grasp. I don't know. But there's more of a sense of relationship with an equal, something different about his poems to the guy: there’s no obvious gender hierarchy, even one being wittily or sincerely ignored or satirized.

One of the things about contemporary gay love poems, I've noticed: no animal, vegetable, or mineral metaphors. Because it is at best an underground tradition, or, more often, thought of as unique by the sufferers, no publication of this kind of material ever having been allowed; because everything has to be reinvented from scratch, described exactly? Is that it? That this material hasn't accreted metaphor yet, let alone the distancing objectification & condemnation of the object which the possession of a womb seems to provoke... 

(iii)

At the event level: things that really happened

Sonnets:
50-51 – Shake did leave London on occasion: the Puritans or the plague closed the theatres, or the company was taking the show on the road (the circuit of major coaching inns), or all three (2)
57-58, 99 – Henry Constable also left London on occasion, and sometimes for significant periods of time. A very skilled diplomat, he was sent on missions to various parts of Europe from a very young age (Scarry, p. 36) and later exiled for his Catholicism (Scarry, p. 42)
78, 80 – Other poets were writing to and about Henry Constable (who was widely known beloved, and admired) and imitating his poetry. He published a book of sonnets in 1592 and a second edition, containing his Shakespeare sonnets, in 1594 (Scarry, p. 52)

(iv)

With personal or factual tangents.

Thursday, Dec. 22, '16
Have finished reading the sonnets. Not very well, I know: I find it so hard to get even a basic prose-level sense out of Shakespeare, and always have, that I have to admit that I'm not a very good reader at all.

I've always been afraid of Shakespeare, by reputation beforehand (he's hard), and then doing Henry V in 2nd year. I was 13. I knew immediately that the St. Crispin's Day speech was a very good motivational speech, and the wooing scenes were remarkable for their bad French; but beyond that I didn't understand any of it – who was who, why any of it was done in the first place or was important now, hundreds of years and thousands of miles later, where, if I turned my eyes from the page to the window I could see the grass yellowed and strawed and dying on the nearby hill, where we sniggered because England declared a drought if it didn't rain for ten days straight.

I wondered why the Bishop of Ely was important, where the cathedral was and why that seemed to be important. I wondered why about the whole thing. Looking Ely up in the encyclopedia gave factual answers about the town and cathedral, but made nothing clear.

Of course the answers to those questions are that the presence of the bishop confirms the approval of the Church (the other great power in the land) for the war, and the justification for the war is at the end of Henry IV Pt II. But you have to have seen shaky coalitions abase themselves & sign up to foreign adventures more than once to understand the deep and cynical realpolitik of that answer.

My brother had Julius Caesar. At least that had a plot.

Hearing lectures this year on Sappho and Ezra Pound; seeing glosses on Japanese prints intermixed with translations of Horace and Catullus; (3) seeing little-known Renaissance voices translated and re-imagined in relation to each other; (4) seeing translations of Cavafy, (5) and Ritsos; (6-7) reading a dual biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald, (8) I find myself revelling in a level of education we could never have imagined and understanding how thin our education really was. We actually were expected to become shop assistants & car mechanics, bank tellers & kindy teachers, faithful mothers and fathers and Mass attenders, well-bearing & well-fleeced sheep. (Plasma physicist came later, and then by accident.)

So I'm a recognizer of superior quality, by and large, but not of all the multiple levels & layers of meaning, which Scarry and so many other critics are.

Have started the Scarry book. I've clearly misread a lot of the sonnets, missed some of the kink and fury and most of the meaning – but I did get some of it right, and now, at least, the chronology is settled. Shake published them 20 years after writing them, perhaps to cheer HC up because he was in prison. Oh, and the bit about Marlowe: Elizabeth I condemned homosexuality; the punishment was imprisonment or execution. (Scarry, p. 23). So "public shame" was the least of it. (Which makes Marlowe's situation all the more...interesting. What was the deal there?)

Did Kit Marlowe Guy Burgess it? – Yes and no.

Marlowe was smeared as an atheist & seditionist for political reasons. (9) When the Church and the State are combined in the same monarch, religious dissent becomes heresy becomes sedition becomes secessionist plot. His homosexuality was both real and a smear.

The unknown margin-writer of the county facility's copy of this book (plucked off a re-cataloging truck) – faded blue fountain-pen ink, fascinating hand, half artist, half academic – has seen through the layers of evidence and the contradictory first and last halves of the closing paragraphs of Nicholl's final argument. "Oh the English!" he writes, "They will never examine the Cecils."

The evidence Nicholl has unearthed and pieced together, and the point he makes and draws back from, is that Marlowe was very likely slated for disposal, if need be, by Robert Cecil. Marlowe's defence in court against false accusations of seditious poster-making and pamphleteering would have revealed his years of provocateuring, in an Elizabethan street-sleaze way, for, ultimately (up, up, up through the layers), that same Robert Cecil and the Queen’s Privy Council, whose chief business had always been managing the succession. (10)

Along the way Nicholl's book is a how-to of scams for and by Elizabethan grifters, who, once London was teeming and frothing with religious change and the nascent possibility of and lust for wealth, byproducts of its defence of itself against serial European rivals, enemies and powers, set to and invented most modern cons.


Part II
July-August 2017

Seventeen is a lot of sonnets.
There is a photo I saw on the intertubes and squirreled away at the time – saw it somewhere in The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, I think, in 2002, according to the file-date my computer gives it – of a painting of an unknown man who might be Shakespeare.

Slightly scruffy; retreating hairline; sweet smile; deep-sharp observant eyes, I've-got-your-number eyes. (11)

 
So why is someone who looks approximately like this writing these sonnets, and sending them to the young man if the traditional story isn't true?

Scarry thinks they were all known to each other, a circle of young people, young artists, actors, musicians.

There are some people so beautiful their arrival sends everyone into a tizz. If there were a circle of people which included Shake, if all these people knew each other, there might have been a consensus about this recently arrived young man, this beautiful and kind and intellectual and irresistible young man – and a sort of good-natured and semi-subliminal desire to be part of his extraordinary sweetness and beauty, to be included in the sunlight of his goodwill by giving him gifts. Recognition of your gift could make you a minor sun, for a moment.

A pretty penniless young man like Shakespeare, already in the theatre, in the speaking & writing biz, could send a sonnet. On some general theme, or the theme the communal joking with the young man took. "The world's fresh ornament" (sonnet 1) does suggest someone new to the scene, and strikingly beautiful.

The picture in my mind is strange. It's from the first story... an image of a man in a field, cartoonish castle in the background. The man has a quill pen and a modern writing-pad. This is Shakespeare, persuading the young man in the castle to marry.

But with the old story wrong the field and castle vanish. But the sonnets still continue in a vacuum. My mind supplies a drawing-room of sorts – or maybe a tavern – a small group of teasing bohemians and young aristocrats or the aristocratically-connected. Pleasantries, wit, non-specific. It seems slightly feasible that jokes and gifts and gossip and poems might all be exchanged here.

Shake's first 9 sonnets are full of almost abstract argument. Some parts are so compressed the syntax gives out –

Then were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was – [sonnet 5]

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for the world enjoys it – [sonnet 9]

– but mostly it does not. The arguments are beautifully made, but the first sonnets of the sequence aren’t engaged.

(Even so, there are 9 of them so far... Was Shake writing them that fast? Was that another part of the joke, if at this stage the whole thing were still a joke, a game, a pastime in and for the group?)

But there is a gradual change throughout this whole (what I think of as preliminary) sequence. In sonnet 10, Shake says:

Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

... for love of me. ?! This is a bit personal for a trope or joke even in a small and habitually meeting group. I'm not sure now that a group setting for these is plausible.

Sonnet 13, line 1, addresses the young man as "love": Oh that you were yourself, but love you are and line 13 says "dear my love." Something is happening; the distance between the speaker and the subject has lessened drastically. This is really beginning to sound like a private conversation, not a public one. It begins to cast doubt on whether any part of the sequence had ever been read or extemporized or conducted in the company of the group.

In Sonnet 15 Shake declares:
And, all in war with Time for love of you
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

There’s scarcely any distance between speaker and subject now. It is much easier to see this as a private matter of Shake sending poems to the young man privately.

But still – this is still a lot of poems. It's the vacuum around them from my first understanding of the old story that always... Made me afraid of them, because they were incomprehensible, difficult in themselves but also suspended in a contextual void – Michael Wood (2) says that after the opening sonnets Shakespeare then fell in love with the young man, possibly in his grief over the death of his son, Hamnet. The quill pen scribbling on the modern notepad a good furlong from the castle returned to my mind. I think the absurdity of the image meant that, unconsciously, I thought the explanation unlikely, but that, consciously, I didn't want to disrespect anyone's grief. And so, for me, the sonnets continued to swirl along in their difficulty and conceptual mistiness, another bit of Shakespeare I didn't dare advert to.

Sonnet 16 draws back a bit (a better war against Time, you having a son), but 17 says a son would prove Shake's descriptions no exaggeration, and that the young man would live twice, in his son and in Shake's verse.

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, as heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
and in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, "this poet lies -
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces."
So should my papers yellowed with their age
Be scorned like old men of less truth than tongue
And your true rights be termed a poet's rage
And stretchèd metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time
You should live twice - in it and in my rhyme.

This is the first time Shake says this.

It's almost like ownership, this new boldness, boast, decision, policy, procedure. The premise/promise affects two people, not one. This formulation of the position of the speaker with regard to the person spoken to, this new claiming of one by the other (What are you doing with my life in your poems? Even thinking of somehow putting my life in your poems?) would be presumptuous, suffocating, intolerable.

Unless the young man were amenable.

Unless the young man had also been speaking.

As Scarry has discovered, writing. Back. (12)

Seen as one man writing in privacy and isolation, even with the clear movement of the writer towards the subject, there's no situational sense in this many sonnets except as some kind of ... bizarre exercise? Fantasy? Delusion? Astonishing and pointless creation of air and glass? A young man, this extraordinary young man replying explains the seventeen, the eighteen, most of the many.

This may be one of his replies. If the English ever existed, it is lost. This is a literal transcription of the Latin, published in the Netherlands in 1591:

I send, Light, this narcissus to you by gift of a warm spring, and I send our poems joined to the narcissus. I do this so that in return for the book you may give back to me moistened lips, and in return for my flower you may give your flower to me. (12-13) 

(v)

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate

This old anthology-piece –

This strangeness out of nowhere on the page of the book I've covered in thick plastic because everyone covers their textbooks to sell to next year's class, with the ink of my red-biro'd name already blurred and spread and reduced to vivid pink in the plastic texture, and I'm sitting here, thousands of miles and hundreds of years away, spending my eyes trying to make my name sharp again while wondering how much the blurring matters – bored and uncomprehending because I can read the poem and it makes sense (but why does it signify?) – reading it with a sigh because this week is the week they've decided to teach poetry again –

This sonnet's full of praise, syntactically sturdy & forthright, the language rich rather than frilled, tender as well as rich; and Shake's verse has declared itself the young man's immortality even before we understand what Scarry has said: that all the letters of Henry Constable's name are contained in the last line, and that reading the line aloud does cause his name to be said by the reader, does cause the young man to live beyond death.

Translating the first two lines into modern English… leaves me shaken, imagining this being said.

Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
You are more lovely and more temperate.

More lovely. Lovely – the word accurate and intimate, speaking of the experience of another person; more lovely, the speaker like someone overcome, speaking close, at whisper distance, the reaction pulled straight out of him – Not lovelier, its consecutive unstressed syllables creating a fading blur of the reader’s attention, the apprehension of the loveliness. More lovely: the person spoken to being wholly seen.

The intimacy and gentleness and appreciation strike me, lightning, and I see the sepulchre that contains me.

And now I see the sequence. Sonnet 18, this old war-horse of a sonnet, this electric, witty, joyful, tender, this shattering declaration in language so utterly refreshed, is an aubade.

==

1. Scarry, Elaine, Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2016.
2. Wood, Michael, In Search of Shakespeare, Maya International Vision, Distributed by PBS Home Video: PBS DVD Video, 2003.
3. Merchant, Paul, Bread and Caviar, Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 2016.
4. Merchant, Paul, Some Business of Affinity, Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 2016.
5. Cavafy, Constantine, Poems 1904, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2016.
6. Ritsos, Yannis, Twelve Poems About Cavafy, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2010.
7. Ritsos, Yannis, Monochords, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2015.
8. Richardson, Robert D., Nearer the heart's desire: poets of the Rubaiyat: a dual biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald, New York, Bloomsbury, 2016.
9. Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning, the Murder of Christopher Marlowe, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1992.
10. See also Gregory, Philippa, The Last Tudor, New York, Touchstone, 2017.
11. See also https://news.canadianshakespeares.ca/2006/04/25/controversial-shakespeare-portrait-coming-to/
12. Scarry, pp. 243-244. The original of this poem may be the Latin quoted on p. 243; at St. John’s College Constable would have written in Latin as often as English. (The collection of fifteen of Constable’s poems in which this poem, Carmen xx, appears, was printed in the Netherlands in 1591; five poems were translated into Dutch, then into Latin.)

13. Light, this early narcissus bloom I send thee
     Our songs bound at its open bell and tips.
     In return give me thy moistened lips,
     My flower make thine. Give thine to me.